A Look from the Enlightenment to Modernism and Then to Today's Post-modernism

It is possible to define the Enlightenment period as a time when Europe emerged from the dark Middle Ages and began to value reason and science. The influence of this period, which spanned from the mid-seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries first toward industrialization and then toward modernization. 

The perspectives put forward through the works of scientists and thinkers such as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Francis Bacon, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Isaac Newton paved the way for understanding the laws of the universe, the establishment of nation-states, and the realization of how important constitutions, laws, science, and individual freedom are. Efforts to shape the rules of modern society under the guidance of reason and science also opened the door to the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, supporting the spread of the dominance of reason across the world. 

Therefore, we can say that modernity emerged as a system of rules and laws that regulates individual and social life, increasing efficiency and prosperity under the guidance of reason and science. On the other hand, these rules and laws could sometimes be so oppressive that, because they made the working conditions of industrial workers in the nineteenth century extremely harsh, the revolutionary ideas of thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarding the change of this order came to the fore and became widespread, and ultimately all these processes polarized the world in the twentieth century. Distinctions such as the Rich North – Poor South and the Developed West – Underdeveloped East were typical examples of this. The world had become a chessboard. 

I see this situation as a contradiction of the enlightenment process based on reason and science. While scientific efforts and research and development activities enable people to work more efficiently and live in prosperity, they also cause states that "produce" technology to establish superiority over states that "use" technology, companies to suppress worker wages to increase efficiency, and large technology companies to market the personal data of users on their own social media platforms for the sake of increasing advertising revenue. So much so that, today, it is not the individuals themselves who decide what to buy, what to like, what to believe, and who to vote for, but the technology companies that hold this personal data. 

This is the stage we define as Post-modernism, that is, beyond or after modernism. A feature of this period, which has another popular definition as post-truth, is that developing technology and science multiply and disseminate information, almost eliminating the barriers and boundaries to accessing knowledge. However, an important question arises here again: Which information we hear is true? Whose information is true? 

The tendency of false information to spread faster than accurate information, the absence of a single truth, the perception that every individual and every community's own perspective is correct in its own way, allowing everyone to say and do anything, the discovery of completely different laws such as quantum mechanics for atoms and subatomic objects alongside the laws discovered by Newton that are valid at the level of large objects, and the widespread availability of technologies that allow anyone, whether they know this information or not, to share it easily and quickly, literally force the people of this period to struggle in their search for truth, reality, and fact. 

Another of the most typical features of this period is the trivialization or marginalization of known, accepted, and applied social laws and systems. The "it's like that to me" perspective, presented without relying on concrete data and even in a way that suggests there is no need for proof, and the effort to ensure that communities believe this, have become the ordinary flow of life. Nowadays, when a war breaks out, we can encounter an infinite number of different answers as to what the cause is. That is, of course, if we can get out of our filter bubbles. When everyone has their own truth, it becomes impossible to reach a consensus or solution on any issue. 

The online feature of the internet, which was an invention of the twentieth century but has become a tool of the twenty-first century, connecting people and objects to each other, has now revealed that states and companies that possess these technologies have an "implicit power" that can directly influence and direct individual people and objects. 

What falls to us, in this period that we can define as an "eclipse of reason," is to lead a life in the light of science and under the guidance of reason in our search for truth, reality, and fact.