How These Seven Developments Shaped the Modern World
Seven Key Historical Moments
What happens in 1776—this one remarkable year—is that there are seven key developments that you can see in a particularly intense form.
You have globalization; the Enlightenment, the intellectual development that makes Europeans think that we are the first people to understand the world for itself rather than just being taught what to believe; you have industrialization, which centers on the development of the steam engine and then developments in mining and trains and all the things that flow from it, like electricity; you have enrichment, which is really important because if you looked at a map of how human beings have developed in wealth over the whole of human history, you would see it sort of bumps along like this for 10,000 years, and then somewhere around the 1770s it shoots upwards and hasn’t stopped rising since. And then you have democracy, which of course is the one development most of us do know about because of the American Revolution. You have the move to post-Christianity, or ex-Christianity, where elites in Europe and North America begin to say that they’re going to leave behind Christianity and move beyond it.
Remaking the World
Andrew Wilson
In this skillfully researched book, Andrew Wilson explains how 7 historic events in 1776 shaped today’s post-Christian West and equips believers to share God’s truth in the current social landscape.
And then you have Romanticism, which is the artistic movement that comes out in poetry, music, and art, but it also shapes the way we think about the self and who we are in our image-bearing.
And effectively, those seven developments are all concentrated in this one year, and then they explode out and shape almost everything in modern life. The last 250 years is a story of increasing globalization, as the world gets smaller and technology joins up more and more parts of the world. Actually, the Enlightenment informs the way we think about ourselves and education and knowledge, and the way we think about science and history and women and slavery and all sorts of things are all connected there.
Industrial technology, as we know, just runs amok. The world gets richer and richer and people live longer and healthier lives, although that brings a lot of damage as well, like war and atom bombs and all that. Democracy went from no countries in 1775 to one in 1776 to now where nearly every country on earth purports to be a democracy or a republic. I think there are six countries on earth today that don’t say they are either a democracy or a republic. And many of them aren’t, as we would understand it, but that’s what they say. And then post-Christianity increased in Europe and then has now come across to North America as well in some ways. And then Romanticism.
That’s how I would tell that story. I think the last 250 years is the story of how those seven developments collided with one another and shaped much of what we now do—even in ways we’re not even aware of. We wouldn’t necessarily say, “Oh, that Romantic idea couples with this industrial technology to create this phenomenon of people being able to change their sex,” or whatever it might be. It’s a collision between an ideological thing, a material thing, and an economic thing, which creates a lot of the changes we are experiencing at the moment. I hope that’s a helpful way of thinking about it.
Andrew Wilson is the author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.
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