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David Bodanis on The Ten Commandments
11.30am, Sunday 11 July 2010
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London Everyone’s heard of them. Most of us would be hard pushed to name all of them. What relevance can this ancient code of conduct possibly have to modern life?
David Bodanis, one of the few people who genuinely deserves the title "Renaissance man", argues they underpin the whole of Western history, have shaped our fundamental habits - from sexual guilt to the concept of weekends - and are as relevant today as when they first tumbled down the mountainside.
Their core message is not: ‘”Thou shalt not swear when a hammer has whacked thy thumb”, but of freedom from fear of your possessions being taken; freedom from relentless work; freedom from chaos.
To create an assembly kit for a new civilization, in just ten simple steps, would seem hard enough. To have it last for three millennia, and shape the life of half our planet’s population, means we should take them seriously.
David Bodanis is a futurist, historian, scientist, business advisor and prize-winning author. As an Oxford academic he lectured on geopolitical trends: in industry he was part of Shell’s renowned Scenario Unit, looking at the likely impact of technology on economic and social development. David advises companies and government agencies from BMW to Microsoft and the People's Republic of China. He has also worked with the Director of the World Economic Forum on designing the programme for Davos. His books include Electric Universe, the bestselling E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, (which has been translated into 26 languages) and most recently, Passionate Minds. Read his column in The Observer Magazine
here .
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