Jason Crawford

And he says that essentially the very idea of progress, the idea that progress is possible and desirable, is a modern concept that originated in the West in the 1500s and 1600s.

And that before that, and in most places and times, people didn't

Not even the idea of progress.

They saw history as relatively cyclical.

And in fact, they often had the opposite idea.

The opposite to the idea of progress is the idea, Machir says, of ancestor worship.

The idea that our ancient ancestors were the greatest people who ever lived, that their accomplishments far surpassed anything we will ever do, and that all knowledge that matters was revealed to them in ancient times.

And that really all we can do is kind of pay them appropriate respect, learn from their ancient texts, and maybe produce a little bit of commentary on them where we can ring deeper and deeper levels of meaning out of them through more and more exegesis on the classic texts.

That's kind of where society was for a while.

And so he tells in that book about how we broke out of that and came to the modern concept of progress, modern in a broad sense, and realizing that we could actually surpass the ancients and, you know, take the world to a better place than it had ever been.

And the core ideas of the Enlightenment, which Pinker sort of identifies them as reason, science, and humanism, I do think are important for all of that.

I do sort of believe in that fundamental power of the idea of reason as an overriding principle in life and guide to life.

All of this stuff, of course, is deeply and hotly debated.