Post Enlightenment

I have this suspicion that we in the West are entering into the age of Post Enlightenment.

The symptom is that the key habit of the enlightenment, the relentless and continuous incremental improvement in all activities of human endeavor, is dimming.

This habit of continuous improvement requires a ‘disrespect’ for the past.

Breaking the habit down into sub-habits we have (1) the practice of critique which is used to identify issues, (2) knowledge gathering, (3) the proposal of solutions, (4) the implementation of one or more solutions, and (5) repeat ad nauseum.

When this practice first emerged in the late 1600s, critique – the systematic identification of problems within all of what was considered orthodox – was seen as heretical.

Fortunately business leaders in England caught on that it was also quite lucrative in the business of technology. Therefore critique, this branch of objective rational thinking, took off and we got the industrial revolution.

Over three hundred years later we are the beneficiaries of this revolution. Productivity in the manufacturing of goods and services has improved to the point where we in the West are all far better off than the monarchs of the day.

Somewhere along the way we also got marketing. Consumption, driven by all those increases in productivity, had driven straight past the point of natural saturation. Marketing was then born to push even more consumption

The key tenet of successful marketing is fear. The fear of being different, the fear of missing out, and the fear of not being happy or content, of not living up to the model of success.

In fact I have just endured an American kid’s movie called Inside Out. An animated children’s psychological thriller (sic), the key message of this movie is that ‘sadness’ sometimes has a purpose. Really, it has come to this.

The Americans are so far into the ‘happiness’ epidemic that being sad is considered unacceptable. If you are anything other than happy or content then you need help.

And herein lies the threat to the habit of continuous improvement, the key legacy of the Enlightenment.

Those practising the core skill of critique are often labeled as critics, cynics or pessimists, usually with the pejorative emphasised. Thus our kids are learning not to use this important skill.

Already in my life I can see the differences. When I mentally plot the rise of the happiness epidemic against the general practice of critique and continuous improvement, I see an inverse causal relationship.

What to do?

Firstly, maybe nothing. It could be argued that we need productivity to drop in order to save our limited global resources. Maybe not though; we may need new technology to save our arses as we over-populate this planet.

Secondly, we could use intelligent machines to do all the continuous improvement. Then we would be off the hook and can madly chase eternal happiness.

Or maybe, we could just fight back against the happiness epidemic and put critique back on the pedestal where it deserves to be.