Enlightenment 2.0 21st century enlightenment

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Introduction

Elsewhere in this blook, I have looked at the history of knowledge as I feel there is much we can learn from the past.

We can view history in the light of industrial revolutions or even economic revolutions, but I have tried to look at it through the lens of knowledge.

I have identified what I consider to be five major knowledge revolutions, the fifth of which is only just emerging.

Cognitive Revolution

The first revolution was the Cognitive Revolution, some 70,000 years ago when we first learned to talk. We could thus pass down our knowledge from generation to generation through cumulative cultural evolution for the first time.

Writing Revolution

The second revolution was the Writing Revolution, which began with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BCE). This invention permitted the growth and governance of large, complex societies and enabled academic learning and the exchange of information.

The Enlightenment

The third revolution was the  Enlightenment or Age of Reason – a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries whose central idea was that rational change could improve humanity. Its roots lay a little earlier with Guttenberg’s refinement of the printing press in 1440.

The book had a massive impact on the world. It freed the Catholic Church’s ideological grip on knowledge in the western world, leading to the Protestant Reformation, The 30 years War, the Scientific Revolution, and culminating in the Enlightenment.

The first and second Industrial Revolutions followed, respectively, after 300 and 200 years.

Information Revolution

The fourth revolution – the Information Revolution, started about 1945 with the invention of the computer and culminated with the birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This technology has given us as individuals the ability to access almost all of the world’s information (including misinformation and disinformation).

Fifth Knowledge Revolution

I believe we are now entering a fifth knowledge revolution, although its nature is far from clear, and we have yet to agree on a name.

Unlike others, to my mind, this revolution is not predominantly about machine learning and artificial intelligence (often labeled the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0), although clearly, these technologies will have a significant impact on the world and play their part in the revolution that is now taking place.

Potential names for this fifth knowledge revolution might be the Conversation Revolution or the Age of Conversation. It might even be called the Age of Consciousness as proposed by Bill Halal. Or maybe the Connection Revolution or the Age of Responsibility. Only time will tell.

For various reasons that will become clear, I choose to call it Enlightenment 2.0.

We are moving into a new period of human consciousness which we don’t yet fully understand.

When we say a new period of human consciousness, we mean that the perception of the world will be different, at least as different as between the age of enlightenment and the medieval period, when the Western world moved from a religious perception of the world to a perception of the world on the basis of reason, slowly. This will be faster.

Credit: Henry Kissinger

The parallels between E1.0 and E2.0

Several influences triggered the Enlightenment (E1.0), but two of the most significant were:

• • The invention of Gutenberg’s printing press and the greater availability of books
  • The coffeehouses of London and the salons of Paris and Europe.

Books facilitated the dissemination of ideas and knowledge, while coffeehouses and salons were places of conversation that created new ideas and knowledge.

Today, a parallel revolution is taking place that in my opinion is triggering a second Enlightenment (E2.0).

• • The invention of the web has accelerated the sharing of ideas and knowledge.
  • Social media has allowed “textual conversations” to take place, and in particular, conversational technologies like Zoom, Teams, and Clubhouse have enabled global audio and video conversations.

Enlightenment 2.0

The term Enlightenment 2.0

I am not the first to use the term Enlightenment 2.0. The following have also adopted the phrase or something similar.

European Commission Joint Research Council

The Enlightenment 2.0 is a European Commission Joint Research Council (JRC) multi-year research programme started in 2018.

The initiative seeks to understand the different drivers influencing political decision-making in the 21st century.

The programme has published three reports so far:

• Understanding our political nature (2019)
• Technology and Democracy (2020)
• Values and Identities (2021)

Article: Understanding the drivers of political decision-making in 21st-century government (Introducing the European Commission’s Enlightenment 2.0 research programme)

Enlightenment 2.0 | Laura Smillie, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring sanity to our politics, our economy, and our lives

Enlightenment 2.0 is a book written by  Joseph Heath and published in 2014 that outlines a program for a second Enlightenment.

21st-Century Enlightenment

21st-century Enlightenment was a project run by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). A report was published in 2010.

Resources

• Paper: The Information Age and the Printing Press by James A. Dewar
• Stanford Social Innovation Review: Our Gutenberg Moment by Marina Gorbis
• Article: The second Gutenberg revolution by Pelle Neroth
• Blog Post: The iPad: What is a Gutenberg moment, anyway?by Dennis Baron
• Article: The Social Impact of the Printing Press by Vejas Liulevicius
• Podcast: Welcome to the Second Enlightenment by James Lindsay

Posts that link to this post

•  What Is Global Consciousness? Consciousness, collective consciousness, higher consciousness, and global consciousness
•  Henry Kissinger and Artificial Intelligence We are moving into a new period of human consciousness

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