We need a new Era of Enlightenment, and we need it now
By Kaspar Colling Nielsen, Writer
As we see the founding principles for our societies erode, we need to ask ourselves what’s next and how we can regain control, argues author Kaspar Colling Nielsen in this keynote from Danish Design Centre’s “Experimentation by Design” conference on January 29.
It seems to me that some of the fundamental ideas of our modern societies are eroding, perhaps even dying. The great German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, recently said that we, the people, were the progressive forces of the 20th century. We changed society through political engagement and political struggles. We fought for labor rights, women’s rights, a better and more equal society. Our struggles were rooted in certain political core values. Today, we, the people, are no longer the progressive forces of change. We are not able to change anything. Today’s forces of change are technology and capital management. These are the forces that shape and change our societies and we, the people, are reduced to mere observers, trying to adapt, and to understand what is happening.
Western societies are becoming more and more unequal. Everyone knows this. Even the WTO is concerned, but it’s very hard to do anything about it, because it has just happened. It is not the outcome of any deliberate political action or plan that real estate prices in capital cities have skyrocketed. No government ever deliberately wished for its citizens to live with insane mortgages. It’s just something that happened because the capital system dictated it. Because it was possible. It is basically an economic premise: The cost of an apartment can be infinitely high if the interest rate is zero. Private banks are allowed to produce new money, when we obtain mortgage loans. The Danish national bank is only creating about four percent of the new money in Denmark, the rest is produced by private banks when they give out loans. The billions and trillions of the extremely wealthy come from your debt. Again; no government or individual politician ever wanted the system to have that effect.
The capital system is changing and defining our societies to a much larger extent than the political system, creating changes with much greater effect than the any political reforms in history.
Tech: If it’s possible, we make it
The other progressive force of the 21th century, according to Sloterdijk, is technology. Or rather new technology. New technologies are developed constantly without any of us truly understanding their implications. Technologies, like the capital system, also just emerge at a fast and uncontrollable (and unstoppable) pace. If it’s possible to make, we have to make it.
The problem with these new progressive forces is that they are blind. They do not want or wish for anything. They are not based on any kind of value system. They do not hold any kind of belief in anything. A smartphone does not come with an ideology or any kind of value system. Even the people who designed them don’t know what kind of changes they will create. Facebook has profoundly changed our democratic conversation, and we didn’t even realize it before Trump and Brexit was a fact. We only understand the implications of new technology, when it’s too late.
Democracy first?
We are facing other fundamental and difficult challenges. The Western democracies used to be the most powerful on the planet. For centuries, we were by comparison the most intelligent, the most advanced, the richest, and the strongest in the world. This is no longer self-evident. There are other regions in the world, other kinds of societies that are prospering and growing, much more than us in the West. Asia, for one, is challenging the global sovereignty of the Western societies. Why is that a problem? Because the historic connection between democracies and prosperity in a society is disregarded. Twenty years or even ten years ago, it was a widely held assumption that if a developing country had hopes of becoming a wealthy, industrialized country, democracy came first. That democracy was a precondition for properity. Now, the globalized world has shown us that our democracies are perhaps no longer the most effective or prosperous systems of governance.
The point is that if the development of our once great societies is guided by value — any kind of humanistic, democratic and benign value — that can strengthen our ability to imagine, almost catch a glimpse of a better future.
The challenge for humanism
Not only democracy, but humanism itself is challenged. Since Immanuel Kant wrote his moral philosophy in the 18th century, we have considered the individual as something that held certain rights. Europe’s modern history, since the time of Enlightenment until today, has been the story of states gradually and steadily giving more rights to more people. Kant also taught us that moral ideas could be universalised as general rules. The culmination of our European humanism is formulated formally in the Refugee Convention and the Human Rights Declaration. In a sense, these are sacred texts in our secularized societies, but in recent years politicians and others have begun criticizing them. Some believe that the right thing to do is to step out of these international agreements. This would have been an unthinkable proposal just 10 years ago.
The real tragedy is that the critical voices aimed at these “founding” democratic and humanistic declarations are not completely wrong. Humanism is in crisis for a reason. Refugee and migrant flows force us to deny hundreds of thousands of people their basic rights for protection. The number of refugees from Africa is projected to rise in the coming years, and European governments will predictably turn them down. By denying them these rights, we fail our own ideals. We abandon the core values of who we are, and what we believe in. But we have to deny them these rights, we feel forced to do so, because half of the world’s population wants to live where we live.
The great Italian author Umberto Eco said it best on his death bed: “If we open our borders, we lose ourselves, if we close our borders, we also lose ourselves.”
In recent years we have learned that our humanism is not at all universal. It does not apply to everyone and the hard truth is, it never did. European humanism emerged from and was created by Europeans and nobody else.
