This has emerged from a pretty extensive conversation involving RSA staff and Trustees and is based on research with Fellows and partners. We wanted something broad enough to reflect our heritage and cover the range of our activities but also bold and interesting. Rather than spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a face-lift our approach is, as it were, to drop the phrase into conversation and see what people make of it.

The reason I liked 21st century enlightenment (despite having lots of ideas of my own) is that it has two meanings. The ‘soft’ interpretation is simply that the RSA seeks to enlighten people as to the nature of the modern world and the best ideas to make that world better. With an amazing programme of lectures and events, not to mention the website and Journal, we can certainly claim to be meeting this objective.

The ‘hard’ interpretation is an unashamed championing of the values of the Enlightenment, the era in which the RSA itself was established.

If I can be excused a very superficial reading of history, the idea I associate with the Enlightenment is this: There is a good way to live one’s life but this ideal does not rely on rules handed down by kings or bishops but can be derived from an account of the kind of society in which we want to live and the kind of people we are and have the capacity to be. 

In the past I have spoken about a social aspiration gap, defined as separating the kind of future most people say they want for society and the kind of future we are likely to build relying on current patterns of thought and behaviour. This gap can be seen to have three dimensions, three ways in which we the people must develop to close the gap. Collectively we must be more engaged, more self reliant and more pro-social.

Personally, I believe there are many things wrong with modern society including our, as yet, inadequate response to climate change . These challenges help to make the case for us to live differently. But the case for 21st century enlightenment does not rely on these pressures. Being engaged, self reliant and altruistic is the way to live the good life in the good society.

As someone who calls themselves progressive, I worry sometimes that people who share these values feel the best way they can make the case for a different way of living is to say we are in a crisis, whether environmental, social or economic. In this way progressives can sound very much like pessimists. On occasion, for example, environmentalists sound like they would be disappointed if a technology was invented which took carbon from the atmosphere without us all having to stop travelling and shopping.

The point for me is not that human beings have failed to achieve progress (who among us wish to return to a time when the average life expectancy was less than forty?) but that more is required of us and more can be achieved by us.

This can be a century when the human race not only meets the challenges it has created for itself, but when it can aspire to reach a higher level of functioning with more and more of the human race feeling more able to discover and express their full capabilities. This is the ideal of 21st century enlightenment.

I realise this all sounds rather trite. Whether the new strap-line works is more about what the RSA does than what it says about itself. This means our lectures, our research, the feel of our House and most of all the ways we support our Fellows to be a force for good. Of one thing  I am reasonably confident; this is an account of our mission of which our founding fathers (they were all men) would approve.

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My role was so minimal I didn’t even feel able to use to make my own brief comment on the Olympics. If I had it would have been this…..

” It may be a post hoc rationalisation but it seems to me that the Olympics we deem to have succeeded are ones we associate with a strong story about the host city and country. Think Barcelona and Spain’s emergence as a modern democracy. Think Sydney and Australia’s projection as a young and dynamic country. Think China and the demonstration of its status as a new superpower. But what was Atlanta’s story. And what was Athens’? 

In 2005 we won the bid on such a story – of London as a diverse city and our Olympic vision of inclusion and participation. But what has happened to that story since? As far as I know the latest statistics show that sporting participation in London has failed to increase since 2005. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I see precious few fruits of the Mayor’s much vaunted sporting strategy.

If we are to have a story to tell about Britain and London in 2012 we better start on it now. Because if we don’t have our own story, and if don’t make it real through a successful strategy to make the Olympics truly inclusive and a catalyst for participation then we will leave it to others to write that story for us. And what they say may be less than flattering.”

Come to think of it, I guess it was best I didn’t get the chance to speak. There’s nothing worse than a party pooper.

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I was reminded of my own irrational feelings towards everyday objects when I went to get a temporary pass for the BBC (soon to be followed by the real thing). It filled me with a quite undue sense of pride and achievement.

It’s not the first time this has happened. Over several years I took great pleasure in keeping my Labour Party conference passes as I passed through various stages of promotion from research assistant to head of rebuttal to head of policy and ultimately assistant general secretary. And when I left Number Ten I went to quite some lengths to hold on to my Downing Street and Parliamentary passes, not because I wanted to gain illicit entry, but because each pass carried a great symbolic weight.

Indeed, so voluminous has my collection now become that I suspect if I ever go completely dotty I will be found running naked down the South Lambeth Road wearing nothing but hundreds of brightly coloured passes and lanyards.

Getting the BBC pass involved another memorable moment. The young man in the ID office was having some difficulty printing my photograph when an internal BBC messenger came to his desk to drop off a parcel. When the messenger held out his clipboard for a signature the ID guy said ‘sorry I’m a bit busy can I sign for it later’. The messenger was walking away when he turned; ‘sorry, mate, I think I need it now’. At which point ID guy leant over and signed, an act that must have taken all of two seconds.

I always think when I say it that it’s true, but I guess the statement ’I am too busy’ is an assertion of status, a way of showing that your job is more important that the person seeking your time. Maybe ID card guy was once assistant ID card guy, someone who had no choice but to sign when asked. But now he has moved up in the world and everyone needs to know it.

