Seven Key Historic Moments
What occurs in 1776—this one outstanding 12 months—is that there are seven key developments that you could see in a very intense type.
You may have globalization; the Enlightenment, the mental improvement that makes Europeans suppose that we’re the primary individuals to grasp the world for itself relatively than simply being taught what to imagine; you could have industrialization, which facilities on the event of the steam engine after which developments in mining and trains and all of the issues that circulation from it, like electrical energy; you could have enrichment, which is de facto vital as a result of when you checked out a map of how human beings have developed in wealth over the entire of human historical past, you’ll see it kind of bumps alongside like this for 10,000 years, after which someplace across the 1770s it shoots upwards and hasn’t stopped rising since. After which you could have democracy, which in fact is the one improvement most of us do learn about due to the American Revolution. You may have the transfer to post-Christianity, or ex-Christianity, the place elites in Europe and North America start to say that they’re going to go away behind Christianity and transfer past it.
On this skillfully researched ebook, Andrew Wilson explains how 7 historic occasions in 1776 formed as we speak’s post-Christian West and equips believers to share God’s fact within the present social panorama.
After which you could have Romanticism, which is the creative motion that comes out in poetry, music, and artwork, nevertheless it additionally shapes the best way we take into consideration the self and who we’re in our image-bearing.
And successfully, these seven developments are all concentrated on this one 12 months, after which they explode out and form virtually every thing in fashionable life. The final 250 years is a narrative of accelerating globalization, because the world will get smaller and know-how joins up increasingly elements of the world. Really, the Enlightenment informs the best way we take into consideration ourselves and training and data, and the best way we take into consideration science and historical past and ladies and slavery and all kinds of issues are all linked there.
Industrial know-how, as we all know, simply runs amok. The world will get richer and richer and folks stay longer and more healthy lives, though that brings plenty of harm as nicely, like warfare and atom bombs and all that. Democracy went from no nations in 1775 to 1 in 1776 to now the place almost each nation on earth purports to be a democracy or a republic. I feel there are six nations on earth as we speak that don’t say they’re both a democracy or a republic. And plenty of of them aren’t, as we’d perceive it, however that’s what they are saying. After which post-Christianity elevated in Europe after which has now come throughout to North America as nicely in some methods. After which Romanticism.
That’s how I might inform that story. I feel the final 250 years is the story of how these seven developments collided with each other and formed a lot of what we now do—even in methods we’re not even conscious of. We wouldn’t essentially say, “Oh, that Romantic thought {couples} with this industrial know-how to create this phenomenon of individuals having the ability to change their intercourse,” or no matter it is likely to be. It’s a collision between an ideological factor, a cloth factor, and an financial factor, which creates plenty of the modifications we’re experiencing in the mean time. I hope that’s a useful mind-set about it.
Andrew Wilson is the writer of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.
