We’re living through a second brutal dark age
With renewed bigotry, superstition and terror.
And if you thought we’re on a preordained, exponential path of progress
Then I suspect you might be making a fundamental error.

Since the collapse of the twentieth century experiment in socialism
With equality and global brotherhood as its imagined creed
We have succumbed to the ideology of individualism
Which turns out to be nothing but a fig leaf for corporate greed.

The natural dialectic between cooperation and competition
Has been cynically twisted in favour of the latter
Never-ending wars between regions and religions
Divide and rule, while the elites grow grotesquely fatter.

It’s a dark age with twenty-first century characteristics
But with some cruel medieval barbarism thrown in.
Terror begets terror across our exhausted planet
In a senseless war that humanity cannot win.

So the need for a renewed Enlightenment
Is self-evident, as the planet’s rotting detritus piles higher
The destructive forces of drones and jihadists
Have pushed the old order to the absolute wire.

The starting point for our second Enlightenment
Must of course be empathy and reason and science.
And the acquired dogmas of the previous centuries
Need give way to a more humanistic alliance.

All religion is but accumulated superstitions
Manipulated by Machiavellian elites
And all nations are but artificial constructs
Driving humanity into endless retreats.

There are no gods, no prophets nor heavenly paradises
No creators with omniscient power
Just ourselves in this ever expanding universe
An integral part of the evolutionary flower.

Like all animals, our prime purpose is survival
Which is the origin of our persistent tribal behaviour
But in this age of thermo-nuclear and biological capacity
Cooperation can be the only human saviour.

Seven billion people competing for finite resources
With our numbers growing relentlessly by the year
Reason tells us that global cooperation is the only answer
The alternative being perpetual warfare and famine and fear.

So the essence of the New Enlightenment
Is revamping the dialectic between the individual and the tribe.
But the tribe now is the whole of humanity
And to survive we must all willingly subscribe.

And if there are other civilisations in the Universe
More advanced and more rational than our own
Then no doubt they once navigated this self-same precipice
Surely we homo-sapiens are not governing alone.

The New Enlightenment must permeate all our thinking
Our politics and our poetry and our prose
It must emanate from our universities and colleges
And embrace our families and our friends and our foes.

It must rekindle a new sense of optimism
That the early socialists and suffragettes once inspired.
It must transcend the old tribal dogmas
Whose time has patently expired.

But above all it must be dialectically grounded
In the contradictions that bedevil our days.
And it must address the central contradiction
Between competition and our more cooperative ways.

It must ridicule the ideology of private ownership
That has held sway for five millennia or more
And it must rewrite the history of humanity
Bringing our commonality of our existence to the fore.

It must definitively challenge all superstitions
Be they of nation, of religion, or of caste
And in so doing it is just remotely possible
That our homo-sapiens adventure might last.