History Is Not Linear Progress
The assumption that human societies inevitably advance from primitive to sophisticated, from unfree to free, from ignorant to enlightened, is not a finding of historical research but a mythology that flatters the present.
"History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past, some new states will rise, some old states will subside; that new civilizations will begin with pasture and agriculture, expand into commerce and industry, and luxuriate with finance." Will Durant, The Lessons of History
The linear narrative of progress from hunter-gatherers to farmers to cities to liberal democracy serves as the founding myth of modern Western civilization. Steven Pinker, Francis Fukuyama, and Jared Diamond all tell versions of this story, disagreeing on details while sharing the assumption that history has a direction. But the evidence, as both Durant and Graeber show, resists this framing. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, saw civilizations rising and falling in cycles driven by group cohesion (asabiyyah) that strengthens and decays over roughly four generations. Durant observed that every civilization follows a pattern: emerging from agriculture, expanding through commerce, luxuriating in finance, and then declining through internal decay or external conquest.
The Dawn of Everything dismantles the linear model more radically. Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that pre-agricultural societies were not confined to small egalitarian bands but experimented boldly with political forms some egalitarian, some hierarchical, some oscillating seasonally between the two. Agriculture did not inevitably produce hierarchy. Many early cities operated without kings or bureaucrats. The assumption that complexity requires domination is a prejudice, not a discovery. When Europeans encountered indigenous American critics of their social arrangements, the Enlightenment notion of "progress" was partly invented to neutralize those critiques to frame European society as an advanced stage that others had not yet reached.
The cyclical view is not fatalism. It is a corrective that forces us to ask harder questions: what sustains a civilization's vitality, what erodes it, and why do some societies renew themselves while others do not?
Takeaway: Treating progress as inevitable makes us blind to decline and blind to the possibility that older or foreign societies solved problems we have not.
See also: Asabiyyah Drives Civilizations | Civilizational Collapse Is Silent | Alternative Civilizations Existed and Succeeded | Shifting Baselines Make Decline Invisible