Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history)

You mean the Nurnberg trials?

"Our civilization this and our civilization that."

I don't come from "your civilization". I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don't care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.

Now, sure, "material prosperity" can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, "conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture" (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply "high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure", or even more simply "(material) wealth" but then we'd be playing with semantics, and I'm not sure that'd be productive.

What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it'd probably involve the term "marginal utility" or "marginal cost", or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?

However, these benefits are not exclusive to "your prosperous civilization". They've showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some "primitive" societies.

They aren't exclusive to "prosperity" or "civilization" either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth...

• Privelege,
• discrimination,
• arbitrary punishment,
• authoritarianism,
• oppression of the weak (including children and women),
• sharp division between conflicting groups,
• irrationality and anti-empiricism,

and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.

Finally, what's wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?