Hail the 21st-century Enlightenment. Ideas don't come much bigger
We need to live very differently, argues a bold new text. And that calls for nothing less than a revolution of the mind
o Madeleine Bunting
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 June 2010 21.00 BST
We've had months of discussion (and confusion) about the Big Society, years of entertainment from Big Brother, so perhaps it's only timely that this week will see the launch of some Big Ideas. It makes a change to lift eyes from the detail of coalition agreements or the chances in the World Cup and take on board an analysis of the grand sweep of human history, new scientific insights into human nature, and how we can ensure our survival. This is the territory explored in a pamphlet calling for a "21st-century Enlightenment" to be published this week. "Big" in this context clearly cannot be dismissed as a marketing ploy; ideas don't come much bigger.
It's an intriguing set of ideas pulled together by Matthew Taylor (former Downing Street policy adviser to Tony Blair), in part to sketch out what an institution founded in the 18th-century Enlightenment ought to be doing – the answer being to generate the 21st-century Enlightenment, and this is now the new strapline for the Royal Society of Arts. No small ambition here.
Given that any serious thinker with a book to promote usually includes a stop at the RSA, Taylor has a ringside seat on the intellectual preoccupations and insights of our age, and they are liberally scattered through his pamphlet. And he brings his own personal biography to this roaming around science, history, philosophy and psychology; not far below the surface are the anxieties of a postwar generation raised on a form of liberal progressivism that, despite some achievements, has failed to fulfil its promise – politically, economically or in terms of increasing human wellbeing. The questions that underlie Taylor's pamphlet are echoed in the soul-searching around Labour's defeat: what do words such as liberal or progressive mean, and what kind of politics do they require?
Taylor tackles these questions by going back to the Enlightenment legacy. One can understand why – a concept of human progress was perhaps one of the most striking inventions of this dramatic period of intellectual creativity. And "progress in human knowledge and culture" is the slogan emblazoned round the RSA's auditorium. But can we still have faith in an idea of progress when the very inventions and ways of life that were thought would bring it about – market capitalism and individual freedom – are wreaking unprecedented environmental destruction?
There is a deeper problem about anchoring the effort to defend progress in the 18th-century Enlightenment: it lands you squarely in a fraught argument about Eurocentrism. Too often citing the Enlightenment is a precursor to an attack on other systems of thought – such as Islam; too often appeals to an Enlightenment legacy are a code for privileging this European period of intellectual creativity. At its crudest, it can amount to a land grab for civilisational superiority in which the west has brought progress to the world.
Leaving that aside, Taylor picks three key principles of the Enlightenment legacy: the "revolution of the mind" that "has transformed the world in the last 250 years"; the autonomy of the individual and universalism (that all people are deserving of dignity and human rights); and that we should organise the world according to what is best for human beings. All three are as vital as ever, he argues, but now need radical reinterpretation. We need to live very differently, and that requires thinking very differently. What's required is another revolution of the mind, a paradigm shift in human consciousness.
This is where he becomes quietly optimistic. He believes this is possible to achieve – though not easy. The first source of his optimism lies in the research emerging from fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, showing how deeply social our brains are. The perception of us as sovereign individuals, making independent and rational decisions, is a delusion; we are profoundly influenced by those around us, and prey to emotions which we only partly understand.
Just as the scientific insights of the 17th century led to the Enlightenment's profound shifts in the understanding of the individual, and the idea that the social order could and should be changed, so Taylor hopes science can prompt dramatic shifts in self-awareness, in how we understand human behaviour so that we replace individualism with more socially connected relationships of solidarity.
The second source of his optimism relies on heavy borrowing from the recently published The Empathic Civilisation, in which Jeremy Rifkin argued that history is marked by human beings' increasing empathy for others – which can be briefly summarised as from family to tribe to nation. The question is whether our capacity for empathy can expand to the human species, the globe and the biosphere in time to prevent the destruction of the environmental resources on which we depend. Empathy can save us, believes Taylor; it is vital to negotiations on how we share out natural resources, and vital to ensure harmonious co-existence on a crowded planet. But he acknowledges: "There are reasons to ask whether the process of widening human empathy has stalled, and just at the time we need to accelerate it."
Taylor's faith in empathy is widely shared, for example by those campaigning on aid for the developing world. An example often cited of growing empathy is the greater tolerance on race and sexual orientation showing dramatic progress in the course of just one generation. But, as Taylor concedes, over the same time period we have created a media culture of savage contempt for a range of public figures, from celebrities to politicians. Does the stock of empathy increase or simply get redistributed from time to time? More disturbingly, is empathy always benign? As John Gray pointed out in his Guardian review of Rifkin, it can lead to cruelty just as much as compassion. Empathy is not an easy recruit to this march of progress: the plight of others can prompt withdrawal, denial or willed ignorance instead of the impetus for global co-operation.
Finally, the third element essential to the 21st-century Enlightenment is a "reassertion of the fundamentally ethical dimension of humanism", argues Taylor. What kind of human beings we want to be, what kind of society we want, are always ethical questions, he insists. Again, he cites scientific research that shows how deeply rooted ethical understanding is in the human brain. Ethical reasoning and debate need to be resurrected. We need an ethics that challenges the dominant logics of market, bureaucracy, and scientific and technological development. Just because something will sell doesn't mean it should be sold; just because something can be discovered and developed doesn't mean it should be – now so painfully evident in the Gulf of Mexico disaster. It's a powerful, urgent argument.
Does this amount to a credible account of the possibility of future human progress? Although intrigued, I'm sceptical of the claims made for empathy, and anxious that arguments for ethics may fail to gain traction. But no one is going to agree with all of this thesis – and no one would disagree that it is entirely in the tradition of Enlightenment, provoking conversation, debate and disagreement out of which insight can be developed and the stock of human understanding enriched.
Hail the 21st-century Enlightenment. Ideas don't come much bigger | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian
Hail the 21st-century Enlightenment. Ideas don't come much bigger
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