But where is your evidence that peoples other than Western have gone through the Enlightenment rather than cherry-picked technologies from it (which is not the same thing)? The majority of people are not Enlightened Westerners (and certainly not in any way Liberals) and because of that your point will not stand the tiniest bit of analysis. The difficulties in which the ecosystem that is the planet finds itself are to do with the innate nature of humanity: selfish, boorish, power-hungry, anthropocentric and within that entirely tribal.
Nothing to do with Western Liberalism or Enlightenment.
And in a world where people with access to Western science read their horoscopes and don't believe in vaccines, there is a shortage of evidence that people aren't literally terminally stupid.
John
I'm not a moral relativist, John, but at the same time I'm not really interested in comparing what we do with China. I think we should be looking at ourselves first and foremost, not least because China doesn't exist in a vacuum.
This country is a product of Western Liberal Democracy. Liberalism won the argument a long time ago to the extent that we don't really have any conservative politics in this country as it stands today. The problem with Liberalism, is that it has expansion at the core of the philosophy: it was pursued aggressively back in the day and remains with us today, albeit not so aggressive.
The idea that human beings can and must save other human beings is central to Liberalism. The problem being that we are not necessarily reasonable, which is not what the Enlightenment thinkers claimed and used as a basis for their ideas, and what we end up doing is essentially trying to make them like us. Again, this is a fundamentally flawed human centric view of the world which extends to nature: we delude ourselves into thinking we know best and consequently believe we can just take over everything and with our expert guidance everything will work out fine.
In the event we had accepted our place in the world, just another animal species, and respected what was around us and left well alone; we wouldn't be seeing the destruction of wildlife that we see today including the obsession with putting a building on any spare blade of grass going and the ferocious reclaiming of land for our benefit regardless of the consequences. All of that is a product of liberal ideals bound up with expansion and progress.
Don't get me wrong, I would class myself as a liberal, but a pragmatic liberal rather than being wedded to dogma and ideology; but there is no getting away from the fact that Liberalism is a double edged sword which encompasses the best and worst aspects of human nature.
So, we remain in the age of expansion, we've repackaged it and called it something different; but we're forming gangs, still, and challenging other parts of the world. All of this requires resources.