There may be one more core idea that is obvious to us now but seemingly wasn’t very common in many societies: Things might actually get better and the world is not about to end soon.
Most religions have the basic arc of a story: there is a beginning, there is an ending and lots of BS sandwiched in the middle. Since most civilizations didn’t realize how old the earth actually is, the apocalyptic ending part of the religious story was usually projected just a few hundred years out, especially by the dominant monotheistic civilizations during the last two millenia. It seems really weird to think that so many cultures lived in the ruins of the Roman Empire and didn’t seem to have the ambition to rediscover and adapt what was right in front of them, but it seems their zeitgeist was fairly fatalistic. Why build new aqueducts and a sewer system if the end is coming in a few centuries or even decades anyway?
There may be one more core idea that is obvious to us now but seemingly wasn’t very common in many societies: Things might actually get better and the world is not about to end soon.
Most religions have the basic arc of a story: there is a beginning, there is an ending and lots of BS sandwiched in the middle. Since most civilizations didn’t realize how old the earth actually is, the apocalyptic ending part of the religious story was usually projected just a few hundred years out, especially by the dominant monotheistic civilizations during the last two millenia. It seems really weird to think that so many cultures lived in the ruins of the Roman Empire and didn’t seem to have the ambition to rediscover and adapt what was right in front of them, but it seems their zeitgeist was fairly fatalistic. Why build new aqueducts and a sewer system if the end is coming in a few centuries or even decades anyway?