Alan Macfarlane: ‘All that I can say is that through friendship, love, the kindness of strangers, combined with trying to develop my self-confidence and trying to be kind and generous to others I have enjoyed my life. Leading a modest life which does as little damage to others in the world as possible, I have been enormously fortunate to reach an age (seventy-four) and a degree of peace, as I sit in a beautiful English garden on this June day, looking at the birds and roses.’

Alan Macfarlane; ‘in encouraging a wide education with new elements we should avoid the danger of throwing out much that was good in the old – language learning, basic numeracy and literary skills, encountering new and exciting disciplines and ideas. Nor should we ever forget that almost all of our education comes through people, most of them not our school teachers, but friends and family.’

Computers and Communications. THE 2016-2017 FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW serial. Serial Preface and Contents with Publication Schedule . By ALAN MACFARLANE. HUMAN BEINGS, LIKE other animals, shape their world through the ways in which they communicate. Humans receive about seventy percent of the information they derive from the external world through their eyes and the rest through […]

Alan Macfarlane: ‘If we do not think in a radical way as our world changes dramatically, we are just marching into an ever-narrowing valley which will finally trap us. We should think in new ways to fit a world of increasing expectations and technology, but also increasing leisure and information. China is already leading the way, though it has also partly caught the ‘hospitalisation’ disease. So it may be that once again, as with printing, compasses, paper, porcelain, gunpowder, let alone tea and rhubarb, we can learn from the Chinese.’

Alan Macfarlane: ‘Whether we can, in time, learn how to share and steward our resources, is not certain. It has been done in the past, particularly when it becomes obvious that by forgoing their narrow and short-term gains, humans will benefit, as will their children and children’s children. Casting your bread on the waters – eating less meat, economising on water and car journeys, seriously recycling, all these are small, personal, gestures, but they add up. They already make more sense to many who are increasingly aware that we live in a small, fragile, crowded, planet which is under huge pressure.’