Atwater library
1200 Atwater Ave.
(Get directions)
Sunday, January 29
2H00 PM

‘Geopolitics was the cause of the two world wars, and I think we need to move to the common aims of mankind.’
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
President of the Schiller Institute

We are only three weeks into the New Year and already the world stage is very different.

On Jan 10th, the official launching of the 750 km rail line linking the Red Sea port city of Djibouti to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, took place, reducing travel time from three days to 12 hours. This project is a stepping stone for a trans-continental African rail which will break the continent free of the effects of hunger and under-development for all time.

On Jan 18th, the longest train route was successfully completed from Yiwu, China to London, UK. Dignitaries from both countries were there to witness the arrival of the train in London. The East Wind train having travelled 12, 000 km over 16 days, also passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France. So far, the China Railway corporation has begun rail services to 14 European cities pulling them into a new dynamic of Eurasian cooperation and future orientation along the New Silk Road.

On Jan 20th the inauguration of the next American President took place, who appears thus far to desire a collaborative relationship with Russia and China, the latter two having already formed a close bond in economic affairs.

This new world stage appears to be one of interconnectivity and mutual development, that has commenced with China’s New Silk Road, not as a regional but rather a global process where we all suddenly find ourselves as neighbours. So what will be the course of our future path from these passing three weeks into the coming year?

It is in art and culture where we find our better selves. As Shelley famously put it, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It is through art that we are most uplifted into optimism of possibility and given an imagination of how things could be. It is through art that truths about ourselves are mirrored, truths that may have been wholly unrecognized beforehand. It is through a rich culture that we are able to live poetry on a daily basis. It is through understanding the culture of another that we can then look into their soul.

This Sunday, Jan 29th scholar, historian and musician Fred Haight will present a lecture on the universality of classical music as a mode of creative thought which finds resonance and expression in every culture and across every age and unlike modern “popular” music, walks in harmony with the greatest discoveries in science. Mr. Haight will focus on the misunderstood genius of Johannes Brahms and the attack on Brahms by modernists such as Arnold Schoenberg in the 20th century.

While the world is growing larger, it is also with an increased ability for regions once long separated to now finally connect, bringing us closer to the once distant corners of the Earth. We must therefore not only contemplate where we should be in the next year but where we will be across generations into the future, and what sort of culture should we uphold in order to succeed in this vision of a future.

"The dimension which must come to this dialogue of cultures, or dialogue of civilizations is a look into the future. Not only back to the best traditions, but a look to where mankind should be in 100 years, in 1,000 years from now…We are in that period of a real epochal change; a New Paradigm, where I am absolutely certain mankind is about to become adult." -Helga Zepp-LaRouche