The Greeks were not exempt from this way of thinking, and Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave is an early version of the journey from darkness to light, from shadow to substance. And ever since, the idea of a trajectory has formed and framed Western thought, even to the extent of creating a retrospective narrative of the inevitability of the West itself, constructed out of the bits and pieces of Greek philosophy. Biblical mythology, Roman law, Gothic architecture, Renaissance humanism, and many more minor elements, constantly composed into a retrospect story of “rise and fall,” of progress and stasis, of dark and bright episodes, all framed in a grand trajectory that we still see, with remarkable lack of distance, as the story of the West. But the story of the West is no more than one version of our deep bias toward what I call trajectorism. And this is the meta-trap that social science inherited most powerfully from its great ancestors in religion and pre-industrial humanism.
Arjun Appadurai in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013), p. 223