The Tree Top Gallery

Site specific installation and workshop
by Sen McGlinn + Sonja van Kerkhoff, 2009

Workshop by Sen McGlinn, 2nd August, 6.30 pm,
The Tree Top Gallery, in Regents Park, London, U.K.

Sen McGlinn speaks, in a tree in Regents Park, 2nd August, 2009

This discussion will begin with a broad-brush treatment of changes in global social systems that affect our practical lives, and our world-views. The goal is to provide a big picture, in simple words and without learned academic references, of where we are at, and where change is taking us, as human society on planet earth.

In my _Church and State_ and various articles, I have described the historical separation of the religious and political orders as one part of the process of the differentiation of social spheres, such as economy, science, politics, education, religion and art. This ‘functional differentiation' has been going on for some centuries.

One of its effects has been the individualisation of society and changes in gender roles, another is increasing interdependence. It has also fed into global integration, pluralism and relativism. Together, these constitute the revolution that is variously called globalisation or the formation of a postmodern society. However the world-views that we have inherited from the centralised and rationally ordered societies of the modern era, or from romantic reconstructions of pre-modern society, clash with our experience of living in a postmodern society.

We have notions of what society is and how it ought to work, and they don't match our experience of what works and feels right. The clash creates tensions within individuals which sometimes erupt in violence or self-defeating behaviour. The solution to this disorientation, is a re-orientation to a broad view of what society is in fact becoming.