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Except that every civilization that has fallen in the past believed exactly that about themselves. The Romans believed themselves civilized and different from the barbarians of the past and those current barbarians around them. The Greeks thought the same of themselves, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Turks, etc. if you’d have walked the streets of any of those cities, they would have been pretty sophisticated and full of well educated people with a good bit of division of labor, lavish entertainment systems, good roads and communication systems. We can do what they did with muscle power by using machines. We have electricity and computer and robots — which we use to do what the Romans did with slaves.
And I think honestly that no civilization, even one a million times more advanced than we are today is exempt from history. History doesn’t stop, and a civilization that ignores reality long enough will find itself again facing the iron laws of physics and mathematics and biological realities. And this is the fundamental problem that civilizations face— eventually you build up a system that doesn’t work when pushed up against reality.
The ancients had a pretty fatalistic view of history. They tended to view themselves as degraded versions of their ancestors, hence the stories of bygone golden ages. The idea of eternal progress is largely a Christian one. Furthermore the life of the average Roman was closer to the life of an Egyptian 1000 years earlier or a medieval 1000 years later than any of them are to the life of the average US citizen in 2024. It really is different this time.
Obviously modern civilization will not last forever, just because nothing does, whether it degrades into something resembling a past state or advances into something else. But that doesn't really make the fate of the Romans or the Turks instructive.
It is?
It's not unique to Christianity, but the Western form of linear history which seized the minds of Whigs and the like definitely sees its origins in Christian metaphysical views of time contained between Genesis and Judgement Day.
Though interestingly, in the mind of Christians that linear progression was very much not eternal or infinite, this world will exist for a finite amount of time until His return. The advent of secularism didn't destroy these metaphysics but judgement got replaced by apotheosis and the awesome power of the machine convinced many they were on a road to a heaven on Earth.
Saint Thomas More was not a Buddhist.
The western form of linear time does not solely see it in such things. If the point is merely the linearity (as opposed to cyclicality) of time, you see that in the sentence immediately prior to that I quoted before. If the point is that it's linear with a good ending, well, that is a little better of a match, but Christianity is decidedly unclear about whether things will be getting better or not prior to the return of Christ. On the other hand, you can see a sort of enlightenment-style linearity in Aeschylus' Oresteia, several hundred years before the coming of Christ, where the cyclical vengeance of the furies is tamed and put an end to by the enlightened and civilized gods of Athens.
Of course, I don't imagine Aeschylus was the direct precursor of modern progress—I think that's probably closer to being a result of technological growth and advances in scientific knowledge giving people the often accurate sense that they knew more and could do more than all who came before them.
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