You are correct but pessimistic.
IMO, you are following the pattern I will describe in the following statement. Perfection is not possible, therefore since all are flawed, I reject all and embrace (I'm not really sure what you embrace and I have a feeling you don't either).
There is a higher aspiration, progress. In the absence of the possibility of any perfect model, the highest aspiration is continual progress, even infinite progress, forever. The lack of a perfect model does not prevent constant improvement.
I would truly love to believe in progress. In fact, in my informal history of ideas I think of the 20th as the Century of Progress. Every (approximate) century has had its central idea, its mythos. The 18th embraced Enlightenment. The 19th embraced Romanticism (far from a reaction to Enlightenment per J. Barzun, but rather an effort to complete it) on the academic side and Industrialization on the economic. The 20th saw an aberrant pulse of technical progress that has deeply shaped how we view even nontechnical things, and it is my considered opinion that the concept of human progress is an artifact of these three centuries in succession, but especially the one that took us from horse-carts and the odd balloon to people denying the Moon landings on Youtube.
I have become disabused of the concept of steady or even monotonic human progress. There have been remarkably enlightened societies in the past, but the pattern of decadence, dissolution, replacement by ruder more vigorous sorts ... rinse, repeat ... has not been broken yet. I fear that the Western (and with globalization, the entire industrialized) world is in a condition of increasingly brittle decadence, and when it breaks, the Enlightenment will most likely go the way of republican Rome.
I would not underestimate the sheer destructive power of people looking at a social or economic order and thinking to themselves "how to turn this to my advantage?"
I do not see real human progress in the offing until we have the capacity to change our physical substrate. But just as I see the Century of Progress to be over, with this age's mythos as yet undetermined (from my constrained perspective at its beginning, my best guess is a nostalgic lament for our lost environmental innocence) ... and the promises of Rapid Advances not being fulfilled. We are returning to a more usual rate of technical advancement, even though our ways of life and thought have been deeply shaped by the breakneck speed of improvements in standard of living brought on by almost cost-free petroleum. "It's ovah, Rock; it's ovah." cn
