In defence of the Enlightenment

Three of the major breakthroughs of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment – rationalism, humanism and universalism – are under threat from dark and pessimistic forces in society today. To develop progressive products and lifestyles of the future, these forces must be resisted.

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Here is part of the introduction to a chapter of Design renaissance: selected papers from the International Design Congress, Glasgow, Scotland 1993 edited by Jeremy Myerson – click on this In defence of the Enlightenment link to read the full chapter.

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We could talk about the technologies of the future – about micro‑mechanics, biometrics, mobile telephony. We could discuss multi‑media and how old people are going to cope. We could investigate developments in high definition TV or computer‑supported collaborative work. We could expose the bogus green claims of manufacturers, or analyse the crisis of the premium brand. All these issues are important, but I want to go straight to the core theme of the conference. I want to defend the Renaissance, as well as the Enlightenment, because we live in a time when many people want to overturn the gains those two eras bought us.

The Renaissance of the 16^th century was a period of republican city states and of increasing criticism of the church. There was a great amount of admiration and respect for nature; but at the same time, there was a growing respect not just for landscape or animals, but for human beings.

One of the great insights of the Renaissance was made by the British poet, Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry. In that work, he said: ‘Nature never set forth the Earth in so much tapestry as diverse poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet‑smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too‑much‑loved Earth more lovely. Her world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden’. (1)

Nature’s world is brazen, but the creativity and thought and action and planning of poets, of human beings, is what distinguishes us from nature. A bee may work in a hive, an otter may build a dam, but they don’t design things in the kind of conscious, articulated way that mankind does.

This leads to my first premise. A fundamental rethinking for design may be necessary, in that products related to work will be more important than products related to consumption. It is in that sense that we can say that the act of creativity, of work, is what is human about us. The act of consumption, by contrast, is something that we share with animals. Animals eat, animals excrete, but we’re above that. We’re creative, we are designers and we make progress in design. And that fundamental distinction between work and consumption will become more apparent to us as we all find work a more grueling business in the 1990s. It also leads me to the Enlightenment.

Three Enlightenment breakthroughs

What were the gains of the Enlightenment? First, there was rationalism – the idea that there was a reason for things. Second, there was humanism, summed up by Pope in his Essay on Man: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of Mankind is Man’. (2) Finally, the Enlightenment taught us universalism – for example, the doctrine that all people were in some way equal.

It was Adam Smith, a Scot, who most clearly represented the Enlightenment in Britain. Smith applied rational theory to the actions and the work of human beings, and, in his celebrated analysis of the 17 operations that went on to make a pin, developed the idea of a division of labour. (3) Smith also developed the ideas of value and of price in products.

Why was all this important? Because when we come to 1798, little more than 20 years after Smith published his magnum opus, an English parson by the name of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus made a retrograde step, against the spirit of the Enlightenment. (4) What Malthus concentrated on was consumption. He said that there were too many mouths to feed, given the natural resources available on the land. He wasn’t interested in the quality of human beings and the special quality their work has of making things with a market value and a price.

Malthus suggested that there were too many dissolute working class people consuming and also breeding too much. For him, the only proper kind of consumption was the consumption of the aristocracy and of the church – in the person of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus and people like him. The whole emphasis of Malthus was on the burdensome quantity of the poor.