This forward-marching concept of history – the idea of inexorable political and economic progress – is really a modern one.

Dithering Europe is heading for the democratic dark ages

Boris Johnson

A Greek economy run by Brussels will ignore the lessons of history, leading to more misery...

....  history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence. The Romans gave us roads and aqueducts and glass and sanitation and all the other benefits famously listed by Monty Python; indeed, they were probably on the verge of discovering the wheely-suitcase when they went into decline and fall in the fifth century AD. Whichever way you look at it, this was a catastrophe for the human race. People in Britain could no longer read or write. Life-expectancy plummeted to about 32, and the population fell. The very cattle shrunk at the withers. 

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