A modern Enlightenment is possible

Will Hutton

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So what is the Enlightenment, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was asked back in 1784 as this transformative body of ideas and values swept across Europe. It is, he replied, to dare to know: to acquire and test knowledge and thus the truth of what you think you know. Challenge your ignorance and find a path to truths that correspond to reality.

The Enlightenment opened the door to modernity. The march of science, medicine and industry was unleashed. Longevity and living standards rose in tandem. There were parallel advances in checked and balanced democratic government and the associated freedoms to speak, to associate, to publish, to research, to buy and sell freely and to vote.

Tolerance, freedom and justice were and are supreme Enlightenment values, as is the insistence that loyalty to kith and kin extends to sustaining the public realm. Universal human rights are foundational. And thus, the vital primacy of impartial law to govern all of this. In Britain, ordinary men and women have been thankful beneficiaries of the results - whether the arrival of sanitation and the elimination of deadly disease or winning the right to vote.

The Enlightenment was a revolution of ideas and of practice. It could never have spread without a passion for trusted information, data and scientific evidence at its core. Debate and deliberation, central to daring to know, needed as a precondition a shared body of fact. Truths do exist. The BBC, for example, was established as a public body to use the new broadcast media to disseminate impartial information better to inform and educate British citizens.