A NEW 

The Enlightenment gave us reason. The New Enlightenment must give us dignity.

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One of the defining features of the Enlightenment was separation. On the one hand, this meant breaking things apart to understand them, analysing nature down to the atomic level. On the other, it meant separating humanity from nature and the universe, of which we are inseparably a part. As cosmologists such as Brian Swimme remind us, this dualism was never real; it was only a way of thinking. Yet it gave rise to the belief that we could control and exploit whatever served our purposes.

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That mindset shaped not only how we relate to the natural world but also how we treat one another. People became “human resources.” Relationships became transactional. Our ways of thinking and doing reshaped our ways of being, often to our own detriment. And we now struggle to see the whole for the parts, "the wood for the trees".

Our understanding of value has been distorted, reduced to price and stripped of dignity. As Oscar Wilde observed, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." Robert Kennedy expressed much the same concern when he lamented that GDP measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”

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The New Enlightenment seeks to expose these distortions and help us transcend them. It calls us to question what we value, how we value, and how we relate - to each other, to other beings, and to the planet and our environment.

Systems thinking can restore the big picture that reductionist thinking obscured. And Paul Barnett’s Dignity Theory of Value, being developed through the Enlightened Enterprise Academy, highlights a way of thinking about value that can supplement Value For Money based decision-making. The result will be better decisions. 

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Paul is currently working on a series of three books that will explore the New Enlightenment in depth, alongside dialogues, publications, and initiatives of the Academy. But one thing is already clear....

The adoption of this New Enlightenment, rooted not in separation but in dignity, will represent nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we think, how we live, and what we do to create value.

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Paul does not have all the answers. It will take the collective brain of a global faculty and membership to realise the New Enlightenment. So we invite you to be part of these efforts.