I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"
https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.
I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.
It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".
I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick
... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.
Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.
Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.
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Notes -
Whether we see what we call progress or not depends in large part on the timescales we choose to look at. From the perspective of a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago, nearly all of subsequent history until the iron age at best or the industrial revolution at worst was a step down in quality of life for the average person, who had to live as a subsistence farmer. Technologies like writing (by the Greeks after the Bronze Age Collapse), metalworking (by the successors of the Old Copper Culture in the Great Lakes), architectural methods (Roman concrete), modern materials manufacturing (Fogbank), and even how to make fire (the Sentinelese and Tasmanians) have each been lost and had to be rediscovered years, centuries, or millennia later. Our own stores of information are more stable and numerous than our ancestors', but they are not invulnerable to breakdown of physical media, link rot, incompatible file types, or being drowned in a sea of AI-generated nonsense that will make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible. It would only take a single generation of broken transmission to lose significant portions of what we have gained.
If we look at moral concerns, say sexism for example, we see no steady change in any one direction over time. Women had more freedom in Dark Ages Greece (the time that Sappho was writing poetry) than in classical Athens (when they could hardly leave the house), then more in Roman times (now they could at least own and inherit property) and even more in the early Medieval period (see the letters of Heloise and Abelard for an example), which was followed by the Inquisition, witch trials, Puritanism, and eventually Victorian repression. We see the same thing in China, where in the Bronze Age there were female generals leading the Shang army into battle and whose supposedly ancient patriarchy with its notorious footbinding is less than a thousand years old and stems from the Neo-Confucian reaction to the liberal Buddhism of the Tang Dynasty. The gains of modern liberal feminism are almost entirely dependent on the energy surplus provided by fossil fuels that enabled labor-saving machinery like dishwashers, dryers, and microwaves. If the power were to ever go out (which is not inconceivable, just look at South Africa), then we'd be right back to a more traditional division of labor between the sexes in a hurry.
I think your examples of information loss prove my point. Greeks lost writing, the world did not, and eventually the re-learned it from the east. Basic technology never had to be re-discovered in the Tasmania, the people were simply replaced by others who had not lost them. That was a big disaster for the Tasmanians, but civilisation keeps going.
You are right that moral progress is very patchy and reversible. I think (despite your choice of example) there's a rough net improvement brought on by the axial age, and another one by the Enlightenment. We can pick human sacrifice and slavery as the iconic institutions obsoleted by those revolutions. But when we zoom in to finer detail we see lots of reversals.
Slavery (and its relatives, like serfdom) was obsoleted by the Industrial Revolution making the institution economically unviable; claiming that it was the Enlightenment that made the British (the most industrialized nation at the time, and as such the one for whom it would have been the most unviable) turn around and abolish it is the literal definition of Whig history.
People really like pretending that business marches alongside honor (an attitude that persists in the US to this day) but it's rare for that to ever happen.
We still perpetrate this, we just try our best to distribute it over the entire population (i.e. the root of modern socialism) even if the negative effects are many times worse. Whether or not that's better... well, that depends on whether or not you're disproportionately affected by that- classical liberals are not-coincidentally generally the people whose have innate attributes that socialism seeks to redistribute the most (as much personal attributes, like self-control and the ability to act in good faith, as economic attributes).
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This essay is not a review of that podcast; rather it is my case for progress shaped as a response to three arguments of Ms Harrington. First she admits that society evolves but denies this represents an improvement of moral value. This is a defensible motte from which she moves to a wider bailey. She reckons that history shows that there's no progress because civilisations rise and then collapse. All this underpins her view that belief in a long term arc of improvement is a teleological or religious faith.
This motte-and-bailey is no dishonest trick cooked up by Ms. Harrington. It's an earnest part of the world-view of every progress-skeptic I talk to. Yet however earnest, it's still tricksy to quietly admit that modernity has brought us electricity, obstetrics and moon rockets while loudly proclaiming, with scant context and no qualification that progress is a fiction.
That's how progress-skeptics sneak out of their narrow moral motte. Given half a chance, they reach to wider territories, beginning by branding the idea of progress as teleological or religious. But this ignores a simple a causal explanation: society progresses because useful knowledge grows.
I don’t see this as much of a true motte and bailey. The simple fact is that civilizations do rise and fall repeