From Prehistoric Naivety to Hypermodern Alienation

A metahistorical analogy and the Promethean revolt

Image by Helena Lopes, from Unsplash

There’s a self-congratulatory way of understanding the meta-history that arose after the Scientific Revolution, according to which history is progressive and can be divided into stages that reflect the degrees of our collective ignorance.

Prehistory and early history would have been marked by myth, magic, and religion. Those periods eventually led to philosophy and protoscience, which produced more rational, naturalistic explanations. Finally, there was the period of science and hyperskepticism in which we tapped into overflowing sources of information and learned to circumvent our personal biases by subjecting our suspicions to scientific tests.

This “modern” interpretation of history was partly propagandistic since the notion of secular progress figured in the culture war between faith and reason. The positivistic story about how our species progressed by solving its problems with courage, reason, and industrious ambition was meant to contrast with the Christian story that we ought to surrender to tyrannical supernatural powers — and to the earthly theocracies that supposedly speak for them. Instead of hard-won, human-made progress, there would be an apocalyptic overhaul of the fallen, natural domain at the end of time…