why has there been a general history of improvement since the Paleolithic, even granting an occasional stumble or Dark Age? The slope may be slippery, but the instinct is to keep climbing up. In the long run, our history is one of progress, not decline. This is true for technology, personal comfort, security, and even freedom.

Perhaps we are biologically evolved to live in small, family-oriented bands ruled by a paternalistic champion supported by a majority of the adult males, but to really get anywhere, we had to abandon the pack and develop higher orders of hierarchical organization. To overcome our natural resistance to this, we developed culture as a means of individual control to assist the authority structures we built. We have continued along this path even though it is not an entropic one. We are evolving as a culture even though it can be argued our biological evolution has stopped.

Unlike biological evolution, cultural evolution can be anticipated and even guided. Perhaps not with complete efficiency, but we are no longer solely the plaything of the Mad Molecule. Cultural factors can determine organizational (political) ones and vice-versa. Sometimes inevitable realities in one are resisted by entrenched interests in the other but natural selection still goes on and we are no longer oblivious to the process.

As in evolution, there will be blind alleys, extinctions, failures to adapt and even overspecializations. We are no longer totally at the mercy of raw chance, but neither are we the masters of our fates.

My conviction, my belief, is that there is progress, that it is natural and it will come, that it can be momentarily frustrated but it can never be stopped altogether. There will be setbacks, perhaps even disasters, but the trend is clear, and if you look carefully you can see progressive forces bubbling up from the people and you can see those who wish to stop them , usually at the top, doing their best. After all, the religious meme served well for millenia to help control society, and now it is violently struggling to reassert it's dominance.

Freedom has been tasted by the masses, it will not go away now no matter how powerful the tyrants may try. Authoritarian structures are giving way to collective ones, not just in economics and politics but in every area. And no, that last statement is not a contradiction of the concept that the right of everyone to own property and create wealth is an essential ingredient of freedom. We can have both, collective security as well as individual achievement. After all, in every society throughout history, at least one individual has always had both!

In short, progress is coming, whether we like it or not. Conservatives, by definition those who are happy with the current system, will resist it.
Liberals, those not satisfied with the way things are going and impatient with its slow pace, may push too hard or recklessly for it. But change is coming.