The success at explaining and understanding the natural world encourages the Enlightenment project of re-making the social/political world, in accord with the true models we allegedly find in our reason.
Newton's system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and thus plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of our unaided faculties.
The Enlightenment encouraged experiments, from Horace Walpole's reinvention of the gothic style to Laurence Sterne's self-deconstructing novel Tristram Shandy.
Crummell remains encouraged about African enlightenment through all of this, though.
"The authors of the First Amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful ignorance," that decision said.
Now, let me encourage you to see a rather unusual and challenging performance exhibition, "Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture," on view every day at The Gallery at REDCAT in The Disney Concert Hall.
The American political scientist James Q . Wilson for example, traced the crisis to the 18th-century European Enlightenment, which encouraged people to question established authority, to criticize religion, and to reject traditional beliefs.
Or as I would less soberly paraphrase his point: Christian political theology encouraged the development of Enlightenment progressiveness the way that runaway mitosis encourages the discovery of cancer cures.
To secure the future of our own descendants we urgently need to bring about a digital enlightenment, one that encourages us to give personal data the reverence it deserves, one that recognises that the data's provenance is the people, one that empowers the people to act when their rights are so obviously infringed.
Reversed, it encourages us to forget about breakthroughs and enlightenment, and just step into that darkness.
