Recorded human history spans about 3000 or 4000 years. The question of whether something has been unfolding all this time - it remains open. I would venture to say that most people today do not believe that human history is teleological - certainly most people in the secularized world do not. Then there are of course people who subscribe to a religious eschatology of one kind or another - whether with an ultimate apocalyptic outcome or a cycle of ages that repeats itself.
The main point to make - and to continue to make - is that there is no rational ground for having one set of beliefs about the logic of human history over another. As passionate as some people's attachments to their core convictions are - whether they are convictions that every moment, even the most tragic calamities, are part of a divine plan, or whether they are faith that science will one day prove that only "chance", whatever that is, governs the development of the world - those convictions have no solid foundation, no rational basis. We simply do not know, full stop.
It is possible, though, to decide that there must be something unfolding - this is the decision that underlies the Ark Work. One way of following through with that decision is to backwards-project a history which authorizes the present - from the earliest civilizations of India, China and Mesopotamia to the present. The desperation and sadness of social media, the art world, advanced capitalism etc takes on a different character when it is contextualized in this larger history history. The key, I think, is to grasp how alive the past is. Not just the 19th century, which I've talked a lot about, but, just as much, the 4th and 5th centuries BC, the worlds of Pythagoras, the Buddha, Lao-Tzu.