So the Copenhagen climate conference is about to go up in flames. Depressing but not surprising, given the self-absorbed nature of politicians and the corporate giants that sponsor them. I know that I get very cynical when I well know that changing the hearts and minds of people is a very slow painful process, as witness how long it has taken to change white attitudes towards blacks in the United States. It is now 45 years since the Civil rights legislation of the 1960's and many people are still as locked into old attitudes as they ever were. This kind of attitude is real visible in the 'birther' controversy surrounding President Obama.

Daniel Pink's writing may be shallow but he is correct in identifying our left-brain thinking as a source of the mess we find ourselves. But right-brain thinking will not necessarily be any better if it has not moral underpinnings, no values to guide it. Art and creativity are not necessarily any more healthy than linear logic, merely different. They have no ethical content in-and-of themselves and are just as vulnerable to the approaches of ideologues of whatever stripe. It is in this sense that I am very concerned that our culture is losing (has lost) it's moral bearing. Those institutions, such as the Christian Church, which should always be the custodians of those moral standards, seem to often to be just as adrift as the society they are embedded in.

The churches have, too many of them, bought into the anti-government, profit-is-all philosophy of the Chicago School of Economics and turned it into a dogma rather than standing as a constant critic of the current order.