I think of my grandfather of late.  He raised a family of five daughters, one son, tending a few acres of land in Johnson Country, North Carolina.  My mother once mentioned how happy he felt upon purchasing his first tractor.  He no longer had to walk behind a mule, in order to plow a furrow.  The internal combustion engine powered tractor was a giant leap forward.  Perhaps the mule drawn plow was a small, albeit meaningful advance over a hoe, and the hoe over a pointed stick…

The point of the matter: “advance” has to do with preservation of life.  More importantly, advances have occurred more recently than one is likely to think.

Over immense periods of time
the intellect produced nothing but errors.

A few of these proved to be useful
and helped
to preserve the species:

those who hit upon or inherited these
had better luck
in their struggle for
themselves and their progeny.

Such erroneous articles of faith
…continually inherited,
until they became
almost part of the basic endowment of the species,
include the following:

1. 1. that there are enduring things;
   2. that there are equal things;
   3. that there are things, substances, bodies;
   4. that a thing is what it appears to be;
   5. that our will is free;
   6. that what is good for me is also good in itself.

…sense perception
and every kind of sensation
worked with those basic errors
which had been incorporated since time immemorial.

Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge
these propositions became the norms
according to which
“true” and “untrue,” were determined–
down to the most remote regions of logic.

Thus the strength of knowledge
does not depend on its degree of truth
but on its age, on the degree
to which it has been incorporated,
on its character as a condition of life.

Where life and knowledge
seemed to be at odds
there was never any
real fight,
but denial and doubt
were simply considered
madness.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 110 by Friedrich Nietzsche

The lines from Nietzsche are for you if you should have a taste for philosophy.  My condolences to all philosophers, since for good reason, the philosopher is considered, odd, even as a mad man/woman.  The philosopher is fixated with a yoga-like discipline to question, to doubt the very things that everyone else considers settled.

Is this not a madness of sorts?

If in an unguarded moment, say after a second glass of red wine, the philosopher should speak frankly — he/she hazards to say out loud that the wine glass is nothing but a dance of field effects in the void…

Madness!