The Enlightenment Failed. Here’s What’s Next.
Somewhere on the other side of all this turbulence, something new is forming. Here’s what it I think it might look like.
The Age of Enlightenment. Its influence has hung over the world for centuries, beginning to collapse under its own weight after two world wars. Colonialism was breaking apart and while the West continues to dominate with America emerging as a hegemony, followed a bit by Russia, the world was changing. Today, we are in another turbulent time where hegemonies may fall, a new multipolar system arrives. It’s already messy, it will likely get messier.
So what comes after it all? Enlightenment 2.0? Utopia? A Gilded Age? A single world government? Techtopia? Dark Ages 2.0? I have a theory I’m working on and I’m calling it The Sophocene. What exactly will unfold we cannot of course, know. Technology plays a role, as it always has with humanity, but not in how you might at first think. Oh yeah, AI is in there, but also not in how you might think. And the prototype for The Sophocene already exists.
I had originally considered calling it Enlightenment 2.0, but I think this goes horribly wrong quite quickly. Because whose Enlightenment was it? And if the end result was two world wars, how enlightening was it? Then of course it was a Western European thing, excluding other cultures views, often having stolen from colonised countries and repackaging them as original European ideas. So Enlightnemnt 2.0 fails rather quickly.
A Gilded Age 2.0 fails as well, since it reflects more an age of industrialization and greater division of wealth. Utopia? Always nice ideals, hopeful for humanity, but extremely unlikely. A Techtopia? That leans into technofeudalism and autocracy.
Which brings us to The Sophocene. What do I mean by this? Sophi? it comes from the cross-cultural root of wisdom and -cene of course is a suffix for an age. Like the Anthropocene, or how we messed our planet up. The Sophocene could perhaps, be the age where we begin, as a species, imperfectly and haltingly, as we always tend to do, start to think collectively about the problems we’ve created and start to fix them. Globally. Not in a world hug around a global campfire, but somehow. Kind of what the Enlightenment was pretending to be. But that was just one civilization imposing its ideas on everyone else and damn the torpedoes!
The Enlightenment was largely built, constructed by the philosophers of the time and became core to Western European thought. I think though, given it is an era and grand scale, global and more of a planetary consciousness it can’t be built, but rather is an emergence over time. It doesn’t imply either, that this means complete agreement on everything, or that it’s perfectly wonderful. I don’t think it really can be. But it’s a step forward on our long journey as a species.
One of the more frustrating aspects of Enlightenment thinking and the standard stories that rolled out of it all was that we’re all just competitive, fight and bite a lot, that hierarchy is inevitable and cooperation is only achieved through coercion. This is not true we’ve learned more recently in anthropology and archeology. We’ve tended more towards egalitarian societies, trying different models of governance and a preference for trade and cooperation. Sorry Hobbes, your baseline is moot.
The Sophocene is not a utopia. It doesn’t resolve human conflict and contradiction. It is not, and cannot be, Western Enlightenment delivered at global scale, nor is it a technological fix. AI will be around, but as infrastructure. Nor is it a hegemony or a return to some imagined, yet false, past.
It’s uncomfortable yet at the same time more interesting. We are likely already in the early phase of a transitioning world. One where we may have regional hegemonies, but not global ones. This may well be key to enabling The Sophocene to happen. And the internet, our hyper-communications technologies and AI tools like LLMs may be helpful here, providing the right infrastructure but AI isn’t the content, it’s just a tool.
But the very technologies that enable this can of course, be used to foil such a global attempt. Russia and China already have their own “internet” and could move to block any such global conversations and actions. But even so, people always find workarounds, such as Iranians and others using space-based internet access. This would be a Sophocene Balkanization.
Another challenge is the attention economy. While the infrastructure of the internet is global, what lies over top of it as an economic model around much of the world, but not all, is a model designed for arousal, over understanding, reaction over reflection and outrage over wisdom. The requirement for real engagement with the other means slowness, availability of one another and the genuine risk of being changed.
The Sophocene requires a different economic model. It could still be commercial, but one where the incentive structure rewards depth, identifiable human actors, genuine encounter and productive disagreement over outrage engagement. Not an easy problem to solve. Enlightenment assumed expanding access to knowledge would produce wiser individuals and societies. Two-hundred and fifty or so years later we have TikTok and clickbait.
The Sophocene, as any such thing, requires collective sensemaking at a global scale. But such a thing needs time to work. To test ideas and the metabolism of culture to absorb and process it. Our technological infrastructure is accelerating the speed at which ideas, crises, and decisions move. The biological and cultural infrastructure for processing them has not accelerated. This isn’t new, every major information technology has created this gap, but the current magnitude is unprecedented.
We also wouldn’t want to end up with a global monoculture. To ensure the involvement of indigenous cultures, minorities and different nation states. A tension that must be held along with speed and depth and managing cooperation and genuine disagreement. Local rootedness and planetary consciousness. It perhaps from indigenous wisdom and that of African cultures that we may find the ways to resolve these tensions.
What makes The Sophocene distinct is not technology, though technology is part of it. It is not the internet, though the internet is its nervous system. It is something more fundamental: the end of the condition in which one civilisation’s way of knowing could plausibly claim to speak for all of them. In a multipolar, globally connected world, the Haudenosaunee understanding of collective governance, the Ubuntu philosophy of relational being, and the systems thinking of contemporary complexity science sit alongside Western rationalism not as curiosities but as co-contributors. The Sophocene will not be peaceful. It will not be fast. But it may be the first genuinely human age; in the full, plural, species-wide sense of that word.
The Sophocene is one that draws on Indigenous ecological knowledge alongside Silicon Valley systems thinking, on African philosophy alongside European rationalism, on ways of knowing that Enlightenment 1.0 dismissed as folklore and is now, urgently, rediscovering. The Sophocene will not be peaceful or fast. It will not arrive on a declared date or resolve the deep tensions of human difference. It emerges through this turbulence rather than after it, shaped by the same fractures and disruptions that define this difficult moment we are in today and will be for some time. It is emergent.
What makes it distinct from everything that came before is this: no single hegemony will author it. And holding it together, beneath all the noise, is something older than any civilisation; the stubborn, species-deep instinct to reach toward one another. That instinct may turn out to be the most important infrastructure of all.