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we asked one of the report’s co-authors, Theodore J. Gordon, to join us for a follow-up conference call with our survey participants. Gordon, who was a founding board member of our Institute, conceived of the Millennium Project in the 1980s and remains one of the world’s most highly respected futurists. He’s been studying future issues and trends since well before 1971, when he founded his own consulting firm, The Futures Group. So we were eager to share with him our results.

I also sensed an unspoken question on everyone’s mind: “Ted, what do you think is the Big One?”

His answer surprised us all. In effect, he said, it’s none of the above. Then, in three key words, he nailed the concern we’d all been circling around. “If you look at all of these issues,” he said “and ask what’s common to them all, it’s lousy decision making.”

Yet that very commonality poses a threat to ethical discourse. It can turn too easily into unwarranted certainty, smug self-confidence, and prickly assertiveness. The startling superficialities that pass for opinions on cable television and in today’s blogosphere remind us what happens when a culture of glib obduracy replaces a culture of reasoned questioning.

It is thus surprising to discover that Popper himself hardly lived
up to this ideal of non contradiction. When one examines Critical
Rationalism, for example, one soon notices that it is based on
questionable premises; that its internal logic is seriously flawed;
that it is inconsistent with other elements of Popper's thought;
and that it leads to conflicts with his own publicly stated
convictions.

In Unended Quest Popper observed bluntly that "there
is no such thing as an unprejudiced observation" [UNQ 51].
Although this appears to rule out the possibility of objectivity,
that was not Popper's intention. Rather, again following Kant
perhaps, he thought the basis for objectivity lay elsewhere:
"the objectivity of scientific statements lies in the
fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested" [LSCD
44]. He later restated this slightly differently: "it is the
public character of science... which preserves the objectivity of
science" [POH 155-6].

Down the line, F.A. Hayek, C.G. Jung, and Mircea Eliade were probably unaware of the specifically Friesian influence on them.

Nelson inadvisedly repudiated Rudolf Otto's philosophy of religion. Nelson's students and their associates, Grete Henry-Hermann, Paul Bernays, Gustav Heckmann, Stephan Körner, etc., although heroically perpetuating his memory, editing and publishing the great Gesammelte Schriften [Felix Meiner Verlag, 1949-74], maintaining his Philosophisch- Politische Akademie, and pursuing Nelson's practice of Socratic Method, sometimes, seeking to accommodate themselves to trends in more recent, sceptical philosophy, abandoned fundamental Friesian principles, especially in repudiating the unique Friesian doctrine of non-intuitive immediate knowledge. Nelson himself foretold this:

Here are a few [of the many!] facts surrounding the Compartamos IPO:

• Compartamos didn't issue any new shares as this was a secondary offering. Rather, certain shareholders sold their holdings on the Mexican stock exchange.
• At the IPO, more than 2/3's of the shares of Compartamos were held by NGO shareholders who were (and are) committed to reducing poverty.
• $275M or about 5/8ths of the IPO sale proceeds went to NGOs to reinvest in their missions and the rest (about $150M) went to private shareholders.
  
• The IPO made public (and realized in the case of the stock sellers) the investor returns which had accumulated while the company was private. That is, while there likely was some upward bump due to market conditions in the value of the shares through the IPO process, most of the investor returns were not related to the IPO itself.
• At the IPO, the market valuation of Compartamos was approximately $1.5B which represents a roughly 100% per year compounded return for investors over 8 years.
• The interest rates charged by Compartamos in terms of yield in 2005 was 86.3% (when you add required VAT, the rate to borrowers is about 100%.)

Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and
spawned “irrational” educational and other policies.

One said: “Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires hatred and prejudice
throughout the world, and is commonly used as justification for persecution
of women, gays and people who do not have faith.”

The findings contrast with Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included
poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling.

Poverty and drugs remain, but are joined by issues such as family breakdown,
young people’s behaviour and fears over immigration.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said he
was “extremely pleased”.

“Britain has had it with religion,” he said.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the Internet, and advertising has followed.

Even at established companies, the Internet has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices and work from anywhere at any time. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house.

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.

The pseudo-scholarly clergy don't like that line because they deny the Glastonbury legend about Jesus coming to England with Joseph of Arimathea. This shows a numbskull literal-mindedness.

When I preach the Resurrection on Easter Day, I try to evoke the Lord's appearances around Galilee, and on the walk to Emmaus, as if they had happened in my beloved Yorkshire Dales.

Blake didn't think Jesus came to England, either. He was a poet and his lines are the stuff of imaginative allusion. But imagination is a bit beyond the reach of the polite mechanicals among the modern clergy.

Christians in England are redeemed by Christ, as surely as the first disciples were redeemed by him in Galilee. Blake's magnificent poem is a way of bringing this home to us, building the truth of the experience into our hearts and minds by using homely, national imagery.

What the modern clergy can't stand is the powerful evocation of England. When they see the word "England" they don't hear the music of ancient Albion. They see patriotism and national pride, which to them are the next worse things to fascism and expansionary imperialism.

But, as Chesterton said, if a man won't love his country, it is difficult to believe he loves anything. Blake's hymn was a prelude to Milton, and he knew that Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man, happens down the Old Kent Road as definitely as anywhere else.

Odd, the trendy clergy's preference for abstractions and internationalism when it was abstracted international communism under Stalin and Mao which slaughtered millions more even than the über-nationalists in the Third Reich.

There is nothing abstract or theoretical about Blake's hymn. He wasn't writing a report for the General Synod. As a poet of genius, he knew that the way to convey spiritual realities is to incarnate them in things: swords, chariots, clouded hills, mountains green.