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Especially when one considers the political and social progress evident in the Seventeenth century, I think the Enlightenment saw if not a reversal then a stagnation of that progress. The self-aggrandisement of it's leaders as true vessels and dispersers of wisdom says it all: individual happiness, concerted joint progress, personal freedom and even entire histories and philosopies were dealt a blow from which some never recovered.
Without an 'ecumenical' (to borrow the term) concensus any absolutist philosophy is doomed to breed contemporary unease and retrospective scorn, although the Enlightenment recieves too little of the latter. Of course you will never get an ecumenical consensus to an absolutist philosophy , and for a very good reason - it will always deprive too many people of their freedoms. That is why absolutist philosophies fail, indeed the only way any absolutist philosophy (temporarily) holds sway is by encouraging prejudice and, ultimately, hatred.
In the final analysis, however, I think we should be wary of falling into the trap of holding the Enlightenment culpable for all collapse of morals, development of colonial attitudes etc, as we have had the ability to move to a more reasonable mindset all along. It's too easy to lay culpability for all subsequent wrongdoings on the misguided principles of the past.
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