Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Since I believe that human history is cyclical as opposed to linear, I tend to not believe in "points of no return".
Few things change forever and even the stuff that appears unassailable and inexorable (at the time) sometimes gets scaled back.
I am sure all those women we see in miniskirts in pictures of Kabul from the 1970s thought that things could never go back to the way they were...
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I think of history as being "erratically linear". There's generally a permanent/extremely long term trend that's visible over the long run but there's a hell of a lot of fluctuation on the way there. Kinda like the average temperature charts from the past 150 years--they show a warming climate, but with it not really being apparent year-to-year.
The development of democratic & capitalist society in Europe over the past 500 years is like that, for example. Lots of setbacks along the way but it got there in the end.
That apparent secular society that existed in places like Afghanistan and Iran in the 1960s/1970s is largely a myth. There was only a small westernized bubble in the major cities that was really like that. The vast majority of Afghani women were very traditional even then. It's not like women in miniskirts ever became a nationwide thing there.