Beethoven: his 250th birthday as a political artist!

Music is a universial language and no composer left his signature on music quite like Ludwig van Beethoven. Today is his 250th birthday and his work is celebrated throughout the World.

Exploring the music, life and times of the great composer who changed culture, we are marveled by a political artist, who embodied the then-new ideal of the musician as passionate, politically engaged Romantic hero.

Source: Gabriel Alcala.

As he worked with various forms of music of his time — symphony, string quartet, piano sonata, opera — and stretched them to their breaking points, today for many engaged thinkers one question comes to mind:

What can we do systematically to change the facts why millions of people on our planet cannot access today his music and enjoy as much as those who love Beethoven’s masterpieces?

Smart Rural – A village in Malawi goes global!

Today we still tend to go around in circles explaining the same ideas over and over again with little change in observed behavior in old mental structures. This might be true for some businesses, other leaders as it is for us, individuals.

Let us take a seat back and look at things differently at the warm heart of southeastern Africa for a visit to a rural village in the small country of Malawi:

A 13-year-old boy is thrown out of the school he loves when his family can no longer afford the fees. He sneaks into the library and learns how to build a windmill to save his village from famine.

Where the mind goes, the energy flows!

This African innovation literature is inspiring progress based on the true story of a young boy who just wants to keep the world as he knows it alive and well.

His real name is William Kamkwamba, the author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. William stands for the power not just of the wind, but of imagination and ingenuity and I am proud today that he enjoyed the book Many Many Beginnings and did not spare his emotional support for the progress of our webinar “Global Network - Authors and Activists.”

William Kamkwamba is a friend but more importantly a hero for our smart age who stands for a great example serving as a model of what one person, with an inspired idea, can do to fight the crisis we face. He makes us think like philosophers about the most important forces we have for saving our planet.

Opportunities and risks are very close to each other, yet how can we re-organize and systematically reduce the risks while raising the opportunities?

Thinking about our Planetary Health

The Arab Spring, unfortunately, turned to bitterness faster than many had predicted at the beginning a decade ago. Except in Tunisia, the change was there yet its direction was not for the better. Today millions despair in the region. Nevertheless, the Arab world’s despots are far from sustainability. With record low oil prices, they can no longer enjoy their status quo. Many have therefore become more aggressive and oppressive.

Striking is that this behavior has less connection with intellectual capacity.

If we believe that it can be explained by the supposition that, philosophy being concerned above all with arguments, that Arap leaders are naturally less adept in the field than we are on the wrong side of the argument. This would be making a similar mistake even philosophers made for hundreds of decades!

Love at first sight?

Philosophers for a long have been considered as the leading figures shaping the world of thought.

A man's world: a marble statue of Plato at the Academy in Athens. Photograph: Alamy

Yet how do we explain today that for long centuries they have neglected their thinking about the role of women, with whom they had a never-ending love affair?

The subject of women, women's rights, or gender equality, all essential to the cumulative societal human capital was right in front of their eyes, since the very beginning, wasn’t it?

The bigger problem rather seems in a persisting mentality of a ‘Goodbye’ at first ‘Hello’.

If for some readers such questions seem an irrelevance of far places like in most of the Northern African countries or of old mistakes done by forgotten philosophers from rusty ancient times, how can we explain that only around a quarter of philosophy posts in the modern UK universities in 2020 are occupied by women?

Book Many Many Beginnings hints at the potential of danger by collective thinking to miss arguments which favor all equally for a better outcome. Under the name of the series “Not so innocent fairy tales!”, it opens the scene that favors a broad start for less restriction by the dictates of common sense and argues that long years stories help sustain the uncovered version of mysteriously hidden facts, building on the work of Jack Zippes.

A broad restart is not an easy mission. Yet, although the world seems to demand more and more specialization—in our careers, for example—what balanced Planetary Health actually needs is more people who broaden their way of looking at life and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they flourish professionally.

In 2020 it takes ignorance to argue that we are far from gender equality, even though there is progress. In the era of postmodernism, academic philosophy like many other disciplines has become an extraordinarily inward-looking subject, devoted not to exposing and examining the implications of the way we think about the world, but to exposing instead deficiencies in the arguments of other expert peers.

The reluctance of philosophers to include women for too long was in fact shooting in their own leg, without understanding the real power that lies behind the potential of human capital.

For too long thinkers were mislead by believing what matters is the argument, not the arguer, which means there is no need even to think about gender or ethnicity. They have consequently considered themselves protected from the distorting effects of gender bias.

In Milet, today's modern Turkey, where historians and archeologists believe logic was born, we can trace back time: the motto back then and until recently was logic like artificial intelligence today is gender-neutral, philosophy is logical, ergo philosophy is gender-neutral.

Has this for too long led us to complacency?

Social and emotional intelligence fueled by art and literature ensures a good relationship with our peers and with our families or supervisors. Many Many Beginnings argues that they make it harder to become derailed because of conflicts going on with their inter-personal relationships, but can remain independent in their thinking and protected against biases.

Similarly, in his book Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World David Epstein argues that we should broaden and embrace diverse experiences. His examples run from Roger Federer to Charles Darwin to Cold War-era experts on Soviet affairs. Bill Gates explains some of his company’s success, because of the quality of their hiring process focusing on people who had real breadth within their field and across domains.

This year, we have had a sign on our doors “2020 – Planet A was closed!”

How can we enable new beginnings?

Too many forms of explicit and implicit bias operated for too long in philosophy, as they do within and beyond other academic disciplines. Unfortunately, though, this refines the question rather than answering it.

Psychology suggests that believing we are an objective judge actually makes our judgments less objective, and maybe today we partly suffer from this?

Today we have the same kind of reluctance to acknowledge collectively the dormant human capital, this time less right in front of our eyes (for the bigger part of the world), yet indeed far from sight. Generally speaking, these far places are called rural areas – the poor corners of our planet- where complacency exists, this time less because of gender bias, but more because of geographical bias!

This means if you are born in a rural area, who was not lucky to be part of a city, on the verge of soon turning to “Smart”, then this means that you are mostly living in off-grid areas, without access to essential resources.

In my opinion, one of the most important goals of co-operation on regional policy over the next years should be to ensure that all parts of World Regions are equipped to cope with revolutionary changes and crises.

Providing food and water, World Food Programme (Nobel Peace Prize for 2020), tries to tackle some of the huge problems with its great efforts to fight hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict but does not address the root cause of the real problem.

The real problem lies in failing to learn collectively - similarly like the thinkers failed collectively to include feminism - to worldwide acknowledge and act together for a common good, this time in rural areas to be driven from the benefits of treating everyone equally for his rights to flourish. We need and can complete the thinking.

Art and Literature for African Flourishing

For African creatives with ambitions, recent months have been very inspiring.

Disney, a leading entertainment company, announced an agreement for an original animated series called Iwájú, with a small African animation company.

The Nigerian-Ugandan founders of the company, Kugali Media, started out with a comic book before creating Iwájú, which will be shown in 2022 as part of Disney’s global creative expansion via its Disney+ streaming strategy.

Disney, famous as a traditionally conservative studio, starting to work with an African startup-like Kugali might be inspired by the success of Netflix working with African creatives in TV and film especially in Nigeria, Malawi and South Africa.

Shall we thank William for this?

These African creatives, with varying levels of resources, are working on new ways to tell and re-tell African stories on a global stage. This is great, but what about the rural areas in other African countries or rural areas in other continents?

Let us all imagine the dormant potential that lies in all rural areas! Thinking one day they too can listen to Beethoven, we all have much to think about and learn from both Beethoven and William.

Isn’t this exhilarating?