By Sharon St Joan

It’s not that there’s no such thing as progress. Indeed there is.

If I want to travel around the world, I’ll take a plane. I won’t set out walking, or take a sailing ship, or sit by the roadside waiting for a magic carpet to appear out of the clouds.

If I fall down the stairs and break a leg, I will go to the hospital because waiting for it to get better by itself is not going to work well.

If I want to go into town I will use a car, not a horse and buggy.

All this being said, there is a very large aspect of the way we think about progress in the modern world that is illusory. It is not true.

Really, there are two ways of viewing history — the cyclical view and the linear view.

In the cyclical view…