What might be the state of mind of thoughtful people in 2030? Plainly, it depends on what has gone before.

Norman Cumming remarks that "'Seven Tomorrows' (Hawken, Schwartz) had a base scenario called the Official Future, in which things just developed in the way pedestrian statisticians might project. By about 2005 the world had avoided nuclear cataclysm, the US economy had grown fairly quickly, there had been neither civil war nor social transformation, and so on. Obviously - and the rest of the book demonstrated convincingly why - this could never happen..." The "Dull but Steady" scenario seldom features in books. Scenarios are usually intended to play up issues which the writer thinks to be important. For dramatic purposes, more of the same will not do. However, the next 25 years are, at the very least, an extension to a phase of history which is without precedent. They do not need much dressing up. Consider what is effectively inevitable. The Official Future will see a demographic overturn of the old order, and an uncertain economic rebalancing with the new. Science and technology will be treading on very strange ground. The world will be connecting itself together, so that the discontents and ambitions of any one group will collide with those of people from whom they were hitherto insulated by distance or deference. A great deal that was once virgin and self-managing will be exhausted and in need of active care. This is, surely, enough; and we should earnestly hope that the ship of the World's affairs proceed in a Steady but Dull manner through these reefs. Taking this as our crow's nest, therefore, how might intelligent people be thinking about their world? We are going to address this under seven very general headings.

The parameters of contentment: what makes us happy? The human condition: what are we about? Identity and self: where do I fit in? Duty of care: about whom and how should we care? Political rights and decision-taking. Enemies and the 'other'. What is wealth and how is it created and passed around.

If readers want to add more, please compose a text and send it in to us here.

What is it that makes us happy? What is it that makes us happy?

Let us explore this in two steps. First, what are the grand trends in assessed content? Second, we will look at the objective factors which seem to create the conditions for happiness. History and introspection were very much an individualistic pursuit before the nineteenth century. Later, we shifted to a more collective phase of telling ourselves happy stories about progress. The twentieth century, by contrast, brought on a colder, more abstract and much less anodyne view on who we are. Many discarded the comfort of religion, all were exposed to news and other media which emphasised our capacity to do harm to each other. The mood with which the century ended - in the West, at least - sat in strange contrast to the actual achievements made within it, as measured in the greater breadth of choice, wider education, extended longevity, improved health and general standard of living. Victorian Britain or the

US of the civil war were hard, rough and desperate places for the vast majority of the population. Objective measures of what ought to provoke content in general, and which do in fact correlate directly with personal contentment scores, give the pattern of relatedness that is shown above. That is, wealthy countries such as the US and Britain cluster together, and the developing countries are separated from these by a wide divide. Some nations and many individuals within them will be crossing this divide in the period to 2030 but, as we have seen in the development paper, many more will not. The absolute number of miserable people who, for objective reasons ought to be unhappy will rise, but the absolute number of people who think that the world is going to hell will increase disproportionately, for the reasons discussed above. What, then, are the factors which make us individually happy? Research shows that they come in two blocks: the first broadly to do with the society in which we live; and the other to do with our individual character and its ability to find a suitable niche. Assessment of the first block is straightforward, following much of the analysis given above. One can explain about 70% of the difference in self-assessed happiness between societies in terms of the clarity and predictability of those societies. Some of these are objective social goods: transport, housing, education, health, food supplies and clean water are all more than proxies for wealth and poverty in the statistics. Some important factors are more subjective, but at least as important in defining levels of content. These comprise questions such as: Is there a clear path to self-betterment? Can I rely on others? Is the society there to help me, or prey on me? Will things get better in future - will my old age be safe, will my children be safe? The second block of issues - the fit between individual character and the society - is an egregious issue only in monolithic or conformist structures. In pluralist societies, most able people can find their niche. Communist and other totalitarian regimes, fundamentalist theocracies and military dictatorships all have had little time for individual differences, however. Mao had all pets killed because 'they distracted people from the purity of the state', and imposed uniform dress codes and modes of speech. Other totalitarian states tend to show similar conformity, from the universal "Saddam" mustache in pre-war Iraq to the burqua enforced on women under the Taliban. Liberal states, by consequence, create niches within their structure. Almost any conceivable functional psychological type can find a situation in which their personality matches their circumstances. Most people with complex lives in fact inhabit several niches - work, play, family, self - and have developed sub-personalities to cope with the demands of each of these. It is, however, notable that the more liberal the society, the more space it gives to the creators of discontent, from advertisers which invite you to consume what you cannot afford to the politicians and journalists whose lifes' work it is to pour scorn on the efforts of others. This is, however, necessary creative destruction, the Darwinian struggle from which better governance and more resilient policy ideas emerge. (It also selects for a strange flavour of public servant, but perhaps less undesirable than those bodies which rose to the top of the pond in the time of unrestricted grabs for power.)

