Harmony

One of the principal reasons why I wrote Radical Prince in 2003 was because I felt it important to explain the philosophy underpinning the various practical activities undertaken by HRH the Prince of Wales covering such areas as the environment, agriculture, health, education, the arts and architecture, town planning, heritage, regeneration, rural communities, interfaith perspectives, education, business, enterprise and young people. Now, in this eloquent and beautifully produced book, the Prince himself – with the help of Ian Skelly and Tony Juniper - has set out his overall philosophy summed up in the title, Harmony. He has very clearly grasped and articulated the key insight that the multifaceted crisis of the modern world is in fact a crisis of perception, a crisis embedded in the very nature of the worldview that has proved so dynamic over the last 300 years, but which has now overreached itself in a massive demonstration of what the Greeks would call hubris. Hence the Prince calls for a Sustainability Revolution to restore the balance not only of the Earth but also within the human being. Solutions to our challenges, he rightly observes, need to be deeply rooted in sound perennial principles if they are to be effective in the long-term. More to the point, 'we cannot solve the problems of the 21st century with the worldview of the 20th century.'

This means understanding what the Prince calls the 'grammar of harmony' embodied in sacred geometry and hence in sacred art and architecture in both Islamic and Christian buildings. These same proportions and processes are to be found in Nature as well, and there is an extraordinary illustration of the orbits of Venus corresponding to the geometry of a six pointed star. It is easy to see how this all hangs together, as well as the serious implications of ignoring these principles. Traditional cultures also understood that they lived within and depended upon the web of life; they did not feel themselves to be separate from or superior to Nature. The diversity of Nature is rooted in wholeness, and if we ignore our intrinsic interconnectedness, then systems begin to unravel.

The chapter on Nature looks at the various systems under threat, some of which are associated with climate change such as forests and ice melt. It also analyses various major human impacts such as species extinction, overfishing, birds like albatrosses dying from ingesting plastic debris, land degradation and even the devastating effects of seed company practices on Indian farmers, where 100,000 of them have committed suicide in the last 10 years because they could not see how they could repay their debts. The wider relationship between economics and ecological systems is also considered, along with the need for more adequate measurements of human well-being than GDP. Liquidating the world's natural assets in pursuit of progress and economic growth is unsustainable, as is the growing size of the human population and its impact through consumption. The Prince quotes Gregory Bateson who pointed out that 'the major problems in the world are the results of the difference between the way Nature works and the way man thinks.'

The chapter entitled The Golden Thread explains the origin and practice of sacred geometry. Nature's patterns are the patterns of life. In his examination of the grammar of harmony, the Prince goes back as far as the Egyptians with their emphasis on law and universal order, then explains the philosophy of Pythagoras, Plato and the Stoics, the symbolism of Islamic carpets and gardens, the geometry of mediaeval cathedrals and even the proportions of flowers. These all correspond to certain geometric ratios and other universal principles such as the Fibonacci sequence. As already mentioned, even the movements of the planets exhibit this geometry, as do the proportions of those Stradivarius violin. The Muslim empire carried many of these ideas forward, and it is staggering to read that there were 36 libraries in Baghdad by the middle of the 13th century. Cordova had a huge influence, with 400,000 volumes in its great library at the beginning of the 11th century. Gerbert, who became the first French Pope, was strongly influenced by Muslim culture, and it was one of his pupils, Fulbert, who founded the school of Chartres. Hermetic and Platonic principles came once again to the fore in the Florentine Renaissance, and Ficino's work influenced John Dee and the Elizabethan court. The Prince has always made great emphasis on the effect of architecture, both positive and negative, a theme which is fully explored in this book.

The emergence of what the Prince calls The Age of Disconnection originates in three main trends: the changes in human perception caused by the scientific revolution in the 17th century, the impact of the 18th century Industrial Revolution and the more deliberate 'demolition job' on traditional culture by 20th-century modernism. The book explores these three trends in detail, pointing to a crucial shift away from the idea of participation in the 'being' of things, which resulted in God thought of as separate from Creation and humanity as separate from nature. Much of this is crystallised in the mechanistic metaphor, which has dominated scientific thinking in the last 300 years. This thinking, allied to the process of industrialisation, has led to a purely utilitarian and depersonalised way of thinking with an emphasis on efficiency and economies of scale. The way we treat animals and poultry in feedlots is for the Prince the ultimate analogy of what is wrong with this way of thinking. He is careful to emphasise that he is not against technology per se, but rather the inhumanity that can arise unthinkingly from it. Modernism, particularly as applied in architecture, has been a central preoccupation of the Prince for many years and represents the mindset that has brought about an impoverishment of the human spirit. In this connection, the Prince calls for the restoration of a spiritual perspective on life, the rebirth of human vision and imagination - work which he has already been pursuing with the Temenos Academy.

The last three chapters, Renaissance, Foundations and Relationship give practical examples of new initiatives that are already making a difference to our quality of life. These include new forms of farming, including Highgrove itself, projects to preserve rare breeds and traditional varieties of apple, Permaculture in the Amazon, and an extraordinary regeneration project in the Loess plateau in China. These all exemplify the principle of working in harmony with nature and question the assumption that we need biotechnology to feed the planet. The food system as currently constituted is clearly not fit for purpose, and part of the new agenda has to include the kind of restoration projects highlighted here. There are also promising developments in health, town planning (here the Poundbury housing project is explained) and community cohesion. We can also learn from Nature through by mimicry as a further way of building more harmonious relationships with the rhythms and cycles of the planet's life-support systems. The Prince gives some details of his Accounting for Sustainability and Rainforest Project as well as other initiatives like the School of Traditional Arts, where students are able to study the principles of sacred geometry.

The final chapter on relationship restates the thesis, pointing out that a crisis is also an opportunity. The Prince argues that in order to restore balance in the world, we must also find balance in ourselves, which means a balance between rational and intuitive faculties, between thoughts and feelings, between wisdom and technical know-how. Some traditional cultures have not lost their intuitive connection to Nature, as was demonstrated when many of them knew in advance that the 2004 tsunami was coming - animals such as elephants also knew and took evasive action. We need this renewed 'knowledge with relationship' rather than the industrial 'knowledge about relationship.' There is already a groundswell in favour of these ideas, even if power and money still reside within the current system. The Prince's bold manifesto is a clarion call for a new and necessary outlook, and he gives it a special coherence with his focus on the grammar of harmony. A powerful feature of the book is the many illustrations and diagrams that enrich the text and drive home the points, sometimes uncomfortably with pictures of waste dumps and poultry factories, while others depict the beauty of cathedrals and mosques, and indeed of Nature. We cannot create a new world without a new philosophy, since patterns of thinking precede their manifestation in outer forms. The book is both an urgent and dire warning of the unsustainability of our current practices as well as a beacon of hope for a different kind of future.