The seeds of enlightenment
I argued last week that an aspect of the 21 century enlightenment project might be to escape the cage of individualism; not to reject the powerful idea of individual rights and freedoms but to address the way we systematically exaggerate our own agency at the expense of recognising social agency (a contrast between personal optimism and social pessimism is a consistent finding of opinion polls).
If we are to overcome this dichotomy it will be in organisations. It is at work, in clubs, charities and community groups – not at the distant level of national society – that we connect to the idea of collective action. Which is why organisational reform and institutional renewal is an important dimension of 21CE. It is why I argue that the reform of the RSA, and particularly the way we think about and resource Fellowship, is not just a means of social progress but exemplifies the kind of progress we need.
With this in mind I was incredibly heartened by a recent visit to Scotland at which I met the Scottish Committee and a wider group of FRSA. Scotland introduced a small social enterprise seed fund a year or so ago and it has made a huge impact on the way the RSA thinks and talks about itself. Bureaucracy is kept to a minimum and there is little enthusiasm for wrangling with head office, instead the focus is outwards, celebrating the impact those small grants are making to the charitable innovations of Scottish Fellows and exploring what kind of new ideas the Society might back next.
Following discussion with Trustees and the Fellowship Council, in a couple of weeks we are launching a RSA wide version of a seed fund. I am hoping it can have a similarly inspirational effect on other parts of the Society.
Although there seems to be no shortage of good ideas in Scotland, I am always on the look out for the kind of ideas I would love to hear Fellows developing. This morning – speaking at the South West Observatory in Bath – I heard a great example.
Tom Schuller, co-author of the recently published NIACE Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, was talking about the role that learning can play in improving life for older people. Tom cited a residential home in Cardiff whose manager had decided to be more ambitious than sitting people in front of a television screen all day. The informal curriculum that was introduced included an 83 year old woman learning Welsh from a man sixty years her junior, a 79 year old finding out how to use Skype to get in contact with relatives and a group that took up arts and crafts. The outcomes were stunning. As well, predictably, as higher reported well-being, the use of drugs declined by a half and incontinence pads by two thirds and a resident who had never once before uttered a word asked his neighbour at the painting table what she thought of his plant pot design. And staff turnover also declined significantly.
This was a single case and Tom admitted that there wasn’t enough evidence to know whether the impact could be replicated. It would be fantastic if RSA Fellwos backed by HQ developed expertise in the designing and delivering learning and so transformed the too often deplorable quality of much long term care.
The amount of money and staff support we have set aside for the seed fund is relatively modest at this stage. We simply don’t know what the level of take up will be. But I am crossing my fingers that the problem we are facing in a few weeks will be how to respond to all the brilliant ideas Fellows are developing. This way when it comes to 21st century enlightenment we can truly say we are walking the talk.
How EasyJet has damaged human relations
This is something on which I have posted before. I think it was an idea I got first from someone else. Easy Jet has helped transform the consumer market place for air travel. Its approach has brought flying within reach of millions more people and it has forced other airlines to be more competitive. As the internet makes price comparisons ever easier, any consumer sector that is charging more than it needs to for its basic services faces the threat of a cheaper entrant stealing a major market share. This is the good news. The bad is this: no frills, low margin models encourage businesses to explore other ways of making money from their customers. This is where all the hidden extras come in.
Every customer is seen as someone who can and should be pushed into paying for additional things above the basic offer. This is fine when we are talking about add-on luxuries that people choose to buy. The problem comes when the goal is to exploit customers’ vulnerability to make a fast buck.
I had an example of this on Saturday when I rented a van. As I only had my plastic European driver’s licence and not the full paper version, the company said they had to ring DVLA to check my details. The phone was on speaker, so when we got through I could hear a recorded message saying that the call cost 49 pence per minute on land lines. When the ‘phone was answered the call lasted about 90 seconds. But the charge made to me for the call was £6.49.
I hear every day similar experiences of trapped customers being fleeced when they need some assistance or make a mistake (like going slightly overdrawn for a few days). Another example is the incredible pressure put on people buying electrical goods to buy overpriced extended warranties. In the end this is simply shifting profit from one activity – the basic service – to another – the add-ons and hidden charges. If you are a canny consumer you can probably avoid most of these ways to make you pay above the minimum. But isn’t the overall effect on society malign?
I didn’t get angry with the car hire man on Saturday; what was the point? But I felt resentful and he probably gets lost of aggro from people wondering why they have to pay a mark up of 600% plus on a one minute phone call. So, instead of the relationship between vendor and customer being one which is flexible and friendly and where the idea of ‘service’ means something, instead it is brittle and hostile. I guess this is just the way of the world. And I don’t suppose anyone wants to abandon the benefits of competitive markets, but something is lost in society when those who work in the service sector are encouraged to see customers not as people to please and help but as potential suckers to be exploited.
21st century enlightenment – stalled?
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. When I announced ten days ago that I would use my blog to explore the idea of a 21st century enlightenment, some readers said I wasn’t being realistic. Since then I have only managed two further posts – making last week my least productive week in nearly three years.
