All I can see, then, is that your position is “never try to change anything, because you *must* be wrong about the real cause of the problem.” And that does not seem like a very good or effective position to take, since unless the current order is in fact the best of all possible worlds, it means we’re doomed in a particularly horrible way.

Not especially!

…although, in fact, my social epistemics are perhaps a little more doom-y than what you’ll commonly find.

Sometimes, if you actually know something about the past, you can point to a particular time-and-place and say “look, they actually were better off than we are in X-and-such particular way, they had a solution to this problem we’re facing.”

And – more relevantly, by far – sometimes you can say “we’ve never yet been able to solve this problem, but I have ideas about how we might do so, and we should try out those ideas or at least explore them further.”

The thing about which I’m complaining is the reflexive reactionary itch that says “things are bad now, they can’t possibly always have been bad like this, therefore we should go back to The Way Things Were.”

The point is double-plus-relevant when you’re talking about social changes that amount to “bringing things out in the open.”  How much did we have to deal with them, and possibly suffer from them, before we brought them out in the open?  Well, you sure as fuck don’t actually know, do you?