If we think of history not as an ascending spiral of human advance, but an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs, where freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny,  then we could say that something is happening now that is the opposite of liberty. The dream of free borders, free trade and free movement is in decline. There is a shift towards inwardness and isolation, triggered by the own neoliberalism and its praised global free marke, backed up by some of the central currents in Western thinking.

Human nature, is an inherent obstacle to cumulative ethical or political progress. Seeming improvements, if there are any, can very easily be reversed: one example has been the use of torture by the United States against terrorist suspects. That torture not only came back, but was embraced by liberals, and defended by liberals

The Christian doctrine of salvation was taken over by secular idealism and became a political religion with universal emancipation as its aim. Communism, fascism and "global democratic capitalism are the result of centuries of preparation by the Christian  religion to make a subordinate sacrifice his visible reality for loyalty and commitment to a superior, abstract leader.