The death of art’s core
Art is also dying. Who f…… cares, right? I do. I think art is extremely important, but today, art resembles a supernova, an exploding star. It grows in size, but the core is dead. The bourgeois public of the past has been transformed into a pop-cultural public. Talking about art, consuming it, but not reflecting upon it. People know the names of all of Brat Pitt’s ex-wives, but few know the name of the Chinese president.
People know the names of all of Brat Pitt’s ex-wives, but few know the name of the Chinese president.
Art is dying because there is no legitimate place from which art can emanate anymore. A couple of hundred years ago, the artist was a person inspired by God, and therefore any authority in its right mind would cater and succumb to the artist and his divine work. After the modern breakthrough, the artist became a Van Gogh-type of character. An abuser or a mentally disturbed person, somebody on the verge of normality but who, by virtue of his vices, had some sort of access to subconscious layers in the dark corners of the mind, which he could then express in works of art. The idea behind modern expressive art was that when people saw the artwork at a gallery, they would experience an infusion of some kind of hidden truth that the viewer could only relate to, or sense at a subconscious level. The viewer (re-)experienced a truth they had forgotten about. This notion of art was later scientifically sanctioned by psychoanalysis.
Nobody believes that art works like that anymore. The artist is neither someone divinely inspired, nor someone who can convey deep truths from the deepest layers of the human psyche. Art is dying and with the death of art, we lose the ability to create magical and sublime pieces of work and, we are left with large gallery walls filled with superficial aesthetics or simply odd-looking things.
So what does this all mean?
The death of humanity, the death of democracy, the death of art, and our loss of faith in technology are all ill-boding developments, because they represent the death of ideas born in the time of enlightenment more than 250 years ago. Ideas, on which our modern societies are built. Ideas that we all held as self-evident truths, no matter our political views.
When the foundation of our societies erodes, our societies face the risk of collapsing.
We need a new Era of Enlightenment. We need to define our lives all over again.
Granted, not an easy task, and it becomes even more difficult because everything seems so complex and everything is changing exponentially. Even the concepts and ideas that I have mentioned here are changing. Technology is becoming biology and will change our bodies and minds, and, in turn, the concepts of humanity. My grandkids might live for 300 years, and if you live that long, you might live to see even more sophisticated biotech that can ensure eternal life.
We need a new Era of Enlightenment. We need to define our lives all over again.
Ten years ago, when I published my first novel, the science-fiction genre was not an overcrowded scene amongst writers. Now, more and more sci-fi writers are emerging, putting words to dystopian stories.
I think the reason is because everything is changing so rapidly. Because society seems infinitely complex, impossible to control, and on the verge of becoming fictional itself. The dystopian movement in fiction as well as film and television is simply a symptom of creative minds not finding it very easy to spot a happy ending for us all, to put it bluntly.
Just try to imagine how future wars will be fought. Insect drones, dropped from a mother drone somewhere in some foreign country. Some youngsters sitting safely in Denmark in their gaming chairs controlling the drones hovering above ground many thousands of kilometres away. The drones fly silently through deserts or jungles. Perhaps they look like small mosquitos, passing villages unnoticed. The drones might sit and observe their target for a while, maybe collecting intel before eventually engaging.
This is of course just a figment of my imagination. But by imagining and writing about the future, we are actually analysing the present.
Writing about the future and what might come gives us the, perhaps false, notion that we understand what is going on right now. We all need to make certain projections, not to predict the future per se, but to understand the present. It does not really matter that our projections are always wrong. Because by projecting through future scenarios, we are analyzing present movements through time and through various landscapes. We are letting them interact with other observations and phenomena, thereby understanding much more about what they are and how they work. Come to think of it: writing fiction is not as much a way of analyzing the present as a way to realize it.
That leads me to the final crisis: the climate. If we, by enormous combined effort, succeed in changing our current systems and markets to a sustainable way of living, it will be due to our ability to make projections. Because we are able to imagine future disasters. Only projections can make us invest the huge sums of money needed now to ensure a better world tomorrow. But projecting the consequences of climate change, we can also change the way we view other present phenomena. If we really agreed that we need a green revolution, everything must be viewed in that light. New technology must be sustainable or able to better enhance sustainability. Capital management must equal sustainable investments. The way we live, produce, and consume must be sustainable.
By projecting through future scenarios, we are analyzing present movements through time and through various landscapes.
When you think of it, by striving for sustainability, we are not only fighting climate change, we are saving ourselves by once again putting values first. It’s already happening. The capital system is investing heavily in new, green technologies. This is of course because they achieve the desired revenue, you might say, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is that if the development of our once great societies is guided by value — any kind of humanistic, democratic and benign value — that can strengthen our ability to imagine, almost catch a glimpse of a better future. This sparks a tiny flame of hope that we can regain control of our societies.
Thank you
