Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World by the Prince of Wales Blue Door HK$240
Demonstrating a surprising willingness to transcend the ideological limitations of his birthright, Prince Charles has, for the past 30 years, immersed himself in some of the world's most esoteric literature in order to make sense of a culture that has failed us as affective beings. In doing so, the prince has redefined his position as one of social accountability, synthesising his investigations into a call for a new renaissance, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World.
Observing that 'we cannot go on endlessly prevaricating by finding one sceptical excuse after another for avoiding the need for the human race to act in a more environmentally benign way', the prince argues that there must be an overthrow of both linear thinking and the pathology of control. Ours is, he says, the Age of Disconnection, an era marked as the Anthropocene - entirely dominated by man, that man defined by the Age of Reason.
Prince Charles is not alone in thinking there are fundamental flaws in the way we judge success. Our values are, as he points out, anachronistic. The 'great juggernaut of industrialisation' is reliant upon an 'aberrant ... language - a manmade one - which articulates a world view that ignores nature's grammar. Much of the syntax of this synthetic language is out of synchrony with nature's patterns and proportions.'
He attributes this destructive thinking to the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions of the 18th century, when nature was, for the first time in history, deemed 'inanimate, unconscious, and mechanistic. Intelligence and purpose were not to be found in nature, but outside it, the property of some sort of transcendent God which religion could deal with on its own.' And, in the 20th century, to modernism, which repudiated 'both history and nature as central sources for design. Instead [it] focused on technology and abstraction, legitimising a kind of mythology of industrialisation.'
Troubled by the disturbing indifference in the developed world to 'the sacred presence that all traditional societies still feel very deeply', Prince Charles presents the grave social and environmental consequences of the secular worldview.
The 2006 Stern Review on Climate Change stated that the cost of ongoing atmospheric pollution in the coming decades will rival that of both world wars and the Great Depression combined. A multigenerational debt-binge appended to a multi-generational energy binge: global disaster.