The wealthy societies of 2030 will be more complex than those of today. They will be more 'connected' by systems of feedback, regulation, information exchange. They will have even more niches, with most people living in at least several niches during the course of their daily life. Navigation in this environment will take more effort than today, just as today's world takes more social effort than did living in a village. The basic, objective drivers of contentment will be largely satisfied for most people, for - aside from being old, or relatively poor within their rich world - they will lack for very little. This is not to say that they will be happy about the ways of the world, however, but rather that they will be looking for new baskets from their irreducible quantum of irritation. This irritation will be focused on change. As noted, society will be complex and hard to navigate, but it will also be mutable. This is not so much a matter of change in itself although much change will be occurring - but perhaps more attributable to there being many parallel sets of rules, with no obvious way of choosing which to follow. If you live in an Islamic community in Britain, for example, there are rules for 'inside' and rules for the outside world, rules for business and rules for friends. You need to know which 'game' you are playing, and to be sure that the other people involved have negotiated their way to the same starting point. The societies of 2030 will have many such strands running through them, requiring active management. New rules are constantly churned out by youth culture, new technology and the like - when is it appropriate to make a mobile call? It depends on who is around you and who you are. By 2030, the range of options will be much greater, and the overhead for the insular, for many of the elderly, and for those with poor adaptive skills will be considerable. Sources of uncertainty, risk and concern will not be welcomed by these groups, and whilst a normative approach is not going to be possible, the irritation that flows from this will be exploited by politicians and others. The poor world will be much less happy, for the objective reasons discussed above. Having been able to label themselves as 'developing' - with the hope implicit in that adjective - many countries will have had generations of failure to explain to themselves. They will have straightforward social systems - the traditional pyramid, often held up by columns of patronage - with the tensions implicit in these. However, despite Marx and a century of revolutionaries, such societies are remarkably robust so long as everyone has more to gain from maintaining the status quo than they do from attacking it. As noted elsewhere, many such countries have developed a popular culture of self-blame: "We are so hopeless as a culture that we can only be governed by a firm hand; and if the government steal, well, that is better than chaos." Others seek to place blame on external forces, typically on the standard bearers for whatever is succeeding elsewhere. The US and its economic system has taken these blows for the past half century; and before that, Britain. The composite superpower of the 2030 period is the network of commerce that will span the market economies, and it and its agents will attract odium. Hate will lead to direct action, and episodic low intensity violence against such targets will be a feature of the times. As now, this will attract disproportionate concern from the rich countries, and the ideology of these movements will be another thread to follow in the maze of the times. Some in the rich world will sympathise, whilst others will deny any compromise: rational processes which lead to economic and social betterment - such as free trade - will be decried by both movements, and so made more difficult. Tense times will

make it hard to unclench the necessary muscles, whilst relative tranquillity and prosperity will make it far easier to ensure more of the same.

