10.7 The New Enlightenment, step (iii): from knowledge to wisdom

I come now to step (iii) of the New Enlightenment Programme. The task, here, is to help humanity gradually get more AOR into diverse aspects of social and institutional life – personal, political, economic, educational, international – so that humanity may gradually learn how to make progress towards an enlightened world. Social inquiry, in taking up this task, needs to be pursued as social methodology or social philosophy. What the philosophy of science is to science, as conceived by AOE, so sociology is to the social world: it has the task of helping diverse valuable human endeavours and institutions gradually improve aims and methods so that the world may make social progress towards global enlightenment. (The sociology of science, as a special case, is one and the same thing as the philosophy of science.) And a basic task of academic inquiry, more generally, becomes to help humanity solve its problems of living in increasingly rational, cooperative, enlightened ways, thus helping humanity become more civilized. The basic aim of academic inquiry becomes, as I have already said, to promote the growth of wisdom. Those parts of academic inquiry devoted to improving knowledge, understanding and technological know-how contribute to the growth of wisdom. The New Enlightenment Programme thus has dramatic and far-reaching implications for academic inquiry, for almost every branch and aspect of science and the humanities, for its overall character and structure, its overall aims and methods, and its relationship to the rest of the social world. I have spelled out in some detail what these implications are in a number of publications.³²

As I have already remarked, the aim of achieving global civilization is inherently problematic.³³ This means, according to AOR, that we need to represent the aim at a number of levels, from the specific and highly problematic to the unspecific and unproblematic. Thus, at a fairly specific level, we might, for example, specify civilization to be a state of affairs in which there is an end to war, dictatorships, population growth, extreme inequalities of wealth, and the establishment of democratic, liberal world government and a sustainable world industry and agriculture. At a rather more general level, we might specify civilization to be a state of affairs in which everyone shares equally in enjoying, sustaining and creating what is of value in life in so far as this is possible. Figure 10.1 depicts a cartoon version of what is required, arrived at by generalizing and then reinterpreting Figure 2.1 (see Chapter 2).

As a result of building into our institutions and social life such a hierarchical structure of aims and associated methods, we create a framework within which it becomes possible for us progressively to improve our real-life aims and methods in increasingly cooperative ways as we live. Diverse philosophies of life – diverse religious, political, economic and moral views – may be cooperatively developed, assessed and tested against the experience of personal and social life. It becomes possible progressively to improve diverse philosophies of life (diverse views about what is of value in life and how it is to be realized), much as theories are progressively and cooperatively improved in science.

AOR is especially relevant when it comes to resolving conflicts cooperatively. If two groups have partly conflicting aims but wish to discover the best resolution of the conflict, AOR helps in requiring of those involved that they represent aims at a level of sufficient imprecision for agreement to be possible, thus creating an agreed framework within which disagreements may be explored and resolved. AOR cannot, of itself, combat non-cooperativeness, or induce a desire for cooperativeness; it can, however, facilitate the cooperative resolution of conflicts if the desire for this exists. In facilitating the cooperative resolution of conflicts in this way, AOR can, in the long term, encourage the desire for cooperation to grow (if only because it encourages belief in the possibility of cooperation).