Optimism developed as a coping mechanism with the future. But it would certainly be detrimental for a man to remember the past, the sheer horror of the emotional connections to the events of the past must be crashing. So humans developed a backward looking optimism to cope, AKA the mythology. Both mechanisms are intended to make the present truly meaningless and hence livable.
I have been reading Robin Fox and he claims that our bad memory is nothing but a remnant of the Paleolithic era when history was circular. Nothing really happened in the linear fashion, the linear history was not yet invented. So we live in the linear times but we continue to default to the circular evolutionary pattern. Our peculiar pattern of seeing ourselves as the center of the universe where it all starts and ends, or the tribal tendencies for the same are the markers of this phenomena.
Further reading:
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Ben, I have never read Robin Fox. Which of his books would be a good place to start?
Greg, I can’t recommend with authority. I just started reading myself. I saw @ahaspel tweet this: “If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a cultural construction of a duck.” –Robin Fox
And I said: I must find out who is the genius who wrote this. So I started with his last book, just published. http://www.robinfoxbooks.com/latestbook.html