From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised. One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you.
I think the silver lining of this pandemic in the last couple of years is we have realised that culture is not relegated to an office, it's agnostic of a physical office. It is how we work with each other. We have gotten a little lazy by thinking it is all these fun and games.
I was sitting on a train—the British invention that transformed trade and travel, and was embraced very early in the United States. In my hand was an iPhone – another revolutionary advance, this time created by Americans with its iconic appearance designed by an Englishman. There are countless examples like these.
The brains of our ancestor Homo sapiens were the same as our brains. How to draw, how to write, how to think, have all been learned, sometimes with great difficulty, and the learning has been passed on.
I do believe there's something fundamentally essential about free play—the open-ended combination of elements not confined by a narrow context. This concept is vital not only to humanity but to life itself. Consider Johan Huizinga, the sociologist and anthropologist who, in his book 'Homo Ludens,' famously argued that play is a necessary precondition for culture. I find this perspective accurate.
Cinema also exists within a framework of genre- and that can be challenging as genre can often flatten storytelling. It can also be a strength- when you play inside a genre- take the case of John le Carre for instance, he's a great novelist but works within the genre of spy-fiction, and transcends the usual narratives.
The brain can be thought of as a blank slate, yet it comes with certain built-in constraints and proclivities. Every culture recognizes the octave, because it's grounded in physics, a simple 2:1 frequency ratio. Every culture also uses the perfect fifth, 3:2. And every culture divides the octave into a discrete set of steps for their scale, usually between five and eight.
Women were never in the driver's seat with dating. It always came down to the man to take the lead, to ask the girl... There was this playbook where the guy has the power, the girl is weak and fragile waiting to be saved by Prince Charming... and this is disempowering for both sides.
I'm surprised that people argue that economic integration causes a loss of identity. In fact, countries get the benefits of their own country (whether it be food, types of goods, technologies) but in-addition, they get the benefits of all the things other countries produce too. Economic integration doesn't remove a country's identity, far from it… rather the range of products, services, instruments and intellectual processes available increases. You keep what you have and add things from abroad. This is not reducing identity, but expanding it.
I believe, personally, that movies allow people to be taken places they can't get to on their own- be it travel, or culture, or learning. The arts are not just one, they are all connected- and movies have become a huge part of the arts.
Glastonbury means different things to different people, but for me, there's something really life affirming about bringing people together who can live peacefully, without conflict, for 5 days in the middle of the countryside with pretty basic facilities, leaving feeling like they can change the world.
Technology claims to be showing us a mirror of what was already present in society but in reality, technology is a funhouse mirror with a feedback loop that's engineered to show us the most egregious parts of society that are better at keeping our attention.