Publish at October 12 2022 Updated October 12 2022
Human history is about 300,000 years old. 10,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer societies became sedentary, and since then we have gone from the rudiments of agriculture to a fast data exchange network available everywhere on the planet right in our pockets. All this corresponds to only 4% of our past. It is enough to make you dizzy! But if for the last 300 or 400 years, progress has been seen, in the West, as a step-by-step march, it has not always been so.
Historian and youtuber Manon Bril, along with her fellow philosophy expert Mr. Phi, discuss in this video the very concept of progress over time. Antiquity is divided between philosophers saying that the world has always been as it is and stories like the fire offered by Prometheus to men that allowed them to live better on Earth. In the Middle Ages, everything revolved around religion. Thus, happy events are God's design. The misfortunes too, but the medieval thinkers do not dwell too much on it...
The Renaissance will be a transitional period until the Enlightenment and the modern one where progress is therefore a long march towards the "end of history". This does not mean the end of time but a period where this journey would stop. For Marx, this would happen on the day when the proletariat would make the social classes fall. Others have argued that the fall of communism and the domination of liberal democracy is this ultimate goal. Yet this is not felt today.
In fact, since the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of progress has begun to be questioned: some times it is good and at other times it causes more problems such as the weapons created during the two world wars.
Moreover, believing in the linearity of history is a bit of an illusion according to both speakers. For example, for a long time, we considered that the waterwheel was born in the 17th century. However, since then, researchers have found diagrams of this technology in antiquity. Thus, knowledge would be lost and would come back as needed. The same goes for social progress. As much as there was an abolition of slavery at the beginning of the 19th century, slavery laws were passed temporarily in the middle of that same century. Similar movements can be seen in women's rights, including abortion recently going from legalized to outlawed in some countries including the United States.
So history may not be this quick straight line. However, as they conclude, it is true that while in the past a man could be born and die in a similar context, this changed with the 20th century. Some were born before the democratization of television and will die being able to call and see their family on a small device.
Time: 22min36
Picture credit: en.depositphotos.com
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