Note to Self

I am suddenly struck by an interest in World History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History.

I am interested in history through metanarratives (Lyotard), cyclic and time-dimension -type history (Nietzsche) and Mythemes (Lévi-Strauss).
I think the idea of evolution as a narrative makes me think that there is some climax to the "story of humankind" and that each generation or century thinks that they are living in that climax (maybe. or not. maybe that's just my theory, me with no training in history. I'm just brainstorming ideas here).
I would also like to think that no, there is no "end", no "impending doom", no "apocalypse" and these are all just made up. Magazines like this because they grab you with headlines like "The end of ______insert thing vital to this culture here_________." "The end of food." "The end of technology." "The end of..." etc.
So what if it's the end? I'm trying to think of something that was vital for past civilizations but nowadays we don't even consider it a real thing. At a smaller scale, this would be something like the Vinyl Disc, or not even...maybe the Laser Disc. Probably when the Laser Disc was put out, some media were writing headlines like "The end of video." But no.
What probably started me thinking about this was my Climatology course's class on Climate Change and how everything needs to be looked at in terms of scale. Humans have been here only a tiny portion of earth's life, and yet me studying in Humanities, it seems like we're all that matters. I guess there's a biological need for it, I guess if we "evolved" thinking that all that mattered was, say, (ugh it's so hard to think of something universal to humans) Pine Cones, then we would spend most of our time and energy on pine cones and not enough to actually feed ourselves or warm ourselves and then we would've died. I guess.
Another thing that started me thinking about this was viewing The Edukators, how one generation of activists just slowly fade away and another one comes along and raise caine. Stuff like this makes me think that history comes in cycles. Once something is forgotten, and oh how easy it is to forget, then it just repeats itself. I remember learning about the Holocaust in high school and they said that the most important part of why they're telling us all this is so that it isn't forgotten.
To have history, there has to be a belief in such a thing as a past, and there has to be a belief in a future, and then a present has to be defined from past and future. But what if there is no past and future? What if it is just a big circle and that archaeologists and historians and all those who are digging up the past...what if the past is actually the future?
There also has to be a belief in something called progress. I've read countless times texts in which there was the claim "Today we live in a state so much better than people in the past. Despite every problem we have today, we have this and this and that and look how much we've improved." Yeah, I guess you can claim that if you're measuring "betterness" by stuff like "social justice", "development", "(right to) education" (I'm putting EVERYTHING in quotes because I'm really tired), "equality", "non-discrimination", "peace", "meeting of basic human needs such as food, water, shelter", "dignity", "social mobility", "democracy", "freedom of speech"...for some places more than others at least...(notice how none of these include "having lots of money", "being famous" and "having a bigger house" [maybe except for equality...not equality of opportunity, which is merit-based, but equality]?)
The problem is...only back for a couple of generations, you're still comparing the present to the present if you make the above claim. You're still comparing today's interpretation of indirect documentation of the past to today. You say, "Unless there's time travel!" But that's just it. Even with time travel, you were born into a certain time period in a certain culture (though with globalization I think that culture is spreading-not transmission-wise but more like a spreading out, thinning of peanut butter onto toast. although there is the issue of cultural imperialism.), and even if you travel back in time, like being raised in one culture and then living your adult life in another, you are still of your own time so you are immersed in the ideas of that time. Getting back to the point of time travel, say you went back to, oh I don't know, the 1st century A.D. You go and you say, "Look at what they eat and look at what they wear! And how they treat their squirrels!" And then you go back to your own time and you think that what you have in comparison is better. Well maybe if/when we do get time travel, some people would fall in love with the place and choose to stay in it (Crichton), but then maybe that's due to exoticism or grass is greener on the other side syndrome.
First and foremost of all, we do not have time travel so we have only one life (well even with time travel we only have one life with different time-domain alternatives; right now we only have space-domain alternatives i.e. moving to another place if we don't like it here barring borders and barriers), one perspective - that's right one perspective no matter how educated and open-minded you are because as one person = one vote, one person = one perspective. So anyway of course the idea of progress is relative and I guess like everything else in the social sciences progress is also dynamic and along a continuum. So, say that "we" are aiming at progress. Then we're aiming at a moving target, not just moving towards "higher" progress (another topic to discuss are the loaded superlatives such as higher and lower and majority and minority in discourse), but aiming a target that is shifting according the society's "needs" and "wants", probably with a lag time of about oh I don't know.
I guess this is also the tenet of Orientalism (Said). Europeans looked at people living in the Arabic Peninsula, saw that they desperately lacked the comforts of the current European civilization, and decided that what they needed was "progress".
I am really skeptical of governments now because they tend to go by either their own interests or what they think is right for the masses (actually advertising goes the same way, except it is usually "What is marketable to the masses to earn the top dollar"). This links in with the idea of control and power (Chomsky).
Even with an idea of reincarnation...what am I getting at here I am too tired I no longer know!
But what do I know? I am merely a product of my society, right?


Anyway, books I want to read are:
The Postmodern Condition (or not. it's too demanding)
Guns, Germs and Steel (I started this like 2 years ago but have yet to pick it up again)
What Technology Wants
Any book recommendations would be good!