I don't precisely know what it would look like to return to a pre-enlightenment or if that is even possible, but I am curious what you meant by that. You can expound further, if you like, and forgive me if I just completely missed it. This did provoke within me this following idea.
Modern humans, society if you will, has adopted a reductionist view, partly because it has served us well in a functional science way, as opposed to a functional philosophic way. It has resulted in this error: science did a cursory glance at spirituality, found nothing, and declared all spiritual paths are vacuous philosophies that have no inherent value. They threw the baby out with the bath water.
To demonstrate how this might be wrong would be to look at the efficaciousness of any modality. When it comes to medication, some people need the brand names, some need the generic. In principle, it's the same molecule, but sufficient difference in quality, content, and manufacturing results in a variance in efficacy. Some meds, brand or generic, just don't for some people. There is not one counseling modality that effective for all patients. People and personalities and challenges are all different. Education is failing because it only has one cookie cutter 'one size must fit all 'mentality, but people are different; there are visual learners and auditory learners and kinesthetic learners. Also, our time is completely different; society is much more nuanced than in the past, and the basics is just not enough for folks to function at higher societal levels.
Not all foods are agreeable to all people, even if we do not discuss allergies. The philosophies of of forest dwellers, snow dwellers, desert, plain, and ocean dwellers are very distinctly different and not universally interchangeable. Using that, we can argue every era and culture is equally and sufficiently nuanced to result in variances that are not going to be universal, even though there is a thread of universality running though all of us that connect us. Even within cultures, our interests, hobbies, relationships, and activities from required to leisure, are naturally diversified as we would not necessarily want 100 percent sameness... So why would we expect spirituality to come in a form that is 100 percent universal in terms of relating or accessing this domain?
If science has taught us anything, it should be to pursue and cultivate a way of being that leads to your individual best health and relating. Getting people to be the same results in bad outcomes. It's not bad to invite folks to practice or try a modality that works, but to allow if it doesn't work for the invitee, it isn't because they are broken, but because they have different flavor and path. There are flavors that just don't mix well. We don't force this. We create different meals.
And so, if pre-enlightenment means we accept a universal 'acceptance of spirituality,' that would likely help people. For sure, we know there is a sun. The sun shines on us all, but we don't all make food directly with sunlight. We need green folks. Humans don't make oxygen. We need green folks. We live together, we find our path, we do well on the path, but we tend to get squashed if we get off the path. If you're getting squashed, you're probably on the wrong path, or you never started you path because society does expect some normalization process... That, too, is good for society. That, too, is good for the nonconformist because it helps motivate them to find their community. If the community doesn't exist, we create it.
:)
As always, thank you for inviting me to participate in your dialectic.
