This book is about the ecological crisis that threatens to collapse our entire civilisation. It is about the crisis of liberal democracy unfolding before our eyes. And it is about a new approach that aims to tackle both crises. Over the last few years, progressive activism has increasingly looked at the world through the lenses of identity, power and privilege. It has successfully placed its oppression story at the heart of the mainstream media and politics. But at the same time it has alienated its more moderate allies and has become more homogeneous and dogmatic in its thinking. In this book I argue that this is a huge mistake. It is a divisive approach that contributes to further political polarisation and provides fertile ground for authoritarian and nationalist politics. The recent elections to the European Parliament have provided fresh evidence that our societies are drifting further apart. On the one side stands the urban, cosmopolitan, liberal and ecologically minded elite that has helped the German Green party to its biggest electoral success ever, and on the other side are the more rural, more traditionalist working classes who have helped Salvini, Le Pen, Farage, Orban etc. to electoral victories in their respective countries. If this trend continues, it might set us back many years from tackling climate change, years we don’t have. It might also reverse some of the enormous social progress made in recent years instead of contributing to a fairer world. As encouraging as the recent movements Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion are, they exist within the progressive bubble. The resentments against green politics on the other side of the political spectrum have reached unprecedented levels. The situation is serious. The transition to a sustainable society cannot happen inside the progressive ideological bubble. Instead we need to break out of the current echo chambers and welcome a much broader set of ideas of good faith into our discussions. We should reduce our moral certainty and learn to live with, rather than fight, people who hold values different to our own. We might even learn something from them. A much better way of tackling our societal problems and existential risks is to take an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary science teaches us how we got to where we are now, and how understanding our gene-culture co-evolutionary heritage will make it much easier to switch off our destructive deep-seated tendency for tribalism and design a good society. We have to shift all our attention to tackling the hard problem of evolution: figuring out how to adapt to the new conditions on Earth much faster than humanity has ever done or has had to do. This book is written for civil society leaders, grantmakers and other change agents who are keen to learn about strategies, solutions and systems that are grounded in human evolution, and thus are more likely to succeed and are better suited to creating wellbeing for all. It is for anyone who is open to engaging with challenging new ideas and committed to building or advocating alternative models of society and economy. The book has four parts: Part I analyses the causes of the crisis of liberal democracy and explores the origins and unintended effects of a significant swath of current social justice activism. Part II explores the core findings from human gene-culture co-evolution and what this explains about how we organise our societies. It contains an evolutionary toolkit that aims to help make evolution work for the Great Transition. Part III provides a glimpse of an emerging puzzle composed of ideas and solutions in our democratic and economic systems that might be part of an intentional cultural evolution towards a greater human wellbeing that is in harmony with nature. Part IV proposes a number of action areas and strategies that civil society organisations, activist networks and grantmaking organisations should pursue. It is based on the evolutionary insights and other findings in this book.weiterlesen