19 Comments on Twenty first century enlightenment: something to build on?

Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Twitter, India Knight and Chris Huhne: the end of communicative discretion? on Sat, 19th Jun 2010 5:15 pm


[...] listening to each other, of course, and responding with the kind of intellectual empathy that Matthew Taylor talked about in his RSA lecture recently. He suggested that for citizens to create a ’21st century Enlightenment’: [...]

charlie beckett on Sat, 19th Jun 2010 5:27 pm


I know it’s not the Guardian or the Statesman but I refer to your excellent speech in this blog post about India Knight, Chris Huhne and Twitter:
http://www.charliebeckett.org/?p=2960
cheers
Charlie Beckett

carl allen on Sat, 19th Jun 2010 8:26 pm


Master Strategy is a subject of the Lord Executioner

The 21st Enlightenment continues a Work-in-Progress

So do indeed pause to rest and reflect

And wipe the sweat from thy brow

And have that long drink

Before the work begins again.

Indy on Sat, 19th Jun 2010 9:18 pm


Matthew, I was gutted to miss the speech – stuck in the middle of the Netherlands – but I hear from K that it was both an interesting speech and a good performance! I like your breakdown, I may send you some further thoughts on it soon…

Indy.

Ian CHRISTIE on Sun, 20th Jun 2010 10:56 am


Congrats on the lecture and the essay-making process.
I think there is a lot to build on with all arguments. There is a connection to be made between 3, 4 and 5. The Enlightenment undermines older frameworks for coherent ethical argument and prescriptions for action (institutional Christianity, however badly translated into everyday morality) but the expectation of many thinkers that a cool-headed liberal secular rationality could take over – a benign Enlightenment monopoly – has proven unfounded, and in any case failed to appreciate the diversity of the Enlightenment founders and their divisions. The risk is that the plural voices representing distinctive worldviews in post-Enlightenment society become embattled and aggressive in the absence of unifying assumptions, processed and institutions. This is the world of ‘culture wars’. What are the institutions and basic assumptions about process and ethical ends that all can agree on, while finding ways to disagree peacefully about other issues within the law and democratic framework? In Michael Thompson’s terms, have we got enough Clumsy Institutions for ethically-informed debate, and if not, what might they be and how could we develop them? Does the supposed New Localism offer some prospects? I have a modest proposal for an annual House of the Local Commons as a ‘second chamber’ process in local communities… and a couple of local authorities might be keen to try it.

Annalie Killian on Sun, 20th Jun 2010 9:26 pm


Matthew, not only do I love the style with which you write ( relaxed, clever and unstuffy) but your contribution to where we as a society and citizens should be heading in the 21st century is vitally important. I would like to invite you to come and spread this message in Australia as our guest at the AMPLIFY Innovation and Thought Leadership Festival that I produce ( see http://www.amplify.amp.com.au/blogs). I am passing through the UK from 11-17 July on a world research tour to curate this Festival, and was wondering how you miht like to meet up to talk about it? I will be attending the TED Conference in Oxford but if you email me on the address I left here, we can co-ordinate?

Stanley Parker on Mon, 21st Jun 2010 10:19 am


I enjoyed the lecture and the process that produced it, Matthew; well done

The most perceptive of the subsequent comments was the one which drew attention to the need to involve everyone not just Fellows. I have no easy answer to this but I do look forward to a continuation of the discussion

Matthew Kalman on Mon, 21st Jun 2010 12:29 pm


Hi Matthew,

I really enjoyed the lecture. I’m part-way through reading the pamphlet, but thought I’d point out a few bits and bobs.

Re Abraham Maslow – he’s actually a bit more complicated than people give him credit for.

For a start, ‘self-actualisation’ wasn’t the top of his hierarchy. He added ‘Transcendence’ needs as well (and launched the Fourth Force in psychology, ‘Transpersonal Psychology’).

People assume that as a pioneer of ‘Humanistic Psychology’ – and a teacher at the human potential mecca, the Esalen centre – he would be a counter-cultural uber-liberal.

Luckily he wasn’t anything quite that obvious, and was scathing about the counterculture’s self-indulgence, hedonism, impulsivity and anti-rationalism. He hated that Esalen didn’t even have a library, from what I remember….

Interesting too that he was a strong proponent of law and order and the ‘forceful father’ – and was against liberals who cannot see the ‘reality of evil’.

Though he felt we might eventually reach “philosophical anarchism and decentralization”, he didn’t think we’d do it by weakening law and order, family structures et al.

Trying to embed the left/liberal society by undermining authority certainly seems to put us at risk of a ‘broken society’, where impulsivity goes unchallenged.

