I think notions of progress are evident in any religion that has a defined beginning and end of the world- and even in cyclical religions that recognize repeating arcs of progress. I think universalist evangelical religions like Christianity especially show the concept of progress, as they posit that more and more people (or less and less, as it may be) will hear about and adhere to the religion. The catch may be that these concepts of progress may not have been necessarily about material progress- they may be about spiritual or cultural progress.
The idea that life didn’t vary much from century to century before the last 200 years is absurd. While material things may have not changed as much (although there were plenty of game-changing innovations in agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, ceramics, weapons, etc.) political and social life changed plenty as empires rose and fell.
Those changes, whilst acknowledged, were not the kind of changes I was referring to in the OP because they either do not follow a particular, agreed, path to a ‘better’ end or they were piecemeal and widely spread out in time.
Nowadays it’s something everyone takes for granted. In every technology and every academic discipline, in terms of wealth, health, etc, we are on a seemingly never ending (with setbacks) path of improvements.
I was asking about the idea of progress as a continuous, on going, process. When did people become aware that we were on this path?
Here is a timeline of medieval technology. Some of this stuff, like heavy plows, arabic numerals and horse collars really did lead to massive changes. To give one example, feudalism was a huge (but not necessarily better) change from the system that predated it.
Whose to say that they didn’t? Oral history can be quite detailed and a big part of a culture’s outlook. I knew a guy who could recite his family’s history for seven generations. Even if he could not read and write, he had a pretty good sense of the march of time.
Empires rose and fell, but progress was nothing like it has been in the last 200-500 years. We have seem dramatic progress in all fronts. Human rights, civil rights, political rights, science, medicine, education, standards of living, etc.
Heavy plows, arabic numerals and horse collars were all advances. But the last few hundred years have seen thousands of large advances, whereas before recent history there were very few large advances. Science, medicine and standards of living didn’t change much until a few hundred years ago.
