Progress is a Scribbly Line

We're taught that ancient civilizations were just rest-stops on the great expressway to the technocratic Utopia; that myth is being shoved down our throats in the media every day. 
 

But in fact human progress is not a straight line moving upward, it's a scribbly line going all over the place. We learn how to do great things then forget, often for centuries. Forget the pyramids- do you think we could build another Chartres in our present state? And I don't mean some prefab simulacrum, I mean the real effin' deal.

Doubtful.

Think about this: was Georgian England in second millennium AD all that more advanced than the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC, never mind the Roman Empire at its peak? Arguable, at the very least. Perhaps less so, in some regards.

We're also taught that the leaps in science and technology over the past 150 years or so were because we finally stopped looking for angels on heads of pins and got wise to the scientific method. 
That, of course, is more modernist mythology.

The scientific method's been around for a very, very long time, was well-known to Medieval scientists, and had been in wide practice throughout the world for millennia. 

Yes, scientific progress did accelerate when the Church began to lose its Vulcan death grip on society, but maybe we should be looking more closely at how that loss of power led to an increased traffic back and forth to spirit realms for our Great Leaps Forward, especially given the secret CVs of many of our most important scientists (and more importantly their patrons and associates).

What is less-known, especially to the I F---ing Love Science crowd, is that the rates of scientific and technological advancement are believed to have peaked, and peaked some time ago. That peak seems to be correlative with the increase in secularism and the decline in esoteric activity among those involved in the STEMs.

Wait: science and tech have peaked? How can that be, you may ask?

Well, you may notice your android manservant is not driving you in your hovercar to your job building the Jupiter mission module, and you still haven't booked that vacation in the deep-sea habitat.

And you probably won't be anytime soon.

The truth is that human spacecraft has been stuck in low-earth orbit for nearly fifty years, airplane and train technology are still much the same as they were in the 1960s, and there hasn't been any exciting news in the world of undersea or even earth-surface exploration in a very long time, even though a massive portion of our planet has never been foot-surveyed (nor have the massive networks of underground caverns that span the entire globe).

Worse, the advances we can point to - in electronics and communication - seem to be making us less free, less secure and less happy than any other time in my memory.