Did anyone watch ‘Idiocracy’ on Film 4 – the ultimate in a dumbed-down, impulsivity-dominated society….!

Re Kegan, I’m glad you mentioned Kegan’s finding for he OECD re how the majority of people haven’t yet reached the self-authoring, modernist ‘order of consciousness’.

As I’ve said, could the RSA make its task something along the lines of explicitly encouraging – and monitoring – the shift of more people into the modernist mindset (and also into the even more fruitful and effective ‘Self-transforming’ mind that follows it)?

I don’t really know the extent to which policy changes affect these mindsets (eg boosting self-authoring), though presumably Kegan’s ‘Immunity maps’ – the change approach he’s pioneered over the last couple of decades – can help individuals and organisations to embed a permanently higher complexity of meaning-making.

I guess it’s subjective, but I’m not sure Kegan’s first book ‘The Evolving Self’ is his masterwork.

It seems to have 10,000 hits on Google when Kegan’s “In Over Our Heads – The Mental Demands of Modern LIfe” has 282,000. (Using his name too – to avoid muddling with Csikszentmihalyi’s book).

I’d say the latter is his masterwork…

Something else that I feel gets a bit neglected in your account is the extent to which various self-awareness, or spiritual, practices have had success in overcoming our usual automated responses (the elephant).

Presumably long-time ‘Mindfulness’ practitioners develop much more control, real autonomy and overcome some of the usual unconscious automaticity?

Ditto long-time followers of practices like Prof Bill Torbert’s ‘Developmental Action Inquiry’…

Some of these practices have worked for 100s, perhaps 1,000s, of years.

Cheers,

Matt K

Will on Tue, 22nd Jun 2010 1:37 pm


Matthew: on a first listening it was a good speech and I’m going to give the pamphlet a critical read in the near future. At the very least it was a perceptive summation of a great deal of new thinking and I will be interested to see how this evolves into a framework for action. Tangible delivery being, in my view, the only true arbitrator of theory…

Ian Christie – if you read this – where might one find out more about your proposal for a ‘house of local commons’ ? I’m curious.

Will

Katy T on Tue, 22nd Jun 2010 3:00 pm


Enjoyed the lecture too Matthew, your performance was unfaultable. Looking forward to the developments of 21st CE thinking too.

junius on Tue, 22nd Jun 2010 8:55 pm


You would do better, Mr Taylor, by specifying precisely what the 18th century “Enlightenment” you refer to was. Although it contained elements that were benign, “empathetic” and genuinely progressive in furthering social well being, it was also riven by contradictions.

One of the most sustained legacies of the “Enlightenment” (demonstrative of inner contradictions and possible unintended consequences) was the highly centralist, control freak party tradition of Jacobinism. This usurped and destroyed many of the socially “empathetic” contributions of less hubristic Enlightenment thinkers.

The results of the Jacobin party paradigm has been generally disasterous for the subsequent Western “tradition”; informing such centralist forms of party control as Marxism Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism and even the more hubristic expressions of New Labour.

How will the so-called 21st century “Enlightenment” liberate civil society from this malevolent paradigm of party centralism inherited from its 18th century predecessor?

“Empathy” is also not a uniquely “Enlightenment” concept as it dates back at least to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, had expressions with the 17th century diggers and the Quakers. The ancient Greeks also probably had a version of it.

jaelo on Fri, 25th Jun 2010 11:01 pm


You say:

# Our idea of autonomy needs to shift from possessive individualism to something more self aware and socially embedded.

# In pursuing the goals of universalism we need to give more thought to the conditions which give rise to (and diminish) the sentiment which lies behind fellow-feeling: empathy.

Socially embedded autonomy (if I understand what this means) will include groups or what John Gray calls ways of life. You have a bit more to say about how differing ways of life will fit together under a universalism.

Patricia on Sat, 26th Jun 2010 11:33 am


I have now read the pamphlet. It’s amazing to see that a number of pretty nebulous ideas crystallised into something so tangible (‘rich and [not so] strange’… one is tempted to add); indeed, something to build on.

It’s great that the concept of the public sphere figures in the final version. I think that the Habermasian framework has a lot to offer here, perhaps not despite but because of its limitations. In particular, it can serve as a canvas for thinking about the two areas you identified as requiring more work: ethical debates and empathy.

What you find in the Habermasian framework is a robust proposal for structuring ethical discourse. It proposes a model where speakers relationship to the social world can be publically criticised in a debate over the rightness or correctness of social rules. On reflection it is however apparent that this model is so compellingly uncomplicated because it has strong discursive bias. It stipulates sharp distinction between reasoned critique of social norms and claims concerning one’s individual vision of what counts as ‘the good life’. That is to say, self-expression or one’s relationship to his/her inner self can never enter public discourse because it cannot be tested through rational argumentation.

