The Age of Enlightenment Has Yet to Come

In the words of Immanuel Kant, to be “enlightened” is simply to “Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!” If we were to simply use this as a guide to determine whether or not we are living in an enlightened era, then I would say that we are most definitely living in a time of enlightenment. One only has to look to the Internet to see just how enlightened people are. People have taken their own understanding of things and run into the sunset with them.

In the traditional sense of enlightenment as in the philosophical movement in which great thinkers such as Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke made significant scientific discoveries and questioned authority. 

They demanded that citizens be given rights, which, in turn, resulted in the great revolutions from which The United States of America and the American Revolutionary spirit was born.

The era of Enlightenment encouraged human thinking and development, something that is still very much at play. But people refusing to be unquestionably be governed is about all that has changed, and in some aspects, we are regressing as people are willing more and more to give up all sense of liberty for false sense of security and or convenience. 

More and more we allow the government to dictate what we do with ourselves and our lives, which is a far cry from the founding fathers wanted for a country that was to provide relief from an abusive form of governing.

On a different front, humans have never been more developed, have they? Humans have developed technology that easily takes the place of human bodies in many instances from factory jobs to what checks out the food in the supermarkets. Sir Newton would be impressed.  But, what of humanity? When will we develop those traits that supposedly separate us from brutes? 

When will the evils of faced by Oroonoko and Olaudah Equiano be nothing but horrors, instead of accounts that can be found on the five o’clock news? 

Will there ever be a time that humans can exist in a way that those in positions of power do not feed off of those in need? The abuse that we inflict on each other needs to stop before we can ever consider ourselves truly enlightened. 

Until humans can learn to work together instead of continually climbing upwards while climbing on others simply proves that we fall in live on the race to survival by any means necessary just as all the other animals do.