There's a lot of stuff that has happened in the past couple of years that proves to me that history is not necessarily a monotonic increase in state across a number of measurable parameters, there are a ton of cyclic elements. Some of those cycles are sinusoidal (pendulum like phenomenon) and some are of the sawtooth variety (slow rise with eventual crash).

In 1879 the world was ahead of us in some ways and behind in many others, if we're not careful then we may end up behind 1879 in many others as well.