Immanuel Kant argued that there are three possible ways to understand human progress.
“Retrogression toward wickedness” is moral terrorism, “perpetual progression toward improvement” is eudaemonism, and abderitism is “a perpetually changing upward tendency and an equally frequent and profound relapse.”
Kant argued that humanity was on a perpetual progression toward improvement. Abderitism, the idea that humanity (under a loving God's direction) builds up civilization only to tear it down, was the most morally reprehensible way to understand human progress, according to Kant.
“This opinion may well have the majority of voices on its side. Bustling folly is the character of our species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.
“…It is a vain affair to have good so alternate with evil that the whole traffic of our species with itself on this globe would have to be considered as a mere farcical comedy, for this can endow our species with no greater value in the eyes of reason than that which other animal species possess, species which carry on this game with fewer costs and without expenditure of thought.”
Personally, I think he nailed it with this idea of the Aberitic. I don't share Kant's faith, and I don't think we have any greater value than any other animal species.
Abdera is a real place. In the western classical era Abderites were the foolish rural counterparts to the cosmopolitan, urban Athenians. Notably, Democritus, the laughing philosopher, was from Abdera. Cicero described Abdera as a republic of fools, and it became short-hand for the classical Greeks for the folly of the self-satisfied and petty-minded.
As Woody Guthrie wrote --
"we build our civilization up / and shoot it down with wars"
-I didn't find a suitable link to the essay, but the title is “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?”