I’m not holding out for an immortal society. I think a civilization or culture that manages to pass some art and literature to the (on a human scale) distant future is pretty successful in one sense. If they also pass on legal or ethical, maybe political principles, that’s a bonus. If they achieve several lifetimes of some combination of peace, prosperity, innovation, etc., I’d call that success.

Sometimes we use the shark or the horseshoe crab as an example of evolutionary success because it bears a striking resemblance to fossils that pre-date the dinosaurs. As with genes, so also with memes. If a cultural pattern can go centuries or millennia with a stable set of mores, folkways, and governing principles, that’s a type of success, but if a culture, polity or way of life can rapidly obsolete itself within a lifetime with a burst of innovation producing lasting and replicable advances, I’d call that a grand success. If some fraction of their population are traumatized or made casualties by the shock value of even positive change, that of course is a subtraction from overall level of civilizational success.