Fear Anti-Progress

Progress isn't destined to last forever, and anti-progress is a terrifying reality sometimes.

Pre-history is marked by one collapse of civilization around 2000 BCE and Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, and deeper yet, with the Younger Dryas climate event that reversed a near dawn of proto-agriculture and killed the Clovis culture in North America, and before that the Ice Age that peaked 20,000 years ago.

The Middle Ages saw the Little Ice Age and the Black Plague.

The revolutions of 1848 failed to take out monarchies in Europe.

Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War was followed by about 70 years of the Jim Crow segregationist South, and the South seems to be regressing again.

Both the French Revolution starting in 1789 and the Russian Revolution, had reversals before their end game was established.

Almost every newly independent country experienced coups and/or civil wars before settling into a more stable independence.

Most of Europe fell to the fascists in World War II (preceded by Spain doing so in the 1930s in the Spanish Civil War). The U.S. experienced the Great Depression which was another kind of regression.

Albania's isolated regime moved its people backwards until the Cold War ended.

Democracy was suppressed in Hungary in the 1950s and has regressed again in the last few years in the post Soviet era. Poland has back pedaled in the post-Soviet era in recent years, although less severely. A brief moment of hope in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Russia was soon dashed as we came into the Putin era which has gradually deteriorated.

The North Korean regime eventually moved its people backwards.

Modernity was reversed from the 1960s and 1970s in Iran and Afghanistan. Lebanon didn't move backwards as badly, but still hit a major bump in the road in the 1980s. Somalia also collapsed into a long stretch of anarchy from which it is just now starting to emerge.

There were steps backward in Pol Pot's Cambodia and in China's Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.

Syria has collapsed into an ongoing civil war and remains split in the past few years. Venezuela has likewise collapsed in recent years. Progress in Afghanistan was wiped away again in 2021 when the U.S. pulled out after twenty years of a fragile but more democratic and modern regime. Ukraine has been plunged into war by Russian invasions, with a first installment in 2014 and another round starting just over a year ago on February 24, 2022. Haiti has collapsed over the last year. The U.K., foolishly, left the E.U. in Brexit. Turkey has started to regress in its modernity from its high point.

Great progress in the U.S. on a variety of fronts of freedom and liberty in the late 1960s and 1970s backpedaled starting by 1980, with regression, although not terribly severe at first.

The U.S. had a high water mark of declaring a right to same sex marriage, only to regress with the overruling of Roe v. Wade just a few years later. Trumpism and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court have undermined the quality of democracy and law in the United States.

These are hardly the only examples, but they are a healthy reminder that progress is something you have to fight to keep and not something that is a given that can be taken for granted.