What Happened to the Idea of Progress?

Many, if not most, who come to a site like Brownstone Institute are mystified, when they are not frankly enraged, by how so many people they took to be thoughtful and intelligent, have failed to engage in any meaningful way with the available empirical evidence on the public health measures undertaken to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus

 Most assume, as I once did, that time just is, and that it proceeds inexorably and in a linear fashion into the future, and away from the past.

What I was forced to confront back then was that this was a relatively new way of understanding the passage of time, one inextricably linked to the rise of modernity in Europe toward the end of the 15th century, and with it-among many other things-the advent of the nation-state and the idea of inexorable human progress through scientific discovery.

Many if not most cultures viewed time in cyclical terms, meaning that they created and lived by a concept of time that provided a built-in mental and spiritual allowance for, and explanation of, humanity's tendency to err, regress, and engage from time to time in the angry and irrational destruction of the greatest fruits of its collective labors.

Or to put it in theological terms, they lived a concept of time that made room for the idea of what most Christian traditions call original sin.

Linear time, in contrast, generally leaves man alone with his own permanent visions of perfectibility.

If the only concept of time you've ever known is linear, you're in a pretty bad spot.

As purblind acolytes of the school of linear time, they literally cannot imagine a world in which the US "Right" to command, direct and sack the treasures of other peoples of the world does not exist.

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-happened-to-the-idea-of-progress/