The masonic Illuministic idea of "Progress" feeds on itself and has done incalculable damage.
Once some novelty is adopted, it usually becomes almost impossible to be reverted back to the previous, objectively superior, state.
While the idea is flawed, and easily proven untrue (even by modern, overtly progressivist, historiography itself!), it has sedimented in virtually everyone's mind in the Western hemisphere (and de facto, everywhere apart from the Moslem world). It IS the current milieu.
Curiously, it was quite the opposite in the Classical world (cosmogony mostly spoke of decadence from earlier, superior Eras), and very different in the Medieval Era (with an essentially horizontal view of Progress).