Alan's report on the Tällberg Conference is sort of disturbing for its sense that we might have to resign ourselves to our inability to do serious, effective, and proactive work required to ensure the survival of the fancy monkeys. The Tällberg Conference may be as good as it gets, and not good enough. [Link]
I confess that on Day 1, I had hopes that Tällberg Forum would "do something." Or perhaps "be something." A turning point. A new start. A breakthrough. A time of serious new commitment to change. I know that is unrealistic, but I have embraced the Buckminster Fuller dictum, "Dare to be naive." It is the only way such things can be made the least bit possible. It is the only way to avoid the far worse trap of cynicism. There was significantly less cynicism than usual on display at Tällberg, which is perhaps one of the greatest compliments one can give to an international conference on the problems of our time. It seemed quite a number of people, including some relatively powerful people (when in their public roles), were also daring to be at least a little naive.
But by Day 3, I had made my peace with the fact that the Tällberg Forum was what it was: a good conference, with a particularly interesting assemblage of people, in a particularly nice place. The musicians, led by multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller and serving up a pot pourri of world music, were superb and inspiring. The Tällberg organization itself was also "tight", just as one says of a good band. They struggled with timing, but they kept the whole thing moving forward, broke it up with artistic interludes, created an atmosphere that created, in turn, a good place to talk.
And the talk? Well, as one of my colleagues reminded me, "This is as good as it gets." He explained that he had attended quite a number of "high end" conferences recently, including Davos and others, and that one just should not have very high expectations about the world's capacity for serious, searching dialogue about global direction. Tällberg was, for him, an indicator of how well the world was thinking about big issues, in a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural way, because it represented a kind of peak in how such dialogues occur. This was a sobering reflection.
But perhaps the trend is in the right direction. To my mind, the world is not anywhere near as "serious" as it needs to get about the complex problems we face in this century. But the Tällberg motto, "Getting Serious", implies that this is a process. We will need to keep working, as a world, on "Getting Serious" for a long time to come.
