THE PROGRESSIVE VIEW
We all believe in progress, don't we? We know that life today is so much better than it was in medieval times when there was no effective medicine; when people easily starved because they only had primitive agriculture; when a privileged few aristocrats had good lives by exploiting slaves and peasants; when there was no democracy, so that ordinary people had no control over the way they were governed. The list of reasons could be longer, but one thing is for sure: we are told to believe that being born today is so much better than being born in medieval times because history is the story of progress.
Politicians encourage us in this belief, and we unconsciously conform to it, by the way words are loaded (as below):
GOOD
New
Progressive
Twenty-
The Future
BAD
Old
Traditional
Conservative
Medieval
The Past
