A suggestion about “What is to be Done?” following the disgraceful far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London . . .
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| L. to r. Andrew James Brown, Caterina Berbenni-Rehm and Satinder Gill talking together at the recent AI & Society International Conference in Cambridge in October 2024 about the ways we conduct ourselves in life in connection with the “Res publica.” |
It will come as no surprise that the fact that a far-right rally in London could draw over 110,000 people is something I find deeply, deeply disturbing. But, having said that, I do not find the fact that this kind of thing is now happening at all surprising. This is because for decades we have had a political class (left and right) that seems unable (unwilling?) to articulate a coherent (enough) liberal, ethico-moral vision about what our society could be like, and then to offer some practical steps towards bringing that society into being. Into that awful ethico-moral gap the far-right are now piling in, often with increasing violence.
At this point in proceedings, a casual reader of this blog post might want to say something like, “Well, OK sonny boy, what would you do?”, and you might imagine that I have nothing to offer in reply. But I have, modest though that offering is.
In the past two years I’ve been trying — with almost zero success, of course — to get someone in either local or national educational circles to begin to work with me and others to develop “secular pilgrimages” in their localities that would offer one practical and educational way for communities to begin to create an ever stronger sense of our national (and global) interconnectedness. Without developing this sense amongst ourselves and our children there is little chance of us building a genuine “Res publica” — that is to say, a peaceable commonwealth of public goods and things.
The idea for this secular pilgrimage was drawn from my work translating the important twentieth-century Japanese educator and advocate of free-religion (jiyū shūkyō), Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988). Of course, I fully realise that almost no one will now go on and click the following link to read the very short conference paper about this that I prepared for an AI & Society Conference in Cambridge in 2024, but just in case someone wants to have a look, here it is, as published in the journal, AI & Society (Springer Science+Business Media):
A secular spiritual pilgrimage around the Res publica
And, Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s original essay, “Greater Tokyo as an Educational Environment” [1934], as well as many other essays, can be read at the following link:
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