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I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understanding of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.
Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.
In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as a Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.
While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.
I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.
I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.
I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.
Edit: Grammar.
I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society. It’s the same across cultures and times with various means of control being attempted or various social systems being implemented to try to keep civilization alive and functioning as technology changes around us. But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change. I suspect we’ll probably settle into something that works just as we have every other time
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Steven Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
I’m not going to disagree on the zoo-society hypothesis. This is true. But it’s also true that humans are not just social but hierarchical. That’s been true from the start of civilization. And so no matter what the specific shape the government officially takes, it’s always those with power and wealth calling the shots. And while some forms of government might be more open for those on the bottom, but at best it’s illusions. They’re lead to believe they’re deciding the direction of the country, but the decisions are not made at the ballot box, they were made before the election even took place.
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