Yet upon reading your comment, I do not feel as if the current world is leaving Reason behind, which was my impression from some of the comments in this diary.
Technologically and scientifically, the world is essentially the same, only with less philosophy and more practical application.
The importance of education remains both high and widely recognized to be high. Throughout the world everybody, especially the poor, sees education as key to success.
There are comparatively few societies left around the world in which social status is rigidly based on blood or caste, as opposed to merely wealth.
It's true that religion remains a formidable motive force in the world, as it always has been. However, the number of nonbelievers remains significant and shows no sign of actually vanishing. This is a net "win" for Enlightenment given how it started.
It's easy to lose sight of the big picture though, from the bleatings of the media, which likes to scare us with terrorism, war with enemy empires, and assorted religious issues of the day. So I'm still unconvinced that we have entered a post-Enlightenment world.
(*) somewhat off-topic, but you might find this interesting if you don't know it already: Newton's contribution was, in various ways, a dead end for physics. Without taking anything away from his achievements, his ideas about forces are in most cases unworkable, and must be replaced by ideas about fields and least energy, which were actually proposed as alternatives by thinkers on the continent. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
There is or was a tag line: "Our knowledge has exceeded our wisdom." Gains in technical knowledge, unless classified, are described in technical journals and or patent applications and thereby become relatively permanent in nature. Many can see and apply the advances. With the social sciences and the humanities is is very different.
There have been advances in the social sciences, but they have not been adopted on the basis of their usefulness to society at large, but rather on the basis of their utility to those occupying the seats of power. Worse, they often are no more accessible to the average citizen than are the findings of the hard sciences.
One of the great weaknesses of Enlightenment thought which persisted into the Enlightenment's child, Modernity, is the over valuation of the importance and power of reason. This is not to diminish the importance of reason, but to put it into perspective against the scope of the problem facing those of us who are awake.
Reason has so little scope in the effective decisions of so many people that the consequences are, or should be, frightening. Consider Germany in 1932 or Russia in 1918. There were people who understood what was happening and tried to do what they could to bring about a good outcome. They were like leaves in a hurricane. So often, especially in times of crisis, society at large is more like a vast ocean of unreason. I am reminded of the prayer from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: "Lord, thy ocean is so vast and my boat is so small!" Our reason is like a boat upon the ocean, but one that was not designed for ocean going voyages. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