‘How funny; to be so obsessed with status, to behave in such an evidently silly way’ I said to myself slightly adjusting my jacket collar to make sure any passer-by caught sight of my bright blue BBC lanyard.

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I frequently give lectures, chair events and meet and greet the famous and powerful (today, for example, I welcomed Gordon Brown to the RSA where he was giving a speech to the think tank IPPR about constitutional reform). None of this stopped me being incredibly nervous today. As I told the class, my own teenage sons find it hard to listen to me for more than about two minutes, so how would I hold their attention for an hour?  

To break the ice I told them about a former academic colleague of mine who spent the whole summer preparing for his first ever lecture. To avoid any mistakes he wrote out every word in advance. On the day he strode as confidently as he could across the stage, plonked his notes on the lectern and started to speak. 

He was just beginning to get over the worst of his nerves when he began to hear some students giggling. Without looking up or stopping his flow he tried to work out what might be the cause – were his flies undone, did he have odd socks on? It was only then he realised: since his opening words he had gradually been lifting the lectern from the floor and it was now almost head height. 

Anyway, not only did I calm my nerves, but I had a great hour. The content picked up on a recurrent theme of mine: politics is difficult because we the people have complex and often contradictory desires. Having shown the students that they agreed with both the following statements, I got half the class to develop the best argument for the proposition: 

As long as we aren’t breaking the law or hurting anyone else the Government should not interfere with how we run out lives    

And the other half to defend 

Government has an important role to play in encouraging us to look after our health, protect the environment and other things we care about as a society  

I found it fascinating that within fifteen minutes the groups had identified the three classical philosophical arguments for both the libertarian and paternalistic state.    

After the lesson I met a group of students who had been involved in the school’s impressive international work. Some had been on exchange trips to Russia, others to help out with a social project in Uganda set up by the teacher whose class I was leading. 

Talking to the school’s passionate Headteacher, I was reminded of one of the many dilemmas of decision making. The school is by far the most socially diverse in the largely affluent and white borough of Bromley. It does benefit from some central Government funding but the local authority does not give it any additional support despite its crumbling building, its challenging intake and its steadily improving results. 

There is little question that greater devolution to councils in affluent areas will tend to lead to lower levels of redistribution within services; these councils generally don’t need the votes of poorer citizens to get re-elected. The goals of social justice and local democratic freedom pull in opposite directions. 

It’s not an easy problem to crack, but if we want some sound advice we could do worse than ask some of the year 11 students at Cator Park.

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Recently I described fending off the critique of neurological reductionism applied, in particular, to my Prospect piece about politics and human nature. That piece, and the annual lecture which echoed some of its themes, were entitled ‘left brain, right brain’. The title implied that political positions were in some way ‘hard wired’ in brain areas. In fact, my focus was on how general insights into human nature could shed light on the claims made from different political traditions.

So, naturally, I was intrigued when sent a link to an article which genuinely does seem to imply that our political values reflect the structure of our brains. The piece, by a team from Northwestern University, Illinois, reports a negative correlation between a personality trait called Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and activity levels in the part of the brain associated with empathising with people in pain.                   

SDO is so we are told:

Across human cultures…a stable and unique personality trait that predicts a wide variety of social and political attitudes. For instance people higher in SDO have been shown to support political ideologies that promote social hierarchy rather than egalitarianism, oppose public policies intended to attenuate group-based social inequality, and see societal roles that reify dominance hierarchy within social institutions (e.g. law enforcement rather than social work).  

The research which compared subject’s personality assessments with fMRI scans concludes:

Individuals who indicated a greater desire for social dominance hierarchy showed less response when perceiving pain in others within front-insular regions critical to the ability to share and feel concern for the emotional salience of another person’s misfortune  

So there we have it, just as I thought, right wing people have damaged brains which make them insensitive to the needs and feelings of their fellow citizens.

What do you mean ‘things are more complicated than that’?

OK, I suppose there may be some very minor qualifications one might want to add:

Although it is often claimed that research has pinpointed where in the brain an activity happens, things often turn out to be more complicated. Complex thought processes are not modular but take place in many regions of the brain  

A correlation isn’t quite the same as a cause. Experience and practice re-wire the brain. It could be people’s chosen or socially-shaped attitudes that cause their brain responses to change, rather than vice versa

Some people might even argue that it isn’t ‘SDOers’ that are the abnormal ones. Maybe the problem in the world is too many people who can’t control their empathetic responses, or fail to see the need for hierarchy to get things done and maintain social order. Perhaps, they might suggest, the world would be a better place if we empathised less and judged more.

And, yes, I have to recognise that a fondness for hierarchy isn’t entirely restricted to people on the right of the political spectrum. Come to think of it, I’ve known a few lefties not that strong on empathy

Also I suppose I should remain true to my own model of behaviour and recognise that even if some people demonstrably have brains which are less attuned to empathy this doesn’t mean they might not make life choices which balance their physiological predispositions, or live in a community with strong norms of compassion and charity

But, as any reasonable person would recognise, these are just minor quibbles. The research team of Chiao, Mathur, Harada and Lipke have confirmed what most of the people I hang around with already knew; left wing people are simply much nicer. And anyone who says different is ignoring the science.

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