Modernity's Arrow of Progress

Modernity's guiding principle (the claim that all reality was predestined to be organized around an ever-upwardly striving linear Arrow of Progress) was simple to lay out.

Simple enough in fact to be laid out on a single simple graph, one showing a 45 degree angled line gently inevitably steadily rising over a piece of Cartesian coordinates gridpaper, of the sort familiar to all of us with some High School math.

It was derived from Charles Darwin's theory that genetically, all Life emerged vertically, with absolutely no possible horizontal genetic linkages.