Humanity has always faced threats to its wellbeing and happiness, with pestilence, war and hunger the major causes of fear for most of mankind’s history - but for those of us lucky to live in the relatively affluent western world, these very basic fears have been removed.

Pestilence has been partially reduced to the diseases of old age, heart attacks and cancer, which many of our forebears did not live long enough to die from.

War, for most of us under 55 years of age, has become a TV event, other people’s problems that a very small number of our defence forces have been sent in to sort out.

Hunger is solved by ambling along the supermarket aisles and not by being expert with the spear.

What has helped to create this relative security from the major threats to life in early adulthood?

Our understanding of medical science has started to control pestilence. The effect of science and technology developed by the western world has made war such a fearsome and all inclusive threat, killing men women and children indiscriminately. Most western countries are too afraid to do more than posture and threaten; they cannot risk being wiped out if the new-age war was to happen. Advanced food and animal production sciences have fed us in abundance, and we are no longer so reliant on the vagaries of soils and the weather.

So why don’t we think we have achieved Nirvana?

Out of our relative security have come other problems, of which we have very little under-standing and even less ability to control. We have a society where we fear for our personal safety and that of our children, where it appears that some of the greatest threats come from our friends and relatives, not our enemies. Many of our young people are lost, evincing a listlessness and boredom that diverts them from seizing life’s great and wonderful opportunities. Many young men have a culture of making little effort to succeed, even at high school in comparison with young women. Young people commit suicide at a frightening rate.

In the past, the solutions to most of our problems have been linked to the rise of science and its rigorous methods and the associated spin-off technology such as better communications, health, hygiene in the home etc. The past century has been a wonderland of discovery and understanding of the basic biology of life and the basic structure of matter. This held in front of us the lure that we might be able to cure all illnesses and live forever. But now, we are finding that scientific progress may have outstripped humankind’s capacity to keep up with change.

I would argue that what we need is a science of society. Psychology, sociology and educational theory have made a big contribution, but this is a much more difficult task than the other achievements of mankind.

In this issue we highlight some of the research projects coming from our humanities and social sciences. Many believe that the humanities and social sciences have little to tell us about the real world. Not so - they are the people of the future. What they need is the rigour of scientific method to be applied to their problems so that, as in the sciences, they can predict the future. At present most sociologists, educationalists and psychologists can only theorise about what has already happened. Without a new view of these areas, real progress cannot be made.

They need to interact with the ‘hard’ sciences to realise the full power and potential of the scientific method. They need mathematicians to assist them in modelling the complex interactions between people and within each person.

I believe the 21st century will become the era when the social sciences and humanities take a great step forward. In the same way that government and industry support the ‘hard’ sciences because they can deliver, the ‘human sciences’ will be strongly supported if they demonstrate that they really can answer the questions we face.

This admittedly is a simplistic view of the world, but if it serves to make the humanities and social sciences think further about where they might achieve as ‘human sciences of society’, and to awaken the general community to what these areas have to offer, that is a significant step forward.

And that is their challenge.