Answer:
The European Enlightenment of the !8th century could not have happened without the previous, and concurrent, Scientific Revolution, and its technological discoveries and inventions, in the !7th and 18th centuries. The Scientific Revolution is the most important event in world history yet most people have never heard of it. A person is unable to understand the world around around them today without at least some basic knowledge of The Scientific Revolution.
There was a small group of philsophers (of the Enlightenment) who really understood that a new world was emerging in Europe in the human understanding of reality. They understood that Man was able to rationally explain Nature for the first time in human history. That God was not actually physically present in Nature. That God, therefore, might not actually exist at all (Atheism). That Man was now in control of Nature. That Man was no longer part of Nature; these were now two separate philosophical realms. That Man was above Nature, even God. And, the big one, the basis of the Enlightenment itself, that Man could remake the world using his rational thought (ideas) without any reference to European history, European tradition or Man as even part of Nature. In other words, wishful thinking born from the dangerous rationalisation of taking ideas to their logical conclusion without any reference to reality.
So, of course, the adoption of these “scorched Earth” or “Year Zero” ideas of the Enlightment was, and still is, a complete disaster for humanity. Especially when combined with the new controlling powers of Science and Technology. The Enlightentment led directly to the first emergence of Left wing politics - that Man is created purely through Nurture, not Nature, and is born as a “blank slate” - with no reference to our 200,000 years of evolutionary adaptation as part of Nature.
This distorted thinking, in turn, led eventually, to the disastrous political and social events of 1968, when even objectivity itself was jettisoned. And, then to the final post-Modern delusion that European culture, art and science is no better than even the most primitive tribes (blank slates) still living in the jungle today.
