Around 1784, Immanuel Kant published an essay asking the question, " What is enlightenment? He was at the tail end of the Enlightenment age, and people were now assigning that label. The Renaissance came and went, and now Kant immortalized the idea that there was a new age that was just experienced. A new period of human enlightenment. If he only knew what was to come!
The French spoke of les Lumières, or the lights, speaking of the bright minds and intellectuals that were pushing society toward curiosity and away from superstition. The Germans called this Aufklärung. Which, if I remember right, is literally the actual concept that we describe as enlightenment today. The awakening of people to flee ignorance and embrace reason, religious tolerance, education, and individual rights.
Would we recognize it if we were living through an equally significant transition right now?
People inside major transformations usually recognize the phenomena before they recognize the era. They notice printing presses, factories, railroads, computers, AI, declining institutions, new philosophies, strange new occupations, changes in how people communicate. Only later does someone give the whole thing a name. Which produces an interesting thought:
History’s great ages are usually named by the people who come after them, but they are felt by the people who live through them.
In my opinion, we are now in a new age. I will call it the Age of Knowledge. For the first time, access to almost all human knowledge is ubiquitous. The Enlightenment gave humanity access to reason. The next age will require humanity to learn what to do when knowledge itself is no longer scarce.
The previous problem was: how do I obtain knowledge? Now we are in a new shift where the scarcity becomes judgment. Kant might therefore describe this not as an enlightened age, but as something like an age of discernment, in which the defining human capability is no longer acquiring information but exercising judgment over it.
The whirlwind of news cycles, the political theatre, data centers in space, wars between the usual suspects are easy distractions, but take a moment and realize just what we have done. Knowledge is near universal now, and that will have a major impact on all of humanity. The same way the Enlightenment brought on the fall of monarchs, new laws establishing human rights, and the exponential progress that led to the Industrial Revolution. Who knows what is in store for us?
