The Enlightenment, Dover Beach, and our withdrawing Sea of Faith
The average human in 1826 was not thinking about how the world would evolve over the next 200 years. They were not aware of the profound shifts the Enlightenment would press into our current-day experience. While the world around them was shifting, awakening, rippling change into the future, the average person was focused on surviving. There were signals of advancement at the cultural level — they were the first generation to stop believing in witches and werewolves — but these moved slowly.
I love this period of history. It's when broader humanity gained an appreciation for the complex beauty and connectedness of the lived experience. The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason (1685–1815), radiated from Western Europe to distant shores, and it signaled a shift in the human frequency.
Said simply: it was a transition from blind faith to empirical evidence. Thinkers started asking how things work — using the scientific method to prove (or disprove) their hunches about the lived experience. Humanity started to believe it could positively impact society through knowledge and reform. Humanity began to realize its agency.
Advancements occurred across every discipline — political, social, technological, labor. The most important was the concept of Individual Liberty and Natural Rights: the belief that freedom is an inherent human condition, not a gift from a monarch. And this idea had latent effects.
You can draw a through line from "Individual Liberty" to Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The idea festered in the collective consciousness of an infant, pluralistic project named the United States of America. A concept of human rights birthed in the Enlightenment eventually grew strong enough to help free slaves in the American South.
A world growing in opportunity
To see how these advancements proliferated, look at output per person — production by country divided by population.
Advancement was visible in the architecture, too — state-of-the-art buildings made possible by the science that drove the industrial revolution.
The Crystal Palace — a massive glass-and-iron hall built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 — was the monument of it. These paradigm shifts laid the groundwork for lifting individuals out of poverty.
When large swaths of a population have their basic needs met, there is more leisure time. What's done with that time becomes important for continuing the advancement — in large part because those leisure activities feed economic growth directly. But some choose to use the free time to think. To think about what to do with the economic power being afforded to them. To think about how society should move forward.
The grating roar
There is much to learn from the thinkers whose critiques landed during a period of hyper-development. The deconstruction of norms frees the imagination — but there is a cost. In the same year as the Great Exhibition, Matthew Arnold penned a cultural critique in the form of one of my favorite poems: "Dover Beach."
The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits… the cliffs of England stand, / Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
This is the facade of stability: the institutions, the monarchy, the promises of a rational age. The sea is calm; a peaceful status quo. In our time, the peaceful status quo is the post–Cold War order, the promise of technology, the stability of democracy.
…Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in.
This is the pivot. The calm sea turns into a grating roar, cycles that begin and cease. The Enlightenment's promise to raise people from poverty and bend humanity's trajectory upward was met with reality. The rising tide didn't lift all boats, and the advancements came in fits and starts.
Just as today: we see technologies introduced with so much promise, accompanied by doomscrolling, decreased privacy, and other (un)intended consequences. Democracy oscillated from 44 to 45.
The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…
The famous metaphor is the "bright girdle" — the cohesive belief system that once wrapped humanity. The Enlightenment's insistence on empirical evidence pulled faith out of the collective consciousness, disrupting the Sea of Faith.
The post-truth era we live in is the disruption of our Sea of Faith. The withdrawing roar is the sound of social trust eroding.
And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Without a collective Sea of Faith, the world becomes a darkling plain — confused. Armies ignorant of the cause they truly fight for, fueled by fear rather than purpose. It's the modern culture war: social media breeding "confused alarms" that resolve into algorithmically divided, "ignorant" armies who can't see the true enemy.
Arnold offers a solve: "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!"
And I'll offer the reality underneath it — that with all the ingenuity of the current day, if we could love one another enough, we could build a bright future that finally fulfills the promise of the 21st century.