Growing Up or Just More Of The Same

Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert - http://www.dunenovels.com/news/genesis.html

I found this article written by author Frank Herbert in 1980. In this article, he discusses his writing of Dune series and themes of human promise and human failings. That these themes are as-ever-important in the first decade of the 2000s as in 1980 (1959, 1937, 1914, ...) causes me to wonder if humanity is really making an effort to grow up as a species or just are we only arranging "more of the same."