Recycling the Enlightenment?

Citation

McPhail, H. (1999), "Recycling the Enlightenment?", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499eab.008

Recycling the Enlightenment?

Recycling the Enlightenment?

Helen McPhail

Helen McPhail is the author of the book The Long Silence.

Keywords: Human relations, Development, Creative thinking

Why are we so careless about the basic bricks of good human relations? On the basis of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and a series of revolutions (industrial, agricultural ...) we have learned to be individual, to be educated, to question, and to dare to claim equality. For most people in most western cultures, these qualities are viewed in terms of material advance: "my right to equality" is often interpreted unconsciously as "my right to earn/own as much as you" (and more than an imperfectly visualised "them") and expressed in terms of visible possessions.

If there is one single quality that seems to be missing, I would suggest that it is the virtue of imagination. It requires imagination to plan a holiday, look forward to our children's future, think about a win on the National Lottery - but we should encourage ourselves and our children to apply these roving thought processes to other people's lives and attitudes, and how we relate to them.

It is perhaps an awkward characteristic: small children are encouraged to be imaginative and we enjoy their playful and constructive language as they recreate and reinvent speech, but it is only the very determined or very obviously artistically talented child who can retain true imagination.

Children are encouraged to ask the "right" questions, to advance in school along carefully prescribed lines: sticking to a specified curriculum content, filling school hours ever fuller of facts and knowledge - rather than opinion and intellectual enquiry - is a Gradgrind progression which endangers emotional and intellectual life, restricting time to dream and imagine, to think creatively outside the official curriculum.

We need to encourage intellectual curiosity, and to counter a dislike or distrust of words such as "intellectual" or "philosophical". By recognising the value of compromise a constructive compromise may be achieved where attitudes of Me right, You wrong are more likely to be self-defeating. Modern urban life is full of people making immense efforts to become physically fit; can we also make mental and emotional agility and stamina equally desirable?

Maturity includes the ability to recognise that others may be in the right - and that in many situations, both sides can gain something. It requires much less mental energy to reject other people's claims on our attention or consideration than to respond to them; it is very much easier to resist the workings of the imagination, either in oneself or in others, and to concentrate only on one's own ambitions. The concept of moral responsibility is a difficult one, a form of freedom that lays a heavy burden on all of us, and such maturity cannot develop in a child who learns only to obey, rather than how to pay attention to other people and perceive their point of view.

We allocate responsibility for our schools and our children to the teaching profession; yet we give them damaged goods, even at a young age, because many children have their minds shaped by casual disregard and aggression of deed or attitude. Equally, many of us, the "consumers", parents and others, who employ and pay the teachers, constantly denigrate them from both ends of the social spectrum, making their lives less rewarding in both psychological and financial terms, and instil disregard for them in their pupils. We know that children can deal with philosophical concepts if taught appropriately, that they can share in building their own future, and parents should expect this intellectual and imaginative stretching.

Although the traditional English "stiff upper lip" may conceal a warm and sensitive heart, it has more often been a way of encouraging a thicker skin, a disregard of others and crucially of one's own feelings, a lazier way of dealing with human instincts, a refusal to imagine other ways of approaching other people or facing circumstances. We may be getting better at expressing our own feelings (not least because of television "confessional" programmes) but this does not always improve our perception of other people's feelings.

Both publicly and privately we are inclined to honour people of imagination, the creators of our modern world in many of its significant elements - but almost exclusively in relation to the past. So many accepted modern attitudes are the result of past imaginative courage, people who sustained immense unpopularity in the past for the sake of an ideal. Heroes and heroines are easier to deal with when they are dead and safely contained within "history", but I hope we can still encourage the clarity and generosity of thought and determination which enabled such hero-figures to shape modern society.

