The Question
Question3: Can we imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for?
Fifty years ago, John Lennon urged us to imagine that there were no countries. The nation state is proving incapable of solving civilizational scale problems such as climate, pandemic, arms race, technological overreach. In a recent book, Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman propose a model of planetary and local governance which accepts the nation state but takes away its centrality. Can you imagine a world without or beyond the nation state?
Question2: What is the Real Tragedy?
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, poet and Nobel Laureate, said in the Hibbert Lectures delivered at Oxford University in May 1930. “The real tragedy, however, does not lie in the risk of our material security but in the obscuration of man himself in the human world.” What is the real tragedy today almost a hundred years later?
Question1: Is there any way of delivering humankind from the menace of war?
Albert Einstein posed this question to Sigmund Freud in a letter written in 1932. It resurfaced in the 1955 Einstein–Russell Manifesto, which asked starkly: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”The same moral urgency was echoed in the Normandy Manifesto for World Peace issued by Nobel Peace Laureates and others in 2019. Now, perhaps more than ever before, this question demands a fresh and honest answer.”