Is there any hope in these dark days, dear listeners? A view of a time when we are all laughing again, even with Rutte, all divisions have been overcome and we can go outside without a self-test in our pocket?
I address you as listeners, because recently due to virological circumstances I was able to binge of NRCpodcasts. That enriches your experience of the newspaper. In Today (news), The Hague Affairs (politics) and Hairless Monkeys (science), you sit at the table with NRC editors.
But the hopes I needed—fully vaccinated and yet felled by a bat bite—were bubbling elsewhere anyway. It came from the slightly less listened-to, but all the more striking podcast Future Affairs, in which NRC editor Wouter van Noort and philosopher Jessica van der Schalk explore the future of humanity with searchlights on their helmets. It is the podcast “that makes you look differently at the future”, according to the introduction. In which we get “a glimpse” of “what is coming our way.”
And that’s quite a bit – and it’s all good news.
Thanks to quantum physics, brain research, psychedelics and “ancient” wisdom, we are moving away from the materialistic and individualistic “old story” that has brought us to the brink of the abyss. Towards a “new story about who we are”, one of ecological “connection”. No more selfish genes, or a society that thrives on well-understood self-interest, but cooperation and awareness that strikes the clock.
In the episodes I listened to you fall from one paradigm shift to another revolutionary insight. About the economy of the future, about ecological art, about scientific ‘panpsychism‘ (the idea that consciousness is not the product of evolution, but the basis of the universe). The presenters like to be carried away by it and it seems that they themselves also experience one surprise after another. A conversation with physicist and philosopher Bernard Kastrup begins with the admission that “it doesn’t happen often to us that in one conversation we learn to look differently at the cosmos and our own consciousness” and “we still have to recover a bit”.
ashemenou. It made me feel a lot better, in bed between the crumpled self-tests. Not only is there light at the end of the tunnel, there is Light everywhere. Although I did wonder what the exterminated Neanderthals of this cooperative gay sapiens 2.0 would find. Well, that was then.
This NRC podcast is therefore a contemporary, fascinating offshoot of a kind of pop philosophy that is causing a furore worldwide. See the success of global thinkers like Yuval Harari (Gay Deus), or Rutger Bregman’s accumulated optimism in airport shops (Most people are good).
I also like to advertise it, because such an exploration of Future Affairs is an interesting experiment, and a form of journalism that is different from what you would expect from the skeptical NRC. If the voice of the newspaper is usually one of the serious ones Journalpresenter, empathetic but also always a little concerned, then the sunny enthusiasm of the newly awakened clicks in Future Affairs: what we have heard again!
This puts NRC at the forefront of brainwash festivals and other avant-garde subcultures. That’s good, because you have to have feelers there too – and it’s something different than the slave society that conspiracy theorists would like to see in the future, often with the same ingredients: new technology and digital ‘connection’ of everything with everyone.
But I do have a Calvinist thought about it.
Because you would expect a little more context and resistance in those lively conversations – and especially historical ballast. Criticism of materialism and naturalism (the idea that reality can be explained entirely in scientific terms) is a trend. But they are theories, open to debate, not revelations.
Or is New Age thinking still become skilled about NRC?
I exchanged ideas with the makers and they responded to my skepticism in a welcoming and sporting manner – as befits good optimists. Van Noort explained to me that he wants to practice searching and not judgmental journalism, now that we are on the threshold of a new era. That has, he says, by definition something fringy and contrairs: that’s what you get with searching.
Yes, and now NRC also has a certain tradition of embracing new times. In the 1990s, NRC editor Jurriaan Kamp, a former correspondent in India, briefly made furore with his Club van Schier, a think tank that wanted to promote a “mind revolution”. Against cynicism and materialism – even then! Kamp left the newspaper and became founder of the awareness magazine Ode.
Perhaps it is the flip side of critical rationalism where NRC Handelsblad was imbued with it in its early years. Like that of essayist Rudy Kousbroek, who in Sunset of the Magicians (1970) poked fun at “the modern superstitions” of romantic hippies and psychedelic prophets. I don’t think he would get much pleasure from the audio rediscovery of that.
Does that sound like Muppet crank from a graying past?
No, it’s fine that NRC takes listeners on a quest for cutting edge thinking. There should be such free space – if only for your sick bed. But let it remain a journalistic quest, with debate and historical awareness, not a breakthrough or conversion experience. After all, the future is always born yesterday.
Reactions: [email protected] nrc.nl/spraakuurombudsman
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 11 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 11, 2021
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