Centerpoint Now is a publication of the World Council of Peoples for the United Nations (WCPUN). The new issue, entitled ‘Are We There Yet?’, is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the United Nations with articles on older and new challenges for global governance (the last obviously including the virus pandemic).
The researchers of the New Humanism Project contributed with a text “Building Ethical Competence for Human Health”, focusing on capacity building for health governance. Check it out here.
The researchers of the New Humanism Project contributed a chapter to the book “Bio#Futures – Foreseeing and Exploring the Bioeconomy” published by Springer. While other contributions explore sustainable development methodologies and practical applications, we were invited to provide an ethical-philosophical framework applicable to the bioeconomy.
What kind of education do our children need to make them more resilient to all kinds of capitalist, conformist and fundamentalist manipulations of our co-existence and to enable them to become self-reflexive, open and tolerant cosmopolitans or ‘world citizens’ capable of living better with each other in our complex society?
What is ethical competence?
The PhɅAct Collective of the Institute organises a dialogue on the meaning and value of cosmopolitanism and ethical competence on Friday 27 September 2019 from 9am to 5pm at the Sukyo center, 124 E 31st St, New York
The New Humanism project team was invited to a United Nations conference on human capacity building. During the Capacity-building Knowledge to Action Day on 19 August 2019 (which was part of the United Nations Latin America and the Caribbean Climate Week), the team argued for a necessary reform of research and education in order to be able to better deal with the complex social problems of today.
We were invited to contribute to the Eleventh meeting of the Research Dialogue ‘Science for Transformation’ as part of the United Nations Climate Change conference in Bonn. We worked on theme 2 Transformative adaptation and climate resilient development.
Silke Van Cleuvenbergen (the New Humanism Project team) (left) introducing the project’s poster ‘Intellectual Capacity Building for a Climate Resilient Future – the New Humanism approach’.
We were invited to participate in a ‘disruptive brainstorming conference’ on the future of resilience, organised by the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Happy to have been among (what they call) ‘100 visionary thinkers and thought leaders’ from international organizations and non-profit, private and academic/research entities, and looking forward to discuss visions for our common future against the backdrop of resilience.
Silke Van Cleuvenbergen and Gaston Meskens (New Humanism Project team) in the panel on the role of art in designing critical climate resilient futures, Seoul, South-Korea, Thursday 11 april 2019
We had talks about the New Humanism project with a number of nice and interesting people during and around the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission for Social Development, taking place from 11 to 21 February 2019 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
The Global Development Network had its 18th conference on 22 and 23 March 2018 in its headquarters in New Delhi, India. This years focus was on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development. I contributed to the session on Ethics with a talk on “The Politics of Hypothesis – on the need for reflexivity at the science-policy interface.”. See the text here.
What do we mean when we say we live in a complex world? This paper characterises problems such as combating climate change, the provision of affordable access to healthy food for all, or evaluation of the possible use of nuclear energy as ‘complex social problems’ of which the complexity can be described by the same set of seven characteristics, and consequently reflects on what it would imply to deal with this complexity fairly. It argues why and how modern representative democracy (within the nation state), science and the market, as the three formal governing methods to produce meaning for our modern society, are unable to deal with these complex problems in a satisfactory way, ‘incapable’ as they are to ‘grasp’ their complexity. Based on this argumentation, the paper proposes ‘reflexivity’ and ‘intellectual solidarity’ as ethical attitudes or virtues for all concerned actors, to be understood from a specific ethics of care perspective ‘bound in complexity’. Consequently, it proposes ‘societal trust’ as an overall criterion for governance, although with the specification that this trust should be generated by the governance methods we use to make sense of complexity rather than by promised or anticipated outcomes. With this focus, in conclusion, it proposes advanded approaches to democratic decision making, policy supportive research and education that would have the capacity to enable and enforce the attitudes of reflexivity and intellectual solidarity for the better of our co-existence.
On 12 April 2016, the New York Society for Ethical Culture organised the workshop “Evolution, Consciousness and Altruism: Steering Toward the Omega Point” in New York City with the aim to reflect on the meaning of altruism from a scientific, ethical and spiritual perspective. The workshop centered around the book Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes and the Welfare of Others (Dr. David Sloan Wilson, The Yale/ Templeton Series on the Foundational Questions of Science)” and was introduced by the author. I was invited to make a contribution to the workshop based on my research on ethics and global governance.
