Civilization = city building. I don't think building bigger, more populated cities is progress at all. I prefer small communities in which people know each other and support each other. Small, privately-owned business supply goods and services. I think cities are a blight on society and nature.
The problem with that, throughout history, has been that those same charming people who adore their village-mates absolutely HATE outsiders. They may be able to make a wary peace with the nearby villages and trade with them, but when it comes to the people a few hundred miles away who speak an incomprehensible language, worship a different god and practice other strange social customs, those guys are the enemy and they have to be conquered and/or exterminated.
War, conquest and slaughter or enslavement was the modal condition during the centuries when humans still lived in tribal cultures but had invented metal weapons. It was only when civilizations expanded to cover wider areas that the people within those areas learned to live in harmony and cooperation with each other. Yet they still made war upon the other civilizations.
That's still the way it is today. The "tribes" have become enormous but they still make war on the rival "tribes" over their cultural differences, particularly the most troublesome difference of all which is religion. The only hope for enduring peace is for the tribes to continue growing and merging until there is only one and nobody's left to be the enemy. Of course getting rid of religion would also help but that ain't gonna happen.
I find some of the most advanced cultures to be the most backwards, in that they have their priorities backwards. Australian aborigines would be considered the least advanced culture on earth by most standards, but they place a high importance on art and music and story telling and living in the moment, meanwhile japanese people are making computer chips and fancy cars while living solitary in little plastic cubicles and committing suicide.
How convenient that you picked a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people who never had a chance to advance into the Neolithic Era. Of course they lived in peace: they had not invented metallurgy so they had no weapons with which to make war. Australia, like Africa, is an unusual environment because its geography did not foster the invention of the technology of agriculture, which is a prerequisite for building permanent settlements, which is a prerequisite for inventing more advanced technologies like metallurgy. Look at Eurasia and the Americas, where agriculture was invented long ago, followed by metallurgy, and you find that those "sweet peaceful primitive people" made war on each other long before they built the huge cities you find so stifling. A few thousand people was a really big city back in those days.
Ideally we could have technology reach a point where we can regress to a hunter gatherer good time while also being able to put it on you tube afterwards. It could be argued the good old notorious western world is closest to that.
What we'd end up with is a privileged class of people who keep the civilization running, and a vast underclass of people who depended on them.
Besides, speak for yourself. I've lived in cities and I've lived in small towns and I've lived out in rural areas. Cities rule. Music is my life and because of civilization I can have electronically reproduce music 24/7, and because I live in a city I can hear professional quality live music as often as I want. You can have the damn 19th century with its traveling bands of mediocre musicians who came through town once a month.
Death is necessary for progress. Evolution demands it. There would have been no New World without ethnic cleansing. When America spread her wings she touched the surface of another world. The greatest predator lays waste to all before it, creating a blank canvas on which to project its will. A backwards, dead culture is one which does not seek to destroy and overcome.
The European colonists did not need to exterminate the Indians. Most of the tribes were relatively sanguine about the new arrivals, and many of them embraced their new technologies and started building towns just like the ones they visited. They could have built a happy, prosperous community together. The Europeans were accustomed to an environment in which none of the "tribes" trusted each other, and they brought that hatred and warfare with them.
It was a bit different in Central and South America, where the Aztecs and Incas, respectively, were already on their way to a culture of war and conquest. But we could have learned a lot from the aboriginal North Americans, who were still in the early Neolithic Era. It's a shame that the Europeans who were running away from their civilization and the Indians who hadn't built one yet couldn't have collaborated and found a new way into the future.
I agree.