Just like bridging the standards of self- expression and claims referring to the normative social domain is a problem for Habermas, so is explaining what motivates people to enter the public debate. What drives individuals to collaborate in the first place? Something akin to empathy? It does seem that looking at the limitations and indeed, the huge body of criticism of the Habermasian framework, can further your thinking about ethical debate and empathy.

Patricia on Sat, 26th Jun 2010 11:37 am


One more thing…

It is a nice future the Habermasian model of the public sphere that it shares your ambition not to lose sight of the fact that individuals are socially embedded, and their predispositions are to some extent a product of this context. (Albeit, if you want to rephrase Habermas using the elephant rider model, you sort of lose the elephant). It does seem that the insight into how the state bureaucracy drains traditional resources of meaning and threatens community resilience and how the logic of markets fragments associative forms of behaviour and leads to alienation and anomie, should make Habermas your ally in the project of reclaiming the idea of big society for progressive ends and the progressive end of political spectrum.

Matthew Kalman on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 9:14 am


Hi Patricia,

There’s one aspect of Habermas that intrigues me a bit – not least as it relates to Matthew’s focus on the growing findings about the emotional foundation of much of our thinking, decision-making etc.

Basically – from what I remember – Habermas grounds a lot of his thinking (about communication, about the ‘Ideal Speech Situation’ etc) in Lawrence Kohlberg’s findings about the stages of moral development. (From pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional).

But hasn’t Kohlberg’s depiction of rational, deliberative thinking been rather undermined by exactly those emotion-based findings that Matthew has been drawing our attention to?

How must this impact our view of Kohlberg? Of Habermas?

(You’d think I’d have more pressing stuff on my mind than this particular issue! But I would rather like to know the answer, if anyone’s got it…).

Matthew K

PS Great idea to have Habermas as an ally

Patricia on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 10:54 pm


Hi Matthew K,

I think we are in agreement. My position is that Habermas’ proceduralism is undermined by Humean empathy considerations.

In a nutshell, outlining his theory of communicative action Habermas fails to answer what motivates communicative action in the first place, i.e., why it is that people adopt the attitude required for the consensual deliberation to take place. He would like to claim that the structure of communicative action establishes and entails a set of ethically binding norms (a strong interpretation of the ideal speech situation) – however, he overlooks the fact that recognizing others as communicative ‘partners’ already presupposes a certain ethical stance.
It could be that such an initial act of intersubjective recognition is a result of an affective state, rather than a product of a rational persuasion – it is a matter of ‘feeling with’ rather than ‘thinking with’… (This is the interesting bit to build on)

Thus, my suggestion was to look at some criticism of the Habermasian framework which is sensitive to this problem, for instance Seyla Benhabib’s ‘Critique, Norm, and Utopia. A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory’, ‘Situating the Self’, or her superb paper in ‘Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment’ (ed. Alex Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer). She sort of manages the impossible: she defends the framework for deliberative democracy while conceding that Habermas’ presuppositions have to be revised. I thought that Behabib’s ‘correction’ of Habermas is something Matthew T might want to look at. It would be fascinating to bring here a perspective from another discipline Matthew K.

David Gouldby on Fri, 2nd Jul 2010 4:39 pm


Mr Matthew Taylor, thank you very much for summing up what my mind has been meandering towards in the last 10 years.

In the past few months I’ve been almost desperately searching the internet for something to match up with the thought processes I’ve been going through, and your talk summed them up very well.
I’m not naive, so I strictly avoided believing that I was the only one thinking in to this stuff this deeply, yet I was becoming dis-heartened by the significant lack of relevant, easily-accessible material on the internet. I was on the verge of creating my own website to get this message out there, but thankfully I don’t need to do that anymore. (I’m sure it would have failed anyway)

I spend a lot of time thinking in to the psychology and sociology of this type of enlightenment, and how it can be further propagated. I’d also love to hear your opinions of how this type of thinking evolved within your own mind, what pointed you down this path? How can we make pupils in schools aware of these same paths?
One of my previous sources of optimism in the world is the fact that people like myself exist – if I’ve reached these same conclusions, then surely many other people have too, because I’m nothing special!

Your analogy of the changes in attitudes towards homosexuality in the last 20 years is a fantastic analogy that really gives optimism towards the fact that we can change society’s attitudes towards this enlightenment.
However, I’m also worried about the things that can hinder the spread of this message. I’m pretty sure that ‘spiritualism’, ‘mysticism’ and all that other new-age ‘BS’ has set this movement back by ~10-20 years.