Imagination is an unpopular quality. It runs counter to all the most popular television sit-coms or the best-selling tabloid newspapers, because they depend on identifying and laughing at "otherness". Attitudes towards facts - selecting and presenting them in ways that bring them closer to fiction - add to the great thirst for dramatic stories: fictional crime or romance, and above all the soap-opera element in television planning and writing. The desire for a story is immemorial and may serve many purposes; a many-layered tale may help to create a nation, as in the ancient classical, eastern or Nordic mythologies, or may introduce abstract ideas of morality, religious belief and relationships - many stories ostensibly written for children can bring immense pleasure to adults, and can extend their understanding.

The adolescent who watches a "mindless" soap opera on a daily basis is satisfying the thirst for being told a story, but is also learning about relationships, seeing how carefully drawn fictional characters deal with banal, complex or far-fetched situations. It is of course much easier to watch such fiction than to practicse building good relationships in person, so these programmes, like classic "romantic fiction" novels, are often a form of escapism: but they can also demonstrate the basic need for human interaction.

We need fiction (the product of imagination) to keep us balanced - factual knowledge and application is not enough for emotional or psychological health, we need original creativity in our lives, in the form of music, literature, poetry, conversation; we need stimulating and beautiful surroundings, the consequence of other people's creativity and imagination, before we can hope to improve our own surroundings and lives. The students or workers who keenly debate the story line in a popular soap opera, arguing about rights and wrongs, are also learning how people respond to each other, how they might or should behave or consider others. They are learning how to exercise their imagination; and those who move on to more demanding forms of "story telling" are engaging their minds and feelings in more complex relationships, are expanding their own capabilities.

Our greater mental freedoms require greater emotional stamina; depression is increasing, perhaps as a result of less rigidly structured forms of daily life, and our greater freedom and relaxation require more self-imposed mental discipline; but when imagination comes close to home we are less inclined to recognise its strength, we are more likely to complain about its disruptive or disturbing aspects.

Advertising and all forms of media encourage feelings of material want and greed, focussed on the self or on children as projections of the parent. We know far more, and more quickly, about other people's lives than ever before: we can see how the rich live, how important money is, but much less often how morally subversive it is and how rewarding an emotionally rich life can be or how it can be achieved. Better standards of living are welcome, but we should recognise the cost: the gap between lowest and highest is increasing, and envy and despair expand in the growing gap.

Can we encourage the ability to talk in abstract terms, to debate philosophically, to explore ideas intellectually? Children do this naturally, and the reward is greater facility with language, still an unpopular concept with the British who are often lamentably inefficient at using their own very rich language. Competent use of one's own language is the most valuable single tool that anyone can have in life (and it comes free): too few people recognise the intellectual and emotional benefit of winning the freedom of a national culture through its language.

The same lack of comprehension stands between the more or less law-abiding majority and the law-breaking and convicted criminal minority. Just as great courage and determination were required before British society could give up profiting from slavery, or employing young children in factories, so immense reserves of generosity of mind and imagination were needed to lead British society away from capital punishment. Very gradually, the same underlying humanity is becoming recognised as a proper basis for penal philosophy and attitudes towards crime. Domestic violence and child abuse are gradually becoming unacceptable at all levels of society, but it has needed long years of assiduous pressure to bring some level of understanding: both the pressure and the response are based on exercising sympathetic imagination, seeing events through other people's eyes. Removing the stigma of criminality from suicide was an early expression of this form of humane understanding; New York has recently reduced its suicide rate dramatically by paying some of its prisoners to be responsible for the well-being of others who are known to be potential suicides.

To counter the many forms of bigotry - racism, ageism, sexism, etc. - we need an emotional breadth of mind and speech which recognises a wide range of attitudes and abilities: creative and imaginative thinking are part of responsibility, for self and for others, which is what the modern world demands. If we want to encourage generosity of mind we need greater imagination, applied at all stages of life and in particular in childhood.

Dealing with crime continues to be a substantial problem - who is an intentional criminal, who is misguided or ill, does the difference matter, what do we do with either category, how can we recognise that some of the people in prison need protection from the outside world as well as vice versa? The facile answers are the least satisfactory, and it requires considerable understanding, courage and humane imagination to see the criminal as the same as everyone else in at least one respect, the product of his or her own history.

