The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is re-branding itself. At least that was what it felt like at an event in Manchester listening to and discussing a streamed lecture from Mathew Taylor entitled ’21st Century Enlightenment’. The lecture title – subsequently published as a 38 page essay – is actually a new ‘strapline’ for the RSA. The question for the lecture and the essay is ‘what key ideas from the enlightenmnent could be usefully adopted as a conceptual framework to respond to some of the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century?’ Pertinent not only for those fellows of the RSA who are tasked with finding ‘innovative practical solutions to the most pressing social issues affecting our communities today’, but also within the context of the ConDem’s notion of the ‘Big Society’.
Could it be that the RSA is contibuting to a certain zeitgeist coalescing around some fashionable reading of late: Nudge, Connected, Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point … ? The “Yes, We Can” optimistic ethos evident in these books is, however, pretty low on overarching theory. There’s a need for a more all-encompasing rationale and plot for the story of “where do we go from here and why” to sustain the myriad projects and inniatives garnering interest and receiving (ever-dwindling) funding. Unsurprisingly for an institution founded in the 18th century, the RSA’s response lies in the Englightenment – but the Enlightenment cherry picked for its more positive, project-enhancing ideas and linked to emerging ideas on behavioural economics and neuroscience.
The source for much of this re-purposing of Enlightenment thinking comes from Tzvetlan Todorov’s recent book In Defence of the Enlightenment, the first chapter of which he reads in the following lecture he gave at the RSA in December, 2009.
Todorov writes clearly, succinctly and persuasively. However, there is something slightly alarming about the desire to harness an intellectual ‘movement’ (however disparate and internally debated), which flourished in the 18th century, as a guide to our emergence from present ills and difficulties. But this is exactly Todorov’s wish:
what we need today is to re-establish Englightenment thinking in a way that preserves the past heritage while subjecting it to a critical examination, lucidly asserting it in light of its wanted and unwanted consequences … it is through criticism that we remain faithful [to the Englightenment project] and put its teaching into practice.
Todorov’s discussion of that project in the book is nuanced and qualified but not immune to challenge. He examines the claim that Englightenment thinking led directly to colonialism in the 19th and totalitarianism (Fascist, Nazi and Communist) in the 20th and argues that ‘the politics of colonisation were camouflaged behind Enlightenment ideals, but in reality they were driven by straightforward national interests’ (31). But there’s nothing straightforward about ‘national interests’ which were defined by a set of ideas about the free circulation of goods, individual and collective sovereignty together with an understanding of the aims of human action – all of which originated in the Enlightenment. To say that Bush and Blair’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were camouflaged around a Judeo-Christian discourse of Good versus Evil but driven by national interests tells us very little. National interests and world-view are interrelated in complex ways. Without the world-view, the decision to invade might never have happened. There were easier ways, surely, to frame and promote ‘national interests’.
Similarly, the idea that the Englightenment project embodies an understanding of linear progress, Todorov argues is a distortion. Instead of linear progress what the Enlightenment philosophes were really arguing for (at least Rousseau) was the perfectability of the autonomous individual: we are capable of improving ourselves and our world. Whilst profoundly reassuring and trivially correct (through dedication, discipline and practice I could play a Bach cantata on the piano) it also flies in the face of much thinking from Darwin on. Steve Jones reminds us in his review of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist,
Darwin insisted that there was no intrinsic direction to evolution, and modern biology shows that he was right.
Freedom in Darwin’s world is very different to freedom in Rousseau’s. The ‘Big Issues’ (climate change, sustainability, growth itself) that an Enlightenment lense may throw light on can in no way be ‘solved’: there can be ultimately neither optimist nor pessimist.
So what then of the three pillars of Englightenment thinking (I’m avoiding the temptation to call them the ‘Holy Trinity’) suggested by Todorov as enabling a reinvigorated practical project of humanism (and a carion call for the RSA) in the 21st century? The autonomy of individuals; universalism; and the human end purpose of our acts are all ideas that were at the core of the Enlightenment project. Here are some unworked-through notes:
On the autonomy of individuals. According to Zengotita in his book Mediated (deserving of a separate post) in an age of relentless and ubiquitous representation, where representation is replacing reality, the individual is reflexively autonomous in ways our grandparents could not even imagine. Of course there has always been representation, even in the 18th century. The difference now, according to Zengotita, is that we are aware of it as never before. We know all about mediation and choices. We also know that our life is a performance, that we can construct any identity or persona we want for ourselves, attach ourselves to any cause, and become a brand in the marketplace of personality. We know it and we willingly play along. This is an autonomy then that wallows in celebration to the flattered self. It’s not the individual that Rousseau, Condorcet, or Kant would recognise. If we are all our own Gods, then salvation is guaranteed; if happiness is a lifestyle choice then lets just keep on choosing. Of course things are more complicated and fewer people than ever claim to be happy. But the point is that the nature of the experience of being an autonomous individual is so different from that on which the Enlightenment thinkers predicated their theories. We haven’t just emerged from a dark age. We are living mediatised lives. Can we really claim the kind of autonomy suggested by such thinkers?
On universalism – the idea is that people as people deserve dignity and share fundamental rights. There are a couple of problems here for me. The first is its anthropocentricity – it’s all about humans, and certain kinds of humans – those capable of rational thought. So, the idea of a social contract – the Rawlsian one which is used to establish those principles that lead to a fair society – is premised on the exclusion of all those who are weaker than the proto-individual: the insane, children and animals. This seems to me to be one of those unintended consequences of the principle of universalism that emerged in the Englightenment: it’s not universal enough!
The human end purpose. Of course I get up in the morning thinking that today is going to be a good day. I also, probably, consider that today will be a better day than yesterday. I give a lecture believing I can give it better than I did the last time. But I don’t kid myself that there is some intrinsic, meaning-making sense in the idea that such betterings are progress. With progress tied to linear time there is always an end at which every progress that was thought to have been made is lost. The ongoing lectures can only be betterments, not progress. And the end purpose? The end purpose can’t be happiness or it’s modern equivalent, ‘well-being’: happiness is not a feeling to be attained but a way of being, at least for today.
And the thornier question of whether there is an end purpose at all? The self-deception that life has meaning has been dealt with by religions for a long time. And it’s a comforting thought which we are all susceptible to, especially when times are hard, confusing or both. The problem with the defence of the Englightenment, taken up by both Todorov and the RSA is, I think this. It’s a comforting idea to think that what we do has a meaning, it makes it easier to make decisions, to go on, to get up thinking that today will be just a little bit better because it leads to something. But like religion, isn’t this form of Enlightenment another superstition – sometimes useful and sometimes the reason for untold horror – but a superstition just too uncomfortable to deny?