AGE OF DISCOVERY:

This highly original cultural and intellectual history argues that our contemporary world is facing many of the same challenges that were characteristic of the European Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries. A particularly fascinating detail is that, although published in 2016, it assesses the risks and problems of pandemics with relation to SARS, Ebola and AIDS. Leonardo da Vinci, the polymath who embodied many Renaissance ideals, wrote that the newly discovered science of perspective was the key to all artistic achievement, and the authors apply this in a much broader sense: "Businesspeople need perspective to cut through the chaos of 24/7 news and information to make capable decisions." The authors quote Machiavelli: "Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past", comparing Columbus's discovery of America with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the invention of the printing press with the internet. Copernicus and Gutenberg and others redrew the world. Revolutions in health and economics are a source of human capital which provide the conditions for genius to blossom in response to technological challenge, but at the same time, systemic risk comes from wars, the spread of disease, extremism, protectionism and xenophobia. Humans are "tiny pawns in a play which we did not write", to quote James Watson, discoverer of DNA, and our world today has to fight new ethical battles such as the use of the world's resources and the inequalities of global finance. 304pp, drawings, diagrams and reproductions.