This is rethink the edge of change here on the BBC World Service.

I'm Amol Rajan.

Hello, in a dim and distant era back in, say, January of this year, it was already often argued that we were

living through one of history's hinge moments, a period of vast, fast and epochal change. A populace ties seemed to be sweeping the whole globe.

Climate change was already causing devastation. And after half a millennium in which

the West ruled the world, the locus of global power seemed to be shifting east.

At the same time, digital technology pioneered by five Californian tech giants in particular

had created the biggest asymmetry of

knowledge, wealth and information the world has ever seen. They called it

the Great Acceleration. And then COVID-19 happened.

Suddenly, the deep cracks in our ways of life have been exposed and widened.

A virus which briefly united the world is now feeding off divisions within it. This is, above all, a global

moment, the edge of change, if you like. The pathogen in amits has had very different

effects in different places, revealing the immense strengths and chronic weaknesses

of whole countries, regions, systems, and ideologies.

Something like a new era, the post-pandemic world is struggling to be born.

We might be on the brink of extraordinary change, but to what exactly? That's what this project of which this program is just a part wants to find out.

We're calling it Rethink.

All the prevailing orthodoxies of our time seem suddenly contested.

What happens next is kind of up to us.

In fact, it's up to you.

How should we live, love, work, travel, talk, prevent disease and promote human flourishing,

...