Is he looking at the future, the past or into our heads? Theodore Zeldin, philosopher and author of many books, including “An Intimate History of Humanity” has many new ideas that can truly set you thinking. Some of them are:
“Our population has so exploded…that every time our population has exploded throughout history, we have invented new kinds of work to absorb the new population.”
So Zeldin says, “I have come to the conclusion that we can no longer live the way we did for we have created educated people and some of the educated people, at least, have different expectations and are not satisfied to just get a job and sit in front of the computer for the whole of their lives. They have got minds that wish to discover….” Zeldin feels that both the above ideas of population explosion and higher levels of education are forcing us to, “…invent jobs. We invented industry, services, public service and now there are a billion young people for whom we have to find jobs… This is what makes this century exciting…we have to reinvent a new idea of business (the buying and selling of time), a new idea of work. Work is where we spend a lot of our time and this is what the 20th Century invented. I see our goal now, not to start a revolution, but to engage in experiments of doing different things in different ways… Just as the pharmaceuticals engage in constant research, even when they are not successful, so should all our industry do to find more interesting and fulfilling ways to live our life.”
Zeldin says if we are to live a 100 years how should we think of the past, present, future…each one of us has a mind which is like an antique shop which has ideas coming from many centuries, so we are actually a mixture of the past and present.
“Neuro science says that ideas of the future are formed in exactly the same place in the brain as your memory…if you have no memory you cannot imagine a life that would satisfy you better, you have got to have a larger memory. In the 20th Century we were told that what we were was built on our memory of our infancy, how we were treated etc…memory is focussed on your childhood and infancy and we think of ourselves as determined by that. We need to expand our memories and to discover the memories of the others and become aware of all the memories. We need history. Without history… you cannot create something new,” says Zeldin.
Putting aside politics which is concerned with power and economics which is concerned with property, Zeldin says, “I am focussing on what goes on in people’s heads. My ambition in the 20th Century is that we should discover who inhabits the world. We don’t know who we are…I am sitting in front of you, but I don’t know who you are…I see interaction between people as the crucial motor of change. That is why I look at private life for in private life you can really be honest, really get to know someone…take each of the problems with which we are faced and look at the historical solutions…”
Turning the 20th Century mantra of asking “Who am I?” to unravel the secrets of life on its head, Zeldin says, “I think that is impossible… You can have illusions about yourself. The way in which you know about yourself, in part, is discovering what other people think of you…you are not what you appear to be...they can stimulate you to think harder about yourself…instead of saying know yourself for me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have…”
And so he addresses three fundamental questions of human existence: Where can a person look to find more inspiring ways of spending each day and each year? What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology or therapy? What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or who feel isolated or different, or misfits?
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Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1ZGxRm8Vc