The problem is that the way thinking develops around a particular intellectual challenge tends to be incremental. So, having done a bit more reading and thinking, I would now change some of what I wrote last week. But a blog post which slightly amends something written a few days earlier isn’t very interesting to readers. I will try to stick to my commitment to write regularly about the 21CE project but I will have to rely on the goodwill and patience of my readers.
Before moving on to a different topic entirely here are the ideas about the 21CE I am currently mulling over. Is it true to say that one of the differences between the original enlightenment and a modern equivalent concerns how we analyse the way the world works? Enlightenment thinkers tended to believe that if we could break down all systems – natural, social, psychological – to their constituent parts and understand these, we would be able to describe the whole system and predict change within it. We tend now to recognise, on the one hand, the importance of how systems as a whole work and, on the other, the irreducible complexity of those systems. I have to admit that, being a rather linear thinker, I have tended in the past to be suspicious of people who talk about systems and complexity, as it can sometimes sound like almost mystical mumbo jumbo. The question is not about abandoning mechanical models for system ones or the pursuit of cause and effect for the celebration of complexity, but about understanding how these two different models of change can be reconciled.
I need some help with this thought. Is it true and what I should read (preferably short) that will help me think about how I should include it in my narrative?
Me, my team, God and the enlightenment
I am writing as I juggle with a dilemma – do I listen to Radio 5 and keep up to date with West Brom’s crucial game with Coventry or listen to the first part of my Radio 4 series on the evolutionary and neurological foundations of religious belief. Maybe I’ll do what I hope some of my readers might do, and listen to the programme on iplayer.
There is a link between the programme and the fantastic discussion taking place in response to the posts about 21st century enlightenment. I will write a fuller post responding to some of these points tomorrow, but a point raised in a couple of comments is that I should be aware of threats to the principles of the original enlightenment, particularly in the form of religiously based attacks on secularism and science.
As a non-believer, making the programme challenged any tendencies I had towards simplistic antipathy towards religion. The key points I took from the research and interviews were:
- We appear to have an innate predisposition towards supernatural belief, with the most interesting explanations lying in how young children’s thinking about themselves and the world develops.
- In relation to the debate between adaptationists – who think religion played an important evolutionary role – and advocates of by-product theory – who say that religious belief is merely an accidental consequences of other aspects of our development, I tend to favour the former.
- I found it interesting that most of those people who report having vivid religious experiences are (otherwise) perfectly rational, and they seem to live more effective and fulfilled lives after the experience.
Since I haven’t heard the final version of the programmes it will be interesting to see whether these points feature in the final cut.
It would be great if you listened and told me what you think
21st century enlightenment – the work begins
Thanks again to all those who gave me comments, encouragement and suggested reading for the 21st century enlightenment (21ce) project. I am starting to realise how daunting this is going to be. Not only will it require me to carve out more of my time (so I’ll be rejecting even more kind speech requests), but I will need to try to write posts which show development in my thinking while also, as far as possible, make sense as individual posts (I can’t expect new readers to go back over all the previous material).
Having glimpsed the enlightenment from various perspectives (Kant, Foucault, Todorov, Dan Hind) I have quickly come to the conclusion that any attempt crudely to superimpose a 21st century construct on that of the 18th century would be pointless. Not only is this because the ‘original’ enlightenment has so many different, often cross cutting, currents, but also because there isn’t – as far as I can see – any reason, beyond a preference for symmetry, to argue that we should seek to replicate particular structural characteristics of the past.
So even if we agree with Todorov that the enlightenment had three foundational ideas – autonomy, ‘the human end of our acts’ and universality – this wouldn’t mean that a 21st century movement should also have three core principles.
The value of appreciating the enlightenment that was underway when the RSA was established is exemplary rather than instructional. The enlightenment is a powerful example of how a set of ideas can contribute to epochal change in human affairs, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us how we might engineer another such moment. It can inspire us, it may warn us, but it need not constrain us.
The most powerful continuity I can see concerns some of the questions that lay behind enlightenment thought:
- If we observe and analyse – rather than simply believe – what do we learn?
- What is this moment in time (which is just a moment a time)?
- Given the potential for progress, what is holding us back?
- Intellectually and politically how do the answers to these questions coalesce into an historical project?
To keep the debate going I offer a first take on one of these questions: What are the aspects of life today that advocates of a 21ce might see as holding back human potential? Here are three:
- An acceptance of mindless progress. In other words, the idea that social progress is the same as economic growth and progress for individuals is about more people owning more stuff
- The denial of social rights. How can we be happy with our species when so many of our fellow citizens lack the basic conditions for autonomy and the opportunity to fulfil their potential?
- The cage of individualism. Just as enlightenment thinkers could believe in God while questioning religious authority, the 21CE believes in individual rights while rejecting the ideology of individualism including the idea that human agency is primarily individual.
I would be extremely surprised to end up thinking these are the right barriers for peaceful contemporary revolutionaries to be tearing down (or that I am describing them in the best language) but hopefully it will inspire some further interesting responses.
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