It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities.

I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.

Though isn't progress inherent in that knowledge tends to increase over time? What's useful tends to get passed on to future generations, so there is an inherent advantage compared to earlier generations. Of course it's not perfect (as sometimes things get forgotten) and just knowledge/skills don't always translate to increase in living standards or productivity or well being, but by and large, in the long run, this should be true?

“ all this has happened before. All this shall happen again.”

Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.

Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing:

"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself.

The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.

Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power.

But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.

I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.

Doonesbury: "Aha! The Hittites!" "You know their work?" "Complete degenerates. But tough to beat after they invented iron." https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1978/12/26

Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....

Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.

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Those petty kingdoms did have the technology to build that - they just were too small to have enough people.

Well that was trigger happy and arguing for the sale of arguing. We have different definitions of what an advanced civilization is.

On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.

#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.

#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?

The lack of written records during the Dark Ages is a sign of a major civilizational regression.

Writing and learning retreated to a relatively small group - the clergy. The cities that had thrived under the empire - and the public works that supported them - disappeared.

There has been a historiographical tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and to euphemistically refer to it as a "transformation." But we're talking about a massive decline in literacy and economic activity, and there are all sorts of indicators (like average human height) that show that people were dramatically worse off.

I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.

E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?

> An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?

Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.

More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.