Progress & reactions in West's forward march

The revolutionary transition in the West''s heartland did not proceed smoothly in a straightly linear fashion. There were conservative and also 'reactionary forces of resistance to the ''progressive changes. In 1814, for example, soldiers from Britain set fire in Washington 'D.C. damaging, among other properties, the White House. 'Between 1861 and 1865, the new republic in North America was troubled by a fairly violently fought civil war between the Union and Confederate troops. Racial segregation in the United States was not abolished until 1964. Dispassionate studies of world history should include efforts to know the set of ideas which animates conservative and reactionary forces as such ideas could survive for a long period of time after the socio'-economic conditions which gave rise to them had ceased to function. Also, history of the West now suggests that factually or scientifically wrong ideas, such as geocentrism, could be accepted without critical thinking as truth and defended with passions for one thousand years.