Things to think about department: Will Hutton, the Observer

Five bright ideas that illuminated 2007


There's much to celebrate in the moves towards greater tolerance of others and understanding of ourselves and the world around us

Will Hutton
Sunday December 23, 2007

The Observer

It is a little embarrassing how late I saw the potential for environmental catastrophe. I recognised that sustainability would be helpful, and did my bit because it was a good cause, but it has only been over the last few years that I have begun to see it as a global imperative. Campaigners, scientists and intellectuals shifted my opinions and millions with me.

Ideas start deep below public consciousness. So what have been the ideas that have incubated in 2007? Here are my five ideas - not, I am the first to concede, the only five - that I believe will surely have an impact and, in the round, for the better.igion as the source of much evil, 2007 has seen the case for faith begin to make a comeback. A life well lived for many is helped by a sense of higher moral purpose. Human beings still require a sense of the sacred.

The controversies over Islam should not blind us to the advantage of a belief in a God who rewards good and punishes bad. A master work by Professor Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, argues that while faith today may be harder to achieve when so much is explicable by science, that does not mean that it is not worth the effort or that those who make the attempt should be mocked by the rationalist secularists.

Even if there is no God, the act of faith, the sense of purpose and the belief in the sacred have illuminating spillovers on the rest of us.

I may not believe, but the churches sustained by the faithful in which I celebrate births and deaths are a source of spiritual solace for me, too.

Taylor appeals for mutual tolerance of those who have faith by those who do not, and vice versa, an appeal echoed by the increasingly influential Karen Armstrong. Fundamentalism is a deformed consequence of the modern condition, she argues, in which believers transplant modern logic to the universe of myth and faith with disastrous results.

But, with Taylor, she argues that non-fundamentalist faith is a source of spiritual good, and must be tolerated. Dawkins-style militant atheism only widens hostility.

Britain's greatness was built on European engagement

Cambridge University's Brendan Simms is an extraordinary historian and his reinterpretation of British history in the 18th century is one of those sleeper ideas that, along with others, is gradually challenging know-nothing Euroscepticism. His argument in the engrossing Three Victories and a Defeat is that Britain won the military space to build an empire and industrial hegemony through consistent and deep involvement in European politics, ensuring that no one European power could ever challenge us.

It was when we followed the Eurosceptic injunction to forget Europe that we suffered ignominy and disaster, losing the war in America as united Europeans undermined our war effort and then watched Napoleon dominate Europe.

We never were, and never will be, capable of prospering without engaging in Europe. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but visceral Euroscepticism increasingly seems batty - and the planks with which it is built rotting.

Empathy for the poor matches criticism of the super-rich

When a Yale professor writes a book saying it is right to be generous to the poor and gets an approving review from the International Monetary Fund, you know the times they are a-changing.

Charles Karelis argues that for too long, right and left alike have been crippled in their thinking about poverty, imagining that generosity will only create more dependency, more disincentives to work and a general fecklessness. It won't.

Karelis argues that the better-off don't get inside the heads of the poor. Of course the poor don't travel long distances for work if the fares make them worse off; of course they bet and gamble to try to escape the suffocation of poverty. Both are rational choices in the circumstances in which the poor find themselves and should not make us grudging about giving them cash. Unlike the rich, extra cash really matters to them and, paradoxically, that is the route to help them make rational choices not to be dependent or gamble.

Even Conservative opinion is shifting. It was at the Conservative party conference this year that, unexpectedly, Iain Duncan Smith's passionate speech against poverty won the plaudits.

Centre-right think-tank Policy Network asks why the rich give so little to charity. For the first time since the 1970s, I detect a move. The case for income redistribution is being made once again.

We make our own destinies

The brain is becoming much better understood. New technologies allowing the brain to be photographed are opening up means of comprehending how our brains are wired and how we come to have a reflexive consciousness, i.e. how we know that we know.

Nobel Prize winners Eric Kandel, Richard Axel and Gerald Edelman are mapping the trillions of connections between our brain neurons that will one day show how our faculties and senses work.

Already it is clear that how we interact with the external environment shapes the billions of neural pathways that affect our mood, attitudes and character. Advances in neuroscience are matched by advances in social science that emphasise the early years' experience in shaping our characters. We are not born with innate dispositions. Rather, we make our destinies.

Enlightenment values are best - despite US neoconservatives

The liberal left has for years associated itself with revolutionary and liberation struggles in the less developed world. There is a natural sympathy for Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even China's Hu Jinato.

America, cloaking its naked pursuit of interests in the language of liberal democracy, is the left's enemy. Bush and Blair invading Iraq was final confirmation of their long-held beliefs.

But 2007 revealed the heroes to have feet of clay. Whatever else, they are not friends of political pluralism, nor accountability through a free media, nor the rule of law. The Western enlightenment and even the US have begun to appear more attractive, the alternatives flawed.

This is an argument being made from the US's Walter Russell Mead to The Observer's Nick Cohen and Andrew Anthony.

So what unites all these themes? One way or another, they are all about how we create the circumstances to live a life well - tolerant of faith, sympathetic to the poor and to early life, supportive of democracy and our neighbours. Maybe the world is getting better, after all.