Feedback on the New Enlightenment

One great thing about my job is the feedback I get from Fellows. I particularly enjoy being challenged. One of my fiercest critics has been Australian Fellow John Montgomery who thinks I am a soft headed, jargon spouting, leftie.

John and I have been sparring on and off since I joined the RSA. He has just sent me an essay entitled ‘A New Enlightenment’. It’s a powerful and basically reactionary piece (I say this not to be disparaging but because the central thrust is a call to react against modern ‘isms’ in favour of older certainties). 

Sorry, John, but I can’t give you the full response the piece deserves (it’s the pressure of last minute work before my holiday).

However, the starting point for my disagreement is that the old truths haven’t simply been displaced by modern fashion but by more profound changes in the world and our understanding of it. 

Globalisation, climate change, complexity, technology and the web, new science from quantum physics to neuroscience; these all challenge aspects of the Enlightenment world view. 

Moreover the Enlightenment itself helped to unleash forces which have created a hollowed out sense of the good society and the good life, which would horrify the authors of the Enlightenment.

I wonder why right of centre thinkers like John want to lay so much blame for modern problems at the feet of a few French philosophers whose theories are unknown to the vast majority of citizens, and so little at the door of consumer capitalism and the hubristic myth of the separate autonomous self, all of which are ubiquitous aspects of modern life?

• John Montgomery - 13 Aug 2008 2:54am

  Hi Matthew, the point of a 'New' Enlightenment is that it would be able to combine the contemporary with general truths and old wisdom. I see this as an amalgam of ontology, objective reason, market economies, Parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, ethics and morality. This is preferable to post-modernism and moral relativism. Second, most people may not have heard of Derrida or Foucault, but this stuff has been force-fed in our universities for 50 years. Ordinary people might ponder why the police are too scared of being accused of racism to do any actual policing, or why white men are under constant attack, or why councils ban Christmas, or why criminals are treated as victims. Most people had never heard of Marx either, but his nutty ideas caused millions of people to be killed by despots. As for modern phenomena, globalisation is not an elemental force of nature, but th outcome of trade and communications technology - in essence it is no different from what has gone before. Climate change (AGW) is not a fact but a theory and a set of computer models. The web is simply an advanced means of communication, just as the telegraph once was. The fundamentals of human societies run deeper than all of these. It was not the Enlightenment thinks such as Smith, Hume, Kames or Adam that cause a 'hollowing out of the good society' but leftwing extremists like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao and Pol Pot. So, finally, it is market economics coupled with werstern style democracy - in other words capitalism - that offers humankind the greatest hope in ending poverty and securing liberty. It is sad that some people choose to stuff their faces with junk food and watch Big Brother, but that is their choice. The problem is that so many of them are so ignorant and uneducated after 40 years of socialistic education theory.

• Sam - 04 Aug 2008 12:18pm

  Good point!

• Liza - 31 Jul 2008 3:09pm

  I do too.

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