Progress isn't as linear as you'd think. A lot of times one small improvement can make many more problems appear that people never had to deal with before. But

Progress isn't as linear as you'd think. A lot of times one small improvement can make many more problems appear that people never had to deal with before. But compounded over many years it looks great. In fact, the longer a time period over which progress is assessed the better it looks. Then you suddenly have a mismatch between what you thought you learnt from history, about how wonderful progress is, and how bad things can get from things that are said to be improvements in your lifetime. If you look at some really terrible things like asbestos poisoning, that was only possible because of progress. But it took further progress to realize how dangerous a substance that is to human health, and then to take steps to correct the mistakes that were made.