History Repeats Itself

The ancient Greeks used the word mythos to mean both history and myth. To them, the past, present and future were just the same old story, told perennially. Like the legend of Robocop. 

Today, it is common for people to see the history of human civilization as a linear chain of cause-and-effect events, something akin to a Rube Goldberg device. However, this is a relatively modern and ethnocentric perspective. Most Eastern religions, including Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, understand history as being cyclical, as did the ancient Greeks. 

Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures introduced the idea of linear time through their conceptualizations of an absolute beginning and an absolute end. Meanwhile, life itself was expected to be more or less the same from one generation to the next… and so it was throughout Europe for much of the period commonly known as the Dark Ages.

Western civilization didn’t really embrace the idea of human progress until the Enlightenment. In fact, this is one of the things that was so damn enlightening about it: this concept that people could actually improve their lives through the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. This, in turn, made people in the Dark Ages a hell of a lot brighter. They figured out that if they used their brains and worked together toward a common good, then the future could be better than the past. That was the theory, anyway. We're still working out the details.

While it is true that vast improvements have been made in toilet paper technology alone over the last five hundred years, we humans also make a lot of the same stupid mistakes repeatedly. I say this as someone who has seen enough M. Night Shyamalan movies to know that the real twist ending is the fact that I am somehow surprised by my own disappointment. Fool me once... I forget how it goes after that.