Enlightened Stories

I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment. I would happily wear a t-shirt with the image of Denis Diderot or David Hume. For a while I actually did have a t-shirt with the likeness of Jeremy Bentham on it but that was more to do with him being the “spiritual founder” of University College London, my alma mater. Having said that, Bentham’s "fundamental axiom" - the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong" seems to me so self-evident that I struggle to understand anyone who argues against it.

Apart from academic ancestor-worship, what is it about the Enlightenment that captivates me so much almost three hundred years after the event?

The Enlightenment was many things to many people but for me it was a period of time in which rationality came to be prized as a guiding principle in human endeavor. This enabled an explosion in scientific thought as well as huge developments in political and moral philosophy. Rationality didn’t come easily. It took enormous intellectual effort on the part of some of the greatest thinkers of all time to set aside existing preconceptions and build it from first principles.

At the risk of offending any neuroscientists who may be passing I’ll try to explain what I think was going on. The primitive brain that still exists at the base of your skull is hard-wired (this is a metaphor of course, there aren’t really wires inside your head) to deal with the environment at the time humans were living precariously on the African savannah. It perceives the world in terms of agency.

“Is there a sound behind that bush? It might be a lion waiting to eat me. I’d better run away”.

The sound is perceived, it was caused by an agent that may well be dangerous, the response is pretty automatic. The problem comes with perceptions that are not so easily attributed.

“The top of that mountain just exploded and I am about to be engulfed by molten rock and poisonous gas. That wasn’t a lion. There must be something even bigger and nastier at work”.

Or a bit more prosaically,

“There are great flashes of light in the sky followed by frightening loud bangs. Still not likely to be a lion. I bet it was the bastard that blew up the mountain the other day”.

And in today’s terms,

“The biggest typhoon in human history just decimated the Philippines. It must be that mountain-exploding, light flasher getting mad about gay people marrying”

The primitive brain has a theory of agency and seeks an agent for those phenomena. It comes up with the idea of a god or a spirit and runs with it. From there it is a direct line to organized religion and the divine right of kings. Stories and myths grow and circulate. They meet and cross-fertilise creating a web of belief that spans the human experience.

Thousands of years later the brain has evolved higher functions. It is much more sophisticated. To use another metaphor, the brain is now capable of running complex software processes that allow reason and logic to be applied. The great achievement of the Enlightenment thinkers was to harness this capability and to look at the world afresh with evidence and reason as their guides. And that’s where the story of modern human development begins to accelerate. The intellectual tool kit developed by the Enlightenment philosophers has shaped the succeeding centuries. It has allowed science to uncover many (though by no means all) of the workings of the universe. Science has led to technology and that has enabled economic development. It has allowed civil societies to develop so that the benefits of economic development are shared across all sections of the population. You will almost certainly live longer and more healthily than your ancestors because of the advances in science, technology and even politics that stem from the Enlightenment.

But nothing in life is ever completely unambiguous. There are certainly people who see the rationality of Enlightenment thinking as undesirable. Some of them are obvious. In 2010 Charles Windsor, heir to the British throne, said

''I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud.”

It’s not hard to see why a privileged member of a family granted a “divine right” to stay top of the heap might take that view but it can be very difficult to understand why some who have benefited hugely from the Enlightenment would take the same approach. Why, despite all the enormous advantages brought about by a rational view of the world are so many people ready to reject rationality?

I think that the answer lies in that primitive brain that seeks agency in every situation and is driven more by stories than by analysis. There is a very old joke that goes:

“Why did you take an instant dislike to Donald Trump?”

“It saved time”.

As with many old jokes it is funny because it reflects a deep truth. Gathering evidence, evaluating it, putting it in context and drawing reasoned conclusions is time-consuming and difficult. How much easier to make a snap assessment of the way a new phenomenon fits with the existing narrative that is already deeply engrained. If you grow up in America with a  world view that incudes tales of rugged western pioneers with six-guns on their belts you might resist all attempts to control the use of firearms in that country. Never mind the overwhelming objective evidence that thirty two thousand of your fellow countrymen die each year due to lack of such control. If your world view includes a deep fear of the outsider you might respond to recent terrorist atrocities by excluding refugees despite the evidence that most terrorists in recent years have attacked their own native countries.

This is bad enough when it is just unintended consequences. When it is used quite deliberately and cynically for political gain it becomes more frightening. The lies told by Donald Trump, Ben Carson and George Osborne are not random errors. They are not even sophisticated or hard to refute. They are deliberate ploys to reinforce a narrative that already exists within a section of the population at the expense of rational consideration of evidence. These three politicians, and there are others, would almost certainly reject Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom. They are not interested in the greatest good for the greatest number. In their world it is quite acceptable to condemn sections of the population to sub-human status  just so long as their own tribe stays on top and grants them positions of power.

So in this bleak picture where is the hope for the children of the Enlightenment? Are we condemned to see the gains of the last three centuries unpicked before our eyes? I don’t think so but the way forward is difficult. We need to tap into the same primitive brain functions as Trump and the rest. We need our own stories. We need our own narrative web that makes rationality the hero. We need legends that reflect what it means to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. There are people around the world already doing this but we need more. For every Donald Trump we need a Carl Sagan. For every Charles Windsor we need a Malala Yousafzai. For every George Osborne we need a Nelson Mandela. Yes I do realize the irony that two of my three heroes are already deceased. Speaking of which, maybe I should get that Denis Diderot t-shirt made up.