Is the Social Sector Going Through Its Own Age Of Enlightenment?

At his keynote presentation at re:Vision 2010 last night in Toronto, "How To Change The World," author David Bornstein made a fascinating historical analogy. For him, the broad shift in the nonprofit and social enterprise space from guesswork to knowable results and measurable impact is akin to the movement from magical thinking to scientific rationality during the European Age of Enlightenment.

For those who haven't been in a history classroom for a while, the refresher course is that the Enlightenment was the period in European history starting in the late 17th and running through the 18th centuries in which we saw the simultaneous emergence of a new political and social philosophy that identified the rights of man as sacrosanct and necessary of protection as well as the scientific method which began to demonstrate natural processes of cause and effect, rather than forcing people to look to the mystical to understand natural phenomena.

The connection that David drew from the Enlightenment era was largely about the process of cause and effect and the replicability of results from effective social interventions. He told the story of Gary White, the founder of Water.org. When Gary started his professional career working with water projects in Latin America in the mid 1980s, the interventions were entirely focused on the mechanics of digging wells. The success of those interventions was often less than 50%.

Yet the water movement -- with people like Gary White in the lead -- slowly started to shift its understanding of success. It turns out that when you're trying to get clean water permanently available to a village, there is an entire complex system that needs to be build around the water delivery technology. You need people who know how to repair inevitable problems with the well itself. You need committees to determine how to buy the spare parts. You need a general appreciation of the importance of sanitation. And so on and so forth.

At this point, Gary's organization doesn't actually do any of the well digging. They are focused entirely on creating a mechnaism to make the necessary social systems grow and thrive around wells and water safety systems. According to Gary (via Bornstein), the old style of intervention is now basically unthinkable.

For David, this is an example -- one that you can also see in the changes in after school tutoring programs and other areas -- of the social sectors growing rationality and shift away from magical thinking. I think it's a great point, and it's nice to hear it placed in that broader context, rather than as just a mechanical obsession with metrics that can sometimes cripple thinking as much as it enables it.

But I think that you could take David's Enlightenment analogy one step further. It was out of Enlightenment ideals that modern democracy was born, and that the idea of the fundamental equality, rather than inequality, of people created the philosophical basis from which the abolitionist movements and modern human rights advocacy could grow.

At their core, those ideas affirmed the agency of people to remake the world. The single most exciting thing happening to the social sector these days is that the swath of people who we treat as having agency to remake the world is changing. Although it can still sometimes feel like it depending on which events you go to, we've turned a corner where social change is no longer only the redistributive pursuit of the rich. One need look no further than the dozen or more countries of origin for participants at the Unreasonable Institute or the Global Engagement Summit to see that the dynamics of who teaches who and who works together to remake the world are shifting.

That's a good thing, it's a powerful thing, and it's something we should be pushing anymore. Then maybe someday you'll see a blog post about the incredibly generative power of our very own Age of Enlightenment.

Check out David Bornstein's new book "Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs To Know" - the most essential starter guide to the field I've yet seen. Due out in a couple weeks.

Photo credit: Sir Isaac Newton statue, by Harlaqueen