Dreams and jeopardy. It’s an intriguing theme for a festival, but wholly in keeping with the ambitious and boundary-hopping spirit of HowTheLightGetsIn, which will be welcoming guests to sample its smorgasbord of big ideas in early June this year. In part, it’s an acknowledgement of a historical moment: the summer of 2022. Things are starting to move again, the future is once more opening up, and yet, as the organisers put it, “we are faced once more with some of the world’s biggest questions, and are asking the world’s leading thinkers to help us solve them.”
Held on the banks of the River Wye, the festival attracting the kinds of people who want to engage with philosophical questions, outside of the ivory tower of academia. As its founder Hilary Lawson told us in a recent interview, the festival aims to encourage debate between disciplines, and “change the way people think about what philosophy is.”
Speakers this year include Nobel-prize winning physicist Roger Penrose, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Andrea Elliott, best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari and trailblazing physicist and author Lisa Randall. The idea is to bring international philosophers at the top of their fields together with influential politicians, scientists and cultural figures. As philosophy partners of the festival, we’re delighted to also see a fair few New Humanist contributors in the lineup, including the writer and theoretician of desire Katherine Angel, philosopher Massimo Puggluci, journalist and feminist Minna Salami, and legendary biologist and honorary associate of the Rationalist Assocation, Richard Dawkins.
Meanwhile, New Humanist Editor Samira Shackle will be chairing a debate on “Necessity and Lies”, with the founder of the festival and philosopher Hilary Lawson, scientist Simon Baron-Cohen and alt-left thinker Rebecca Roache. Should we recognise that lying can be valuable, and sometimes necessary, for ourselves and those in power? Or is honesty not only essential in public life but vital in all aspects of our everyday life as well?
It’s the Jubilee Bank Holiday, and part of bringing the big ideas down to earth is to unwind and have some fun - hence the inclusion of comedy, art and music. It's why the festival bills itself as a "playground of the soul". The London Afrobeat Collective will be there, along with sequin-clad satirical performers Bourgeois and Maurice, “Essex Arab Girl Comedian” Esther Manito, and Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay on the decks - just some of the 450 speakers and performers, on 12 stages over the festival's four days. You can see the full programme here, including events for children and young adults. As Socrates said, philosophy begins in wonder, and who is more awestruck than the young?
Started in a chapel, with a small attendance, in 2018, HowTheLightGetsIn has been something of an unexpected success. Yet why should it be a surprise that people want to engage in the fundamental questions around their own existence. We're all human, after all, and life is a wonderful, puzzling thing. After the inevitable hiatus of the pandemic, it feels right to come together to challenge and enrich our ideas about the world, to learn to dream again, while sounding a note of caution around the need for care and reflection: the "jeopardy" of this year's theme.
We hope to see you there, in Hay-on-Wye, on 2-5 June. New Humanist readers get a 20 per cent discount, with the promo code NEWHUMANIST20. Otherwise, for those who can’t attend in person, the festival will be streamed online.
See here for tickets to the event.
For those of you who can't be with us in person, the festival will also be streaming online during the 2nd-5th June. Click here for more information and to purchase online tickets to watch the festival livestream. Additionally, all the debates and talks from the festival will be gradually released online in the months following the festival on the Institute of Art and Ideas online platform, IAI.TV.
