Beyond Reason: Why We Need a New Enlightenment
Three hundred years ago, a wave of bold ideas changed the course of history. The Enlightenment with its call for reason, science, and individual rights pulled humanity out of superstition and absolute rule. It gave us democracy, human rights, and scientific discovery.
We live today in the world the Enlightenment built. But now, facing a future of environmental collapse, runaway technology, and growing social divides, we must ask a harder question: Is the Enlightenment still enough to guide us?
At the Enlightened Enterprise Academy we believe it’s time to move forward, that while we must protect the Enlightenment’s best ideas, we also need to go beyond them.
It’s not about rejecting reason — it’s about building a bigger, wiser, way of seeing the world. Not a rejection, but a creative transcendence.
Many contemporary thinkers including Julian Baggini, John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Charles Foster, Forrest Landry, Heather M. Douglas, Saskia Sassen, Martin Reeves, Eugene Sadler-Smith, and Daniel Schmachtenberger offer thoughtful critiques of the Enlightenment and it’s limitations. They also suggest ways to transcend them.
In a new series of the Salon called “The Better Way: A New Enlightenment” we will explore their thinking in recorded interviews and live sessions. Some have already agreed to take part and the initial list may be extended. The series is related to a book with the same title which Paul Barnett, Founder of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy is working on.
Free subscribers to the Salon will get short updates as the book project progresses.
Paying subscribers will get full access to all the interviews and live interactive online dialogues, plus recordings of them and a free ebook when the project is completed.
When Reason Isn’t Enough
The Enlightenment put reason on a pedestal. Logic and evidence were seen as the best tools for understanding the world . They helped us make huge leaps forward. But as Julian Baggini points out in How the World Thinks, reason in the Western tradition is not the only way humans have understood life.
Across the globe, cultures have long blended reason with emotion, intuition, storytelling, and lived experience. Ignoring these other ways of knowing means cutting ourselves off from a deeper understanding of reality.
Eugene Sadler-Smith, author of Trust Your Gut and The Intuitive Mind, studies how people make decisions and shows that intuition, those gut feelings and sudden insights, often guide us faster and better than slow, logical thinking when things are complicated. In today's uncertain world, relying on logic alone isn't enough.
A new Enlightenment would not throw away reason. It would strengthen it by adding emotional intelligence, ethical thinking, and intuitive understanding.
Heather Douglas offers another important insite in her book The Rightful Place of Science, shows that science has never been fully "neutral." What we choose to study, how we fund research, and how we use scientific findings are shaped by values. Pretending science is value-free is not just wrong — it’s dangerous.
Breaking Free from Reductionism
The old scientific view was simple: if you break something down into smaller parts, you can understand it better. This idea — reductionism — helped scientists achieve incredible breakthroughs.
But today’s problems, like climate change, pandemics, and global inequality, don’t behave like machines. They’re messy, dynamic, and deeply interconnected.
Iain McGilchrist, in his books, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, explains that Western society leans too much on narrow, logical thinking, the kind associated with the brain’s left hemisphere, while ignoring the bigger, more connected view offered by the right hemisphere. The result? We see the pieces but miss the whole. And this is related to reductionism.
Daniel Schmachtenberger, a systems thinker, argues we face a Metacrisis, and that our biggest risks, environmental breakdown, unstable politics, and dangerous technology, can’t be solved one piece at a time. We must understand the whole system, with all its feedback loops and unpredictable changes. This highlights the dangers of reductionism and related to what Paul Barnett called the ‘systems thinking capabilities gap.’
Saskia Sassen, author of Globalisation and It’s Discontent and Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, studies global economics. She shows how policies rooted in old ideas about markets and individuals are leaving millions behind. Fixing poverty or climate change isn’t about adjusting a few parts. It’s about redesigning the whole system.
The Problem with Hyper-Individualism
The Enlightenment helped free the individual from kings, churches, and oppressive traditions. This was a huge step forward. But today, taken to extremes, individualism is tearing societies apart.
Charles Foster, author of Being a Human and a philosopher, reminds us that humans are not meant to live as isolated islands. We are creatures of place, community, and belonging. Forgetting that connection — to each other and to the Earth — leads to loneliness, division, and despair.
Daniel Schmachtenberger warns that when people are too focused on themselves, society can’t work together. We need strong communities to solve the massive problems we now face. Without trust and shared purpose, we are vulnerable to chaos and collapse.
A New Enlightenment would protect personal freedom, but also rebuild the bonds between people, and between people and nature.
Learning from Other Cultures
The Enlightenment brought powerful ideas to the world. But it often did so by pushing aside other ways of thinking.
