In Between Two Ages, the first long series I did for Ideas in early 1981, I began to explore the unique character of our historical moment, and to advance the idea that only a radical change of mind could respond to its demands.  Three years later, I got a chance to follow up that initial effort with the present series.  Its organizing image or paradigm is the idea of a new age – the way in which I then spoke about my dawning recognition that received social and political forms are quite...

My old Ideas colleague Max Allen and I would sometimes talk about how much the reputation of a  broadcast could depend on its timing.  Some programmes, we thought, were sent into the world ahead of their time, others came after their hour had struck, and every now and then there was one was lucky enough to arrive right on time.   This series, it seemed to me, arrived on the scene a little before the moment at which it might have received the hearing I would have wished for it.  It was made in...

This series, from 1983, gave me a chance to ponder issues, concerning the power and responsibility of journalistic media, that had preoccupied me every since I had begun working for CBC Radio twelve years before.  Two "hooks" provided the occasion.  The first  was the calling of a Royal Commission to consider the problem of growing monopoly in the newspaper business.  This was the Kent Commission, after commissioner Tom Kent, which reported in 1981.   The second was the publication, in 1980,...

Despite his his originality and his influence as a thinker, the work of Leopold Kohr remains too little known.  His philosophy in a nutshell was contained in his crucial book The Breakdown of Nations, published in 1957, where he wrote: "...there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness...Whenever something is wrong, something is too big."  The idea that everything has its proper size had been developed in the biological sciences by D'arcy Thompson in his 1917 book...

This series had its genesis at a meeting of the Royal Society of Canada - in 1985, as I recall, though it may have been the year before.  The subject was the relations of religion and science, and several of the people featured in this series were present - among others physicist Iain Stewart, philosopher Albert Shalom, and British scientist James Lovelock, whose "Gaia hypothesis" was then still new and controversial.  I had long been interested in the  developments in physics and other...

"We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and. growth of underdeveloped areas." -U.S. President Harry Truman, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1949 This series is another in the set of programmes I made between 1985 and 1985 on the theme of "development."  In this. case, the programmes were an overflow from "The Age of Ecology," an eight hour series broadcast in the spring of 1990, which was...