Yes and no, the enlightenment brought us humanism which is little more than self worship. What makes humans worthy of worship the humanists tell us is reason. By extension humanists worship the goddess of reason and we all know how that worked out by cumilalating in the guillotine.

What we have seen since the 60s is people protesting the restrictions of civilization on their instincts or emotions. As it turns out the enlightenment took away the one thing that made civilization emotionally palatable, religion.

Nietzsche had an idea of how to deal with this problem but I'm not sure I approve of it. One thing for sure is we need a new crop of intellectuals because the current batch are unlikely to rise above their egos and deal with the unpleasantness of the human condition.

@wolfhnd The Enlightenment rush toward science and development, and the focus on the material did diminish our spiritual component, and it’s come at a cost. I still think reason is preferable to superstition and conspiracy thinking. And in many ways reason is the antidote to the flood of emotionalism and instinct driven behaviour of the left.

@GeeMac

Absolutely

I'm inclined to not view religion as superstition but more as an allegorical system of social organization. Like all evolved systems it doesn't inherently have "purpose". As humans we assign it purpose or agency because we can abstract reality fairly extensively. I have a similar view of capitalism. Capitalism properly understood is not so much an economic system as a social management system. It not only helps in establishing the necessary hierarchy of competence or meritocracy but enforces voluntary responsibility and delayed gratification.

The question becomes if top down or bottom up design is most likely to optimize fitness. In this case we are talking about group fitness not individual fitness as in artificial group selection.

There are two principles that are important to understand in making the determination. First that human sophistication is a product of swarm intelligence by cultural transmission. Second that science remains relatively poor at dealing with complex chaotic systems such as societies.

As to reason that is a complicated story. Western Civilization has been plagued by the Platonic school of what Kant called "pure reason". The relationship between experience or the empirical and logical reasoning is complicated. What is logical is not necessarily empirically accurate and visa versa. It is best to think of abstract tools such as language as just that tools and we all know the importance of experience in using tools.

Thinking tools have been culturally transmitted to us but we are hardly aware of the role that transfer has had on our consciousness. A brain no matter how innately sophisticated is unintelligent in the absence of experience or sensual stimulation. That stimulation comes both as direct experience and transmitted collective experience. No one is born a genius despite the importance of genetics. Genius is therefore not an individual characteristic but a complicated interplay of genes and environment. For the most part genius is a happy accident.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of education which is a form of social engineering. What I'm saying is complexity limits the effectiveness of social engineering. Hubris or the sin of pride has to be checked or unintended consequences will get out of hand. That is the insight of conservatism. Conservatives are as Obama noted "clingers". The problem is the left is blind to complexity. They assume that they are equally complex as the society they wish to transform. Fools as they say rush in where angels dare not tread.

On a personal note I'm an engineer so I'm very much a top down management personality. However I'm old and experienced enough to know my limitations. Sometimes you just have to go with convention or what the collective experience has taught. Jordan Peterson put it nicely when he said engineering a society is like giving a chimpanzee a wrench and expecting it to repair an attack helicopter.

@wolfhnd thanks for the reply. I didn’t mean to equate religion and superstition. I was referring to the irrational medieval thinking — fears around magic spells, ghosts, and spirits, or mysterious creatures in the forest — much of which was swept away by more rational Enlightenment thinking.