Lava Lamp: TEDxVolcano and the Social Enterprise Enlightenment

by Jeff Trexler · 2010-04-21 08:10:00 UTC
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Scuppered in ol' Blighty, our very own newsy Natty W didn't just spend his volcano-induced holiday after the Skoll conference just noncing about.  Instead, he put together the first spontaneous TED gathering--and in so doing provided an intriguing counterpoint to his recent post on David Bornstein's analogizing social enterprise to the Age of Enlightenment.

Consider the theme that pervaded the talks at the TEDxVolcano event:  namely, the volcano's significance as a teachable moment for our economic "meltdown" and the climate crisis.  On one level, attempting to learn from a natural disaster--whether the Iceland volcano or the Haiti disaster--reinforces Bornstein's analogy, inasmuch as a defining moment in the Enlightenment's development was the struggle to explain how the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake was consistent with the justice of God and natural law.

Nonetheless, there is a subtle yet telling difference between Enlightenment theodicy and how TEDx speakers leveraged the volcano.  Arguably the signal contribution of the Enlightenment response to Lisbon was a conceptual separation between natural disasters and moral responsibility -- the burning lava of a fiery volcano was no longer a monster of reason, and sermons based on stones became a relic of a superstitious past.  At TEDxVolcano, however, pre-Enlightenment rhetoric was out in full force, with the Earth using the volcano to remind us of our all too human failures and the need to act.

Perhaps it's inevitable that the modern mind is reverting back to its premodern state.  At a time when we have literally banished darkness with eternal city lights, the world itself now seems to be an extension of our technology, as much a work of human hands as it had once been the creation of God. In such an environment attempts to section off moral responsibility tend to break down, since "the hidden thunders/belched from underground" no longer seem beyond our control.

Photo credit: Lava Dragon by Liz Henry

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