Seven Key Historic Moments
What occurs in 1776—this one exceptional 12 months—is that there are seven key developments which you could see in a very intense type.
You’ve got globalization; the Enlightenment, the mental improvement that makes Europeans suppose that we’re the primary folks to know the world for itself fairly than simply being taught what to imagine; you’ve got industrialization, which facilities on the event of the steam engine after which developments in mining and trains and all of the issues that stream from it, like electrical energy; you’ve got enrichment, which is de facto necessary as a result of if you happen to checked out a map of how human beings have developed in wealth over the entire of human historical past, you’d see it form 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’ve got democracy, which after all is the one improvement most of us do find out about due to the American Revolution. You’ve got 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 guide, Andrew Wilson explains how 7 historic occasions in 1776 formed right this moment’s post-Christian West and equips believers to share God’s fact within the present social panorama.
After which you’ve got Romanticism, which is the inventive 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 all the things in fashionable life. The final 250 years is a narrative of accelerating globalization, because the world will get smaller and expertise joins up increasingly components of the world. Really, the Enlightenment informs the best way we take into consideration ourselves and training and information, and the best way we take into consideration science and historical past and girls and slavery and all kinds of issues are all linked there.
Industrial expertise, as we all know, simply runs amok. The world will get richer and richer and other people dwell longer and more healthy lives, though that brings a number of injury as effectively, like warfare and atom bombs and all that. Democracy went from no nations in 1775 to at least one 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 right this moment 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 effectively in some methods. After which Romanticism.
That’s how I’d 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 expertise to create this phenomenon of individuals with 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 a number of the modifications we’re experiencing in the intervening time. I hope that’s a useful mind-set about it.
Andrew Wilson is the creator of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Publish-Christian West.
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