Against Individualism (The Other Kind)

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LONGER ORIGINAL VERSION

The RSA has a new strap line and that strap line is 21st century Enlightenment. The original Enlightenment in the 18th century was not, of course, a single cohesive movement. It didn’t have a simple start and finish. So when we think about the core ideals of the Enlightenment, it’s not simply a kind of historical process. In a way, we think about how those ideals have shaped modern values, norms, and lifestyles. It’s a kind of process of cultural psychotherapy. We’re delving into what has shaped the collective consciousness of modern people, and that enables us to explore critically whether those values and what they have come to mean to us still work for us and whether they meet the challenges that we now face.

So whilst I don’t underestimate the ability of human beings to invent and to adapt, in the end, on balance, I do favour the view that we need to live differently in the 21st century. As the architects of the Enlightenment understood, to live differently involves thinking differently. It involves seeing the world and ourselves from a new perspective and critically examining what Enlightenment values have come to mean to us. What we can now bring to bear is powerful new insights into human nature. Insights have emerged from a variety of scientific disciplines and social sciences over the last 20 or 30 years.

Because Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton helped to lay the ground for the Enlightenment by revealing that the laws of nature not only failed to conform to religious doctrine but also failed to conform to intuition. The poet might have said the sun went round the Earth, it might have felt like the sun went round the Earth, but science showed otherwise. I think the insights into human nature have a similar double impact, also unsettling our intuitive sense of our self in the world. Most of our behaviour, including social interaction, is the result of us responding automatically to the world around us rather than the outcome of conscious decision-making. In this sense, it’s more realistic to see ourselves as integrally connected to the social and natural world rather than as a separate, wholly autonomous entity.

The research is clear: if you want to be a happier person, don’t read a self-help book—just have happier friends. There are other lessons that we can learn from the more subtle and holistic model of human nature now emerging. We’re not very good at making long-term decisions. We’re much better at understanding relative than absolute values. As we found out in the credit crunch, we are beholden to what Keynes called animal spirits. Perhaps even more startlingly, we are very, very bad at predicting what’s going to make us happy, and we’re even bad at describing what made us happy in the past.

So I would argue that the moral and political critique of individualism now has an evidence base. It’s with this in mind that I argue the 21st century Enlightenment should champion a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy that recognises our frailties and limitations. Now, this does not mean repudiating the rights of the individual, nor does it underestimate our ability to shape our own destinies. Indeed, it’s actually by understanding that conscious thought is only a part of what drives our behaviour that we become better able to exercise self-control. All of this can enable us to distinguish our needs from our appetites and our amazing human potential from the hubris of individualism. It’s the basis for self-aware autonomy.

The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan argues that successfully functioning in a society with diverse value traditions and lifestyles requires us, in his words, to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. I quote: to resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar, and wrong or false that which is only strange.

Now the good news—and it is really good news—is that there’s every reason to believe that we can expand empathy’s reach. Despite major departures from the trend, most terribly in the 20th century, the history of the human race has been one of diminishing person-to-person violence. Since the advent of modern civil rights, we’ve seen a revolution in social attitudes based on race, gender, and sexuality. Furthermore, real-time global media has brought the suffering of distant people into our living rooms, and immigration and foreign travel provide us with opportunities to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.

There are reasons to ask whether the process of widening human empathy has stalled, and at just the time when we need it to accelerate. After four decades of post-war progress, levels of inequality have risen in the rich world. Tensions between different ethnic groups persist and have taken on new dimensions. Anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, arguably reflecting a failure by policymakers to balance the imperatives of globalisation and the ideal of universalism with the empathic capacity of the communities most affected by change.

From gangs to the impact of violent video games, there are worries about young people. Globalisation and public deficits may mean that future generations in the West face tougher challenges than their parents. So the stock of global empathy upon which democratic leaders can draw has to grow if we’re to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet and all its people ahead of short-term national concerns.

But the chain linking interpersonal, communal, and global-scale empathy is complex. Intellectuals, politicians, interest groups, and think tanks spend an enormous amount of time debating what should be the content of universalism— which rights, which entitlements, which capabilities. But shouldn’t we perhaps just spend a little more time exploring the foundations of universalist sentiment? What is it that enhances, and what is it that diminishes, our empathic capacity?

The policy implications range from a continued emphasis on the early years of child-rearing, to developing schools as intelligent communities, to exploring the way popular culture inclines us to think of other people. For example, a culture which prized empathy would be one which distinguished the healthy activity of public disagreement from the unhealthy habit of public disparagement.

It’s become a cliché that education is the most valuable resource in a global knowledge economy. I would argue that fostering empathic capacity is just as important to achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other and with themselves. But even were we to have more self-aware and more empathic citizens, they would still face dilemmas and differences of opinion.

I want to encourage us to recognise that the question “what is progress?” raises substantive and ethical questions which we should be more willing to acknowledge, to honour, and to debate. How are we to make those decisions? Of course, the utilitarian answer lies in maximising human happiness. If progress is measured in these terms, we have done well since the Enlightenment. There is little doubt that the poorest citizens of the developed world now have better health, longer lifespans, and many more resources and opportunities than those who would have been considered well-off a century ago.

But sometimes it feels as though the idea that progress should be designed to increase happiness has turned into the assumption that pursuing progress is the same as improving human welfare. The success of the Western post-Enlightenment project has resulted in societies like ours being dominated by three logics: the logic of science and technological progress, the logic of markets, and the logic of bureaucracy. The limits of the logic of science and of markets lie in their indifference to a substantive concern for the general good. If something can be discovered and developed, it should be discovered and developed. If something can be sold, then it should be sold. The problem for bureaucracy is a tendency to put the rationality of rules above the rationality of ends.

So it’s in this context that the 21st century Enlightenment project demands a reassertion of the fundamentally ethical dimension of humanism. How can we make it easier to ask, “Is this right?” We live in a world where so many of us feel that the shape of our lives is dictated not by the ideal of a life fully lived, but by social convention and economic circumstance. Why should we cram education into the first quarter of our lives, desperately balance work and caring in the second and third quarters, and then feel that we’re going to suffer second-class status and a fear of neglect in the final quarter?

You see, rationalism can tell us how best to get from A to Z, but without ethical reasoning we cannot discuss where Z should be. So what we aim for can be as important to our well-being as what we achieve. As Michel Foucault says of Kant’s own description of the Enlightenment, it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

To be responsible, to create a big society, to live sustainably—this is not simply a matter of will. The 21st century Enlightenment calls for us to see past simplistic and inadequate ideas of freedom, of justice, and of progress. Perhaps it’s time to stop chasing those myths, to stop being transfixed by abstractions, and instead to reconnect a concrete understanding of who we are as human beings to political debates about who we need to be, and philosophical and even spiritual exploration of who we might aspire to be.

Creative people who want to make a difference have a million and one opportunities and distractions to engage them. This means an ethic which is intolerant of negativity, rigid thinking, and self-promotion, and instead keeps people constantly in touch with the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, true to the spirit which created the Enlightenment, true to the spirit which moved the founders of the RSA 256 years ago. Margaret Mead said simply this: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.