I think mankind intellectually is crumbling as a whole. I see it here where I live in America. Tests have become easier, standards once met have become lost, and books have turned to garbage. Bestsellers today are about diets, and punctuation. (just making fun of "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.) Maybe it's just America but I don't see progression, rather regression. It very could well be just America, but I'm having a hard time seeing the greatness, of a nation that was once so great. The ideas of the enlightenment fade, replaced with corruption, and a horrible economy.
Bestsellers like the ones by by Hesse, Bradbury, cease to be produced, American novelists as prolific as Steinbeck or Angelou aren't here. Lifestyles have changed from respecable to utter laziness.
The subtlety of nature is far beyond that of sense or of the understanding; so that the specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no one to stand by and observe it.
-Francis Bacon "Novum Organum"