Global Humanist Shoptalk

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. Over this series, we've looked at deep time and more recent histories of migration, the excessive role of technology in enforcing current borders, and the biggest moral crises that borders impede our ability to...

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. One other problem with borders is how ill-prepared they make us, as a species, to address extreme human rights violations. Genocide and civil war are routinely difficult phenomena to mediate because of our prio...

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. In this episode, we reflect on how much technology has had to be developed - and often at further cost to human well-being - just to maintain our notions of rigid borders. Is this really the best use of our cre...

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. War has routinely been a transformer of human geography, and changing borders have consistently created significant amounts of human suffering. Recognizing these facts, why then do we still place such high mora...

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. In this episode, we're going back to those deeper histories of migration, to remind ourselves how fragile and recent so many of our ideas about human group structures really are. Yes, we've had eras of more rec...

In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. With climate change disaster accelerating, and amid ongoing war, we have more pressure points than ever, challenging our notion of rigid limits to where human beings can go. But are we ready for the mental refr...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration that our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. We looked at the fragility of money transfers for average citizens, the fraught history of the IMF, and the easily abused systems of microfinancing and cryptocurrency (along...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The rise of cryptocurrency has many stories attached to it: some about wanting to change the world, some about exploiting the world in new ways. In this episode, we reflect on th...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. In this episode, I reflect on a time when I was beguiled by the feel-good story of microfinancing. Nothing is ever that simple, sadly, when it comes to the easily gamified world...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The IMF and World Bank are complex forces in the world today. Located in and funded by countries that caused a great deal of financial inequality in the first place, is their aus...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The internet age gives the impression of easy connectivity, but the reality is quite different for those trying to make and send money to a great many struggling nation-states. I...

In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. In this first episode, we "think slow" about the arbitrary and dehumanizing activity of putting a political price tag on life at all. REFERENCES Costanza, Robert. “The value of t...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, we've been exploring "Petronationalism": the way corporate overlap with state enterprise around the world has created a situation of oil imperialism that underpins a great deal of national and international trauma over the last 150 years. What could we do if we were no longer reliant on, and shaping national myths around, hydrocarbon economies? What would our...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're looking at "Petronationalism". Oil imperialism has done a number on our world. In four snapshots we reflect on the ways that this fossil fuel market has negatively impacted the shape of many cultures. When we talk about reducing oil dependency, we often speak in environmental terms--but what if what's good for "the planet" is also good for us sociopoliti...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, "Petronationalism", we're exploring the myths underpinning modern nation-states, and the arbitrary divisions drawn between corporate and government exercise when it comes to oil imperialism. There are certainly differences between Communism and Capitalism... but do they always show up in the way oil-seeking nation-states have exploited the modern world? REFERE...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're exploring "Petronationalism". Why have petroleum products played such a significant role in the development of nation-states? There's a story of imperialism here with strong consequences for our ongoing crisis shaped by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but also something deeper. For all that we treat "corporations" and "states" as distinct entities, in prac...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're talking about "Petronationalism". After wrestling with the myths imposed on nation-states in Episode 1, especially around World War I, we turn our attention to myth-making within specific countries over much longer time spans, and the way these histories complicate our understanding of what a nation even is. REFERENCES Anderson, Gordon L. "The Idea of th...

In this first miniseries of Season 2, "Petronationalism", we look at the making of nations: our myths around a "balance of power" for sovereign states, and the way they've coloured our understanding of 20th century history. If we're going to make sense of power struggles in the world today, we need to rethink some of our fundamental ideas about the nation-state. REFERENCES Axworthy, Michael and Pa...

In this Season One closer, we explore the history of the light bulb, and what aligning ingenuity with literal illumination has done for us as a culture (for better, and for worse). When we consider how best to uplift fellow humans today, what lessons can the light bulb and its histories teach us about how not to measure success?

In this episode (and in the wake of a few years of toppled statues and related historical markers), we reflect on our use of public spaces to establish a specific ethos for our cultures. What do we venerate with our memorials and monuments? And what other choices exist, that we might not even realize we could make instead?

Punk is a complicated term, because its history has found it appropriated by many different - and often completely contradictory - political movements and societal vantage points. How can so many ideologies fit under one umbrella term? Easily, actually. When "punk" reduces to "resistance from a perceived status quo", all manner of difficult bedfellows might show up to claim the concept as their ow...

In this episode, I grapple with a passion that I did not fully understand - but wanted to. What kinds of cultural tension points exist in the world of sneakerheads? What can the phenomenon teach us about societal priorities, and the complex interplay of capitalism and cultural identity formation?

Climate crises require a bigger reframe with respect to how we talk about our relationship to the planet, and the work of prevention as much as crisis management. But do we really need to reinvent the wheel here? Or are there other eras and cultural contexts that already give us what we need to approach the trials ahead?

In this episode, we reflect on the phenomenon of blaming social media for human behaviours that showed up in pre-digital eras, too. It's not that these online tools can't be problematic; it's more that a full accounting of our problems with social media requires an unflinching look at the problems with us .

Is there such a thing as a "pure" science? I'm not immune to the appeal of such a concept, and have sometimes slipped into the fantasy that a noble enough pursuit of knowledge "for the betterment of all humankind" transcends the complexities of human coexistence. Not so, though, as we explore in this episode, on the wonders of astronomy... and also the humanist importance of honouring whatever rea...