Your overall point is right and important but most of your specific historical claims here are false—more mythical than real.
Free-market economic theory developed only after millenia during which everyone believed that top-down control was the best way of allocating resources.
Free market economic theory was developed during a period of rapid centralization of power, before which it was common sense that most resource allocation had to be done at the local level, letting peasants mostly alone to farm their own plots. To find a prior epoch of deliberate central resource management at scale you have to go back to the Bronze Age, with massive irrigation projects and other urban amenities built via palace economies, and even then there wasn’t really an ideology of centralization. A few Greek city-states like Sparta had tightly regulated mores for the elites, but the famously oppressed Helots were still probably mostly left alone. In Russia, Communism was a massive centralizing force—which implies that peasants had mostly been left alone beforehand. Centralization is about states trying to become more powerful (which is why Smith called his book The Wealth of Nations, pitching his message to the people who needed to be persuaded.) Tocqueville’s The Old Regime describes centralization in France before and after the Revolution. War and Peace has a good empirical treatment of the modernizing/centralizing force vs the old-fashioned empirical impulse in Russia. “Freedom” is not always decentralizing, though, as the book makes clear.
Freedom of speech developed only after millenia during which everyone believed that it was rational for everyone to try to suppress any speech they disagreed with.
There was something much like this in both the Athenian (and probably broader Greek) world (the democratic prerogative to publicly debate things), and the Israelite world (prophets normatively had something close to immunity from prosecution for speech, and there were no qualifications needed to prophesy). In both cases there were limits, but there are limits in our world too. The ideology of freedom of speech is new, but your characterization of the alternative is tendentious.
Political liberalism developed only after millenia during which everybody believed that the best way to reform society was to figure out what the best society would be like, then force that on everyone.
Political liberalism is not really an exception to this!
Evolution was conceived of—well, originally about 2500 years ago, probably by Democritus, but it became popular only after millenia during which everyone believed that life could be created only by design.
It’s really unclear what past generations meant by God, but this one is probably right.
Your overall point is right and important but most of your specific historical claims here are false—more mythical than real.
Free market economic theory was developed during a period of rapid centralization of power, before which it was common sense that most resource allocation had to be done at the local level, letting peasants mostly alone to farm their own plots. To find a prior epoch of deliberate central resource management at scale you have to go back to the Bronze Age, with massive irrigation projects and other urban amenities built via palace economies, and even then there wasn’t really an ideology of centralization. A few Greek city-states like Sparta had tightly regulated mores for the elites, but the famously oppressed Helots were still probably mostly left alone. In Russia, Communism was a massive centralizing force—which implies that peasants had mostly been left alone beforehand. Centralization is about states trying to become more powerful (which is why Smith called his book The Wealth of Nations, pitching his message to the people who needed to be persuaded.) Tocqueville’s The Old Regime describes centralization in France before and after the Revolution. War and Peace has a good empirical treatment of the modernizing/centralizing force vs the old-fashioned empirical impulse in Russia. “Freedom” is not always decentralizing, though, as the book makes clear.
There was something much like this in both the Athenian (and probably broader Greek) world (the democratic prerogative to publicly debate things), and the Israelite world (prophets normatively had something close to immunity from prosecution for speech, and there were no qualifications needed to prophesy). In both cases there were limits, but there are limits in our world too. The ideology of freedom of speech is new, but your characterization of the alternative is tendentious.
Political liberalism is not really an exception to this!
It’s really unclear what past generations meant by God, but this one is probably right.