Attitudes to criminals (more fruitful than concentrating on crime itself) occasionally seem to change in constructive directions. The more fully and the sooner we realise that human nature and history can produce people who present such challenges and that they are part of our society, the sooner we are likely to find a solution or compromise that reduces the risk that they pose and the threat that others perceive.

Prison inmates or probationers who are brought face-to-face with their victims are unanimous in finding it difficult to meet the person they have wronged, and it equally makes great demands on the wronged person as well - for both must recognise how chance events and history have shaped their encounter, and how much the encounter has affected the other. Courage is needed, and a sober imagination of how the other person feels, if the meeting is to be fruitful - as, apparently, such meetings usually are. Lack of imagination is, or used to be, one of the most practical ways of surviving hostile circumstances. It takes both courage and imagina-tion to build on it or to step away from this background.

Imagination and openness are a counter to aggressive self-centredness, for they are focussed on other people's feelings and needs rather than one's own; perceiving another's point of view, limitations or expectations is generally the way towards better mutual understanding, cooperation, gains (emotional, moral, practical) for both sides of an argument. (This imagination may not be starry creativity, it can be a boring see-both-sides blurring of black and white into a better accommodation between two or potentially hostile elements and at its worst can lead to paralysing indecision.)

"Better self-esteem" is often mentioned: this can be misunderstood as meaning simply "a good opinion of oneself", whereas it should be understood as a much more subtly nuanced recognition and appreciation of personal interaction. Alienation is destructive, and everyone needs to feel - however reluctantly - that they are in some way a part of everyone else: the interconnectedness of human society. It is particularly easy for people who have found or created a culturally, emotionally, financially and psychologically satisfying existence to live in complacent ignorance of the struggles and dissatisfactions that wear down those less well off in any of these elements - in fact, a very narrow life. We need constant reminders that deprivation, stress, unhappiness, poverty cannot easily be faced or overcome.

The interest in other people that this requires can be fostered in many ways, some of them useful in learning about oneself and others less so. It is essential to recognise the importance of the press as a force of enquiring opposition where political power affects lives so greatly - but that involves recognising the extent to which press "values" can be self-serving. Vigilance and imagination are our most valuable tools. The popular press and some strands of television programming focus with depressing determination on attitudes of both voyeurism and nervousness; ignoring inconvenient facts - that street mugging is almost exclusively a crime of young men against other young men, for example - it presents news items in such a way as to increase feelings of vulnerability among viewers or readers whose self-image is already undermined by poverty, illness, age or frailty. This brings us back to the young, the student who does not need or want to "go on a demo" like his parents in the 1960s, but who finds it difficult to accept that he should contribute to the broader society that he belongs to.

It is impossible to avoid knowing more about an extraordinary range of facts and events, or absorbing persistent encouragement to see and judge (news), or see and want (advertising); and we need to reduce the feeling of "otherness", to recognise how close we are to other people's experience and how we can engage with them. For many people the churches are no longer acceptable as guide or support through life but we cannot afford to discard the ethical basis of the world's great religions, for we need all the moral frameworks available if we are to break out of our narrow (and frequently self-imposed) cultural and national frameworks.

Cycles of deprivation and of potentiality appear to be coming to a peak simultaneously, with modern globalisation and greater pressures and dangers coinciding with greater awareness and opportunity; it is here that we need to exercise the mind energetically, to build the imaginative spirit based on the individuality presented to us by our historic culture.

Perhaps as history moves on and sometimes circles back on itself, this is the time for a new Enlightenment, an awakening of self-examination which focusses on a balance between what we hope to achieve, what is due to others and how we encounter external circumstances. We must be encouraged at all ages and stages of life to think, to imagine, to question, for we cannot establish creative, trusting and trustworthy relationships without the human warmth that imagination brings to life and sustains.