Is the Enlightenment over?
I experienced a terrifying thought this weekend: what if we are nearing the end of The Enlightenment?
Before he died, Carl Sagan wrote an uncharacteristically pessimistic book entitled The Demon-Haunted World." In the book, he argued the cause of science as a means of holding back a return of the Dark Ages, a period of Wesetern history characterized by lack of widespread education and a belief in the supernatural and superstition. In the Dark Ages, the world was a fearful place in which wolves roamed Europe and death was all too present for the ordinary person: superstition was the only means of rationalizing what seemed to be a capricious, irrational, and dangerous world.
With the emergence of the Renaissance, that changed. The reemergence of classical texts into educated discourse, the rise of arts and sciences, and the rise of great cities powered by an emerging merchant class altered the course of Western history. The Enlightenment, also termed the Age of Reason, emerged in the 18th century as the successor to that movement, asserting reason and science as the basis for man's survival and mastery of the world around him. Mill and Locke and Rousseau sought a rational basis for governance, just as Newton sought a mathematical basis for gravity and motion.
Yet now in the post-9/11 age, we see that for decades the demons have been at our door. The Christian Right in America, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Ayatollahs in Iran. A new conservatism, a new embrace of the nonrational flows about the globe, like fog creeping in from the moor. Could Carl Sagan have ben right, is a new Dark Age near at hand? Will the next 50 years simply be the slow ebb of the great civilizations built on science?
Or is this the last gasp of an historical echo that cannot last in the harsh light of ever-present information, instantly-connected citizenry. The Dark Ages persisted because the political and economic structures isolated the populace, cutting off contact with the outside world for much of Europe. In the Age of the Internet, how can the nonrational survive, except among the fringe who may choose it? When the great online masses correct articles on Wikipedia in mere minutes, how can falsehood or superstition thrive?
History has not yet written this chapter. And perhaps we'll be surprised at how it may look: what if the answer is that a Dark Age did not return to the West, but the East began to shine anew on the backs of Western technological advance? Perhaps great slumbering China will awake from its dreams to brush off the demons from its eyes, leaving them to linger on in the surpassed, crumbling West....
Before he died, Carl Sagan wrote an uncharacteristically pessimistic book entitled The Demon-Haunted World." In the book, he argued the cause of science as a means of holding back a return of the Dark Ages, a period of Wesetern history characterized by lack of widespread education and a belief in the supernatural and superstition. In the Dark Ages, the world was a fearful place in which wolves roamed Europe and death was all too present for the ordinary person: superstition was the only means of rationalizing what seemed to be a capricious, irrational, and dangerous world.
With the emergence of the Renaissance, that changed. The reemergence of classical texts into educated discourse, the rise of arts and sciences, and the rise of great cities powered by an emerging merchant class altered the course of Western history. The Enlightenment, also termed the Age of Reason, emerged in the 18th century as the successor to that movement, asserting reason and science as the basis for man's survival and mastery of the world around him. Mill and Locke and Rousseau sought a rational basis for governance, just as Newton sought a mathematical basis for gravity and motion.
Yet now in the post-9/11 age, we see that for decades the demons have been at our door. The Christian Right in America, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Ayatollahs in Iran. A new conservatism, a new embrace of the nonrational flows about the globe, like fog creeping in from the moor. Could Carl Sagan have ben right, is a new Dark Age near at hand? Will the next 50 years simply be the slow ebb of the great civilizations built on science?
Or is this the last gasp of an historical echo that cannot last in the harsh light of ever-present information, instantly-connected citizenry. The Dark Ages persisted because the political and economic structures isolated the populace, cutting off contact with the outside world for much of Europe. In the Age of the Internet, how can the nonrational survive, except among the fringe who may choose it? When the great online masses correct articles on Wikipedia in mere minutes, how can falsehood or superstition thrive?
History has not yet written this chapter. And perhaps we'll be surprised at how it may look: what if the answer is that a Dark Age did not return to the West, but the East began to shine anew on the backs of Western technological advance? Perhaps great slumbering China will awake from its dreams to brush off the demons from its eyes, leaving them to linger on in the surpassed, crumbling West....
