I think I told you before that I first found out about the Post Modern Age after I had been living in it for over 50 years. I asked a number of other people, both on line and off, and none of them had ever heard of it either. This makes me wonder how many unenlightened people lived during the Enlightenment, blissfully unaware that they were missing out on something big. I made a joke once that the Age of Reason ended a long time ago, but maybe not. There must still be some reasonable people around, maybe even more than there were during the actual Age of Reason. Somebody should do a study about that.
I think the egalitarian movements of the 19th and 20th Century belong in a different category than the Enlightenment Age. When John Locke originated the phrase "All men are created equal", I'm sure that he meant "white males". He certainly didn't include women and children, such an idea was unheard of at the time. When our own Declaration of Independence quoted that phrase, slavery was still widely practiced in this country. It seems that our Founding Fathers were concerned about that and argued about it some, but it wasn't until 1865 that slavery was finally abolished. People commonly say that Lincoln freed the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation, but that was just war time propaganda. Slavery was not legally abolished until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865. Then it took another hundred years to get them their civil rights.
I'm sure I mentioned before that, if I had my druthers, I druther be an isolationist but, realistically, that's not going to happen. Like it or not, we're stuck with this globalism thing, maybe forever. Cultures will continue to clash until they wear all the rough edges off of each other and meld together into one homogenous glob. With any kind of luck, we'll both be dead by then.
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