Pre-modern societies underwent change without experiencing it as accelerated rupture

Evidence

A question remains, provided we genuinely shed the doctrine of progress: How could humanity throughout at least six thousand years of recorded history undergo change, as it did, without having to experience the dimension of change as exists in modernity? — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 409

Categorization

• QUESTION: Hallaq poses this genuinely open question — worth chasing what historical evidence would answer it.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting rupture: change as a dimension humans historically lived without, now naturalized as second nature.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 409
• XREF: connects to: Pre-modern peoples understood humans and animals as one reversible cycle — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 435; Historical change arrives as a qualitative leap, not gradual growth; Modern life became an open-ended discovery rather than a preordained enactment — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 104 (+5 more)