This faith in progress

Every culture has some distant place in space or time where it parks its dreams of a perfect world, and ours is no exception.

Devout Christians in the Middle Ages imagined a heaven somewhere off beyond the outermost sphere of the sky, where angels and blessed souls sang in perfect harmony in the presence of God, far from the discords of life in the lowly world of matter. Centuries before, the ancient Greeks sang of a Golden Age somewhere in the distant past when fields sprouted crops without human labor and the world was at peace under the rule of the old wise god Kronos.

We have our heaven and our Golden Age, too, but unlike most other cultures we put ours in the future, and tell ourselves that we