Isn't history like trying to explain the tree by studying its fallen leaves? Maybe we might further consider the tree?
As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future.
While it might be the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative, the evident fact, for those of us who experience nature on her own terms, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
So we exist in this intersection of energy expanding, as structure condenses. Like galaxies.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
Given then that it is a narrative being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven, it is always a matter of interpretation. Each of us is our own center of the universe and what signals we extract from the noise are what synchronizes with our prior beliefs/knowledge. Then we bond with those on similar wavelengths and get pulled into the various rabbit holes.
Consider that of all the tribal narratives, it was the Jewish deity that became the locus of Western civilization, basically because Constantine needed to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic, thus a religion where The Big Guy Rules.
As democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, when the West lost interest in monarchy and returned to populist forms, it required separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics, which would seem worthy of more historical note, but apparently not.
A spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell, so monotheism bequeathed the West the assumption of ideals as absolute, so every creed and cult has to proclaim universality, or be declared moral relativists.
Though morality is an ideal, not an absolute, so the death of the fear of god as moral policeman, has left the Will to Power to fill the void.
Unfortunately those most adept at that, are not the knights in shining armor, but the amoral assholes who lie, cheat and steal from their grandmother as a matter of principle, or at least convenience.
Leaving us on the cliff's edge, as these people have the strategic aptitude of bacteria, to match having the moral character of bacteria.
The Evolution of the West explains. The History only describes.