I very much detest the word ‘spiritualism’, and yet it’s so often associated with enlightenment. It makes it very hard to find anything relevant through Google searches. Even when searching for specific things like the sociologies and psychologies of it.
Try boosting both the RSA website’s and your blog’s Google rankings for the search keyword ‘enlightenment’

One other thing worth mentioning, which you seemed to strategically side-step, is religion. I’m very anti-theistic and I don’t believe religion can co-exist next to this enlightenment indefinitely. If 18th century enlightenment was the beginning of the end for religion, then I hope that 21st century enlightenment is the end of the end.
What are you opinions towards the social conditioning that we should tolerate and accept religion? I find it very hard to have discussions with religious people as I don’t want to ‘offend’ them, especially in the workplace.

Education seems to be paramount in steering the population in the right direction. I believe we’re now in a race against time to reform the educational system before it’s too late.

On a personal level, I’m slightly concerned how this enlightenment effects the motivation and drive of people in a capitalist world. With the example of myself, there exists a selfless, empathic drive to make the world a better place. This would have been great if these thoughts had come at the peak of my financial career, but they’ve come far earlier. I am no where near where I perhaps might have liked to be at, yet I don’t really care because my happiness is unrelated to this.
I’ve named this condition ‘hippie-syndrome’. How should people aim for financial success, when their happiness doesn’t depend on it at all?
I think you’ve touched upon the solutions with ‘steer’. The methods for steering motivation need to be taught in schools as early as possible. I attended a relatively expensive private school which boasted the fact that it would ‘bring out the potential’ of their students, yet in the last 2-3 years I’ve realised this hasn’t happened at all, my potential has remained repressed. Is this my fault? Or the school’s? Or society’s? Or even all three?!

I’ll certainly be keeping up to date with your blog and the RSA website from now on.
Big long rambling post from a newbie.
David Gouldby

James Taylor on Tue, 6th Jul 2010 12:25 pm


Really enjoyed the pamphlet and have just published a blog post about it http://liberalthought.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/21st-century-enlightenment/

Terry Grundy on Tue, 24th Aug 2010 6:46 pm


Is it just my imagination or has the “21st Century Enlightenment” trope landed with a thud? On the Fellows’ social network website, where much is discussed both serious and frivolous, it’s pretty much a non-topic. In this context (M.T.’s blog) it still pops up from time-to-time but doesn’t seem to be eliciting much excitement, just a bit of mannered intellectual repartee. It’s a pity because the weakening of allegiance to the Program of the Enlightenment may well be the most chillingly dangerous trend of our time. One thing is clear: new fundamentalisms (religious, political and even economic) are popping up everywhere, including in those western lands which were the historic home of the Enlightenment, and these fundamentalisms seem to be increasingly attractive to vigorous young people.

If we stipulate (as I think we must) that most of the scientific, technological, social, and political trends that have made the lives of many people in the world something other than “nasty, brutish and short” can be traced directly back to the developments of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, then we ought to be very worried that the principles enshrined in and promoted by those movements are no longer compelling to young people and, in fact, are under sustained attack in many countries.

Imagine, if you can, a society which does not place the highest value on humane education, reasoned debate, the careful application of the scientific method, restrained government, and an understanding of the reciprocity of individual rights and responsibilities. That would be, would it not, an “Un-Enlightened” society.

Sadly, these very values are being undermined and even directly assailed in many places, including in Western Europe and North America, and if enough of the underpinnings can be knocked down the whole edifice is undermined. We might be very surprised at how quickly all the life-enobling achievments of the Enlightenment could be lost.

For these and other reasons, I suggest we make “21st Century Enlightenment” the principal work of the RSA, not just a tag-line and subject for occasional semi-scholarly debate. We ought to be doing everything in our power to inculcate in the brightest and most vigorous young people we can find an understanding of the Enlightenment and its principles and a dedication to its propogation.

It goes without saying that the scope of the Program of the Enlightenment has been immensely expanded by recent scientific advances in neurology, linguistics, consciousness theory, sociology, economics, etc. That is entirely appropriate considering how a dedication to science lies at the very heart of the Enlightenment tradition. These new insights need to be recruited in any effort to “re-sell” the Enlightenment to our societies.

But the time is growing short here and could be even shorter than we think if a “double-dip” recession happens, since that will increase intra- and inter-society frictions of all kinds and make the new fundamentalisms all the more appealing to people. To me, at least, it seems imperative that we position the RSA as a propagating organ of 21st Century Enlightenment, just as (for example) the Freemasons and the first scientific societies were propagators of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Surely this work needs to be done. If the RSA isn’t up for it, then who will be?

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