Spoilers and Conjecture:

I think it goes deeper then that. If you examing Spira at large it is stagnant. There is nothing new, no progress. People struggle to retain the status quo in the face of death. Spira is a dead world. The never ending cycle of death perpetuates it. The past is the land of the dead, and only dead things reside there. By never progressing forward Spira is essentially a dead world forever trapped in a past it can not escape.