The human condition: what are we about? The human condition: what are we about?
Interpretations of what humanity is 'about' try to synthesise four areas of uncertainty. First, we try to put subjective experience of the world into a way of seeing that re-balances and interprets what we know by experience and what we learn from others. As a child, for example, we can see the world as a backdrop to or even a projection of the narrative of 'me'. Later, we see ourselves in context and learn the difference between the physical world, social constructs within it and our own subjective experience. Religions and folk wisdom once took a major role in this process, now usurped by formal learning, cultural conditioning, science and other forms of investigation. Second, we sense the world through our emotions as much as our perceptions. These start from simple attributes - nice and nasty, dangerous and supportive - and evolve into the complex emotional blends that we feel as adults. We codify these regularities as tacit rules and explicit statements of ethics, and we use them to make choices. Neither emotionality nor the mapping discussed in the preceding paragraph are enough for us to run a coherent life, however, for we need to deploy both of them. Emotional responses are how we find our way through the social maze to the cheese which most attracts us. This is not morality, but navigation; and our society provides us with more or less coherent structures by which to do this. Third, we are drawn to look for a point to our experience. There are ways of collectively getting to the cheese which seem 'better' than others. They cause less friction, hurt fewer people and may even generate a net gain for society as a whole. We learn to think that if everyone were to show the forbearance and trustworthiness that are involved in these better ways of operating, then we should all be better off. And, as discussed elsewhere, it turn out that trust and the non-zero sum game are exactly what societies need in order to operate, and it is the rules in that society which allows these qualities to be deployed. Morality is the name that we give to the most general rules that permit a society to operate. As football or chess literally do not exist without the rules, so societies do not exist without these rules of conduct. However, moralities need not agree, and usually have not done so beyond the fundamental needs of health, commerce and security. Most societies have kept slaves, have written complex laws about slaves and have congratulated themselves on so securing civilisation against the tide of barbarism. The fourth area is an extension of all of the other three. In asks the cosmological, ontological question about what it is to be human: as an individual and as a collective, and as an animal managing its baser instincts with the hope of some form of transcendence. It seeks Purpose and perhaps God, and seeks a synthesis which answers all questions. Science, which is so fine at mapping and defining the first of the three uncertainties which were discussed above is largely hapless in the other two, and helpless in this fourth category. Religion, which aspires to give these answers, often starts with a revelation as to The Point Of It All and then works back to infill the other three areas of right conduct, right feeling, and

right insight. One either buys into the revelation or one does not; or goes along with the cultural norms for practice without subscribing to the supposed insight. Most in the developed world now find this unsatisfactory, and formal adherence to a religion has dropped to a minority in all but the US. Most such people perceive no practical gap that affects the conduct of their daily life until they encounter a major life event, when the gap may become cavernous and addressed with chemicals and 'counselling'. The wealthy world of 2030 will be better understood, in the sense of the first category, than we can currently imagine. We will know how we think and what constitutes awareness. We will probably be able to create synthetic analogues of awareness - so-called strong artificial intelligence - and we will be able to interact directly with the quality and perhaps content of another's mind. We will be able to measure individual mental predispositions and weaknesses, infirmities and potential and will probably be able to make interventions which are currently unimaginable. Our insight into how the body works, ages and fails will be very nearly complete, and our armamentarium with which to solve medical and psychological problems - and with which to create completely new capabilities - will be extensive. The ability to interact directly with the mind will be very much on the horizon in 2030. Quite aside from to potential to resolve the soft and hardware problems of the mind, and the extension of inherent strengths, we shall also see the beginnings of the transcendence movement, whereby human biological limitations are set aside. For example, consider the convenience of the temporary installation of skills, such as languages or human relations, performance arts or aesthetics. One might complement this with temporary personality shifts which meet the needs of the moment, turning up one's competitive drive, dampening down one's moral qualms; or the opposite. One might look to the partial fusion with other minds across a project, such that groups of people become trans-personally intelligent, focusing as something of a single mind upon an issue. Individuals may allocate shards of their awareness to various tasks, rather as one drives, listens to the radio and thinks about problems, but with tighter management and better recall. This implies that the four elements - of mapping, of emotionality, of social rules and of integration around a source of harmony - will be taxed in quite different ways in 2030. As already noted, the basic issue of knowing how things work will be vastly extended. By contrast, the second cluster of tropisms called 'values', 'emotions', 'morality' will be under great strain: we will have to resolve not only our better understanding of the human condition but our advanced ability to interact and change its fundamentals. The third element, the codification of all of this into a working society, will be have to find ways of talking about a huge number of variables to an ever-more complex, preoccupied and quickly-changing society. Finally, the traditional mysteries around which religion has set up its sanctum will be under assault, by implication as new possibilities and arise and in fact as novel insights onto what constitutes awareness, the physical underpinnings of the universe and the like are defined. There is much that will shine light into these hitherto obscure corners. Our four elements - of understanding, of feeling, or codification into rules and of meaning are, therefore, undergoing uneven development and each subject to increased pressures. This is not an entirely happy balance.