One of the fundamental axioms of a sane philosophy of history, I have often noted, is that the history of the world progresses at the same time in the line of evil and in the line of good. In certain periods--our own, for example--one sees the effects of this simultaneous double progress erupting in a kind of explosion.
[Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, Cuddihy & Hughes, trs. Wipf & Stock (Eugene, OR: 2011) p. 4.]