Julian Baggini criticizes this as a kind of cultural arrogance. The West assumed its way was best and missed out on the rich wisdom of other traditions.
Eugene Sadler-Smith’s research into intuition supports this idea. Many Indigenous cultures, for example, place a high value on gut knowing, deep listening, and lived wisdom, things that Western logic often overlooks. And if we are to survive and thrive, we must welcome and learn from many ways of understanding, not just the familiar ones.
Progress Without Wisdom
The Enlightenment faith in progress, science, technology, and innovation, has reshaped the world in incredible ways. But not all progress had been good progress.
John Vervaeke in his book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis argues that “while we once commonly understood our relationship to nature as being a part of the greater whole, we now find ourselves separate and isolated from its perpetual flow” and, “after unknown thousands of years of faith in the inherent meaning in and of life, since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, a dark wave of nihilism has washed across our global village. We’ve mistaken part of life’s complex experience, the problems, and waved away the greater emergent whole of their meaning.”
Forrest Landry adds that we must think carefully about how new technologies affect not just profits, but the fabric of life itself — human life, community life, planetary life.
Martin Reeves, who writes about business and innovation and is co-author of The Imagination Machine, argues that imagination, the ability to dream up new futures, is now as important as intelligence. Copying the past won’t solve today’s crises. We need creativity as much as logic, he suggests.
“Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to transformation—especially during a crisis” and it is “a powerful human capacity,” he argues.
A New Enlightenment would also make sure that progress serves life, not just money or speed.
Healing the Split in Our Thinking
The old Enlightenment tradition prizes sharp, analytical thought; breaking problems down into clear, logical pieces. But as Iain McGilchrist and Eugene Sadler-Smith both show, we have another side to our intelligence: holistic, intuitive, emotional, relational. Ignoring that side is like trying to walk on one leg.
Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about the need for new ways of thinking together; group conversations and sensemaking that can hold complexity without falling into conflict or confusion. And, to survive in the 21st century, we must heal the split between thinking and feeling, between knowing and caring.
Reconnecting with Nature — and Each Other
The Enlightenment taught humans to see nature as something to control. This helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, but it also laid the path to today’s environmental crisis.
Charles Foster and Forrest Landry argue that we must see nature differently, not as a warehouse of resources, but as a living world we are part of. And this isn’t just about saving animals or trees. It’s about saving ourselves.
In a similar vein Saskia Sassen points out, rethinking the economy so that it serves people, not just markets, is just as important. We must rebuild communities where everyone matters.
The Shape of a New Enlightenment
So what would this New Enlightenment look like? Here is a partial list of some of the feature. It would:
Value reason — but also emotion, intuition, and other ‘ways of knowing’.
Protect individual rights — but also rebuild community and shared purpose.
Celebrate science and innovation — but always with ethics and care.
Valuing diverse ways of knowing from across cultures and traditions, not just the Western tradition.
Train our minds not just to analyse, but to imagine, connect, and create.
Employ Systems Thinking to embracing complexity, interdependence
Encourange Ethical Imagination: Steering innovation with foresight, compassion, and wisdom.
Cultivate trust, solidarity, and collective sensemaking.
Root human life within the living systems of nature.
As Baggini, Vervaeke, McGilchrist, Sadler-Smith, Foster, Landry, Douglas, Sassen, Reeves, and Schmachtenberger each show in their different ways, the future calls for more than logic. It calls for wholeness.
The old Enlightenment broke chains. The New Enlightenment must build bridges — to each other, to nature, and to a deeper, wiser understanding of what it means to be human.
The choice before us is stark: repeat the mistakes of the past, or create a future that truly deserves the name progress.
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You are missing the most important thinker of our time, Brian Thomas Swimme. He says, "Our revolution in thinking dwarfs Copernicus’s announcement that the Earth travels around the Sun." It's the lineage from Teilhard to Thomas Berry that makes us a human family, all interconnected, and not the rugged individualists climbing over one another that we have been. Also, he is very charismatic. Here's my Swimme playlist from Substacks I've done that he's significant in: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/brian-thomas-swimme
Thanks for sharing all those book recommendations, Paul! I would add two more to that list:
- Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan: This concept of development (for individuals as well as for the collective of humankind) is spreading hope, as it suggests that more and more individuals are developing to the integral stage where all those different aspects you list as features of the New Enlightenment are integrated to form a „better whole“.
- Finding Radical Wholeness by Ken Wilber: This is building on the Spiral Dynamics concept and expanding it by evaluating the current status of development, the implications that follow from this status and providing hints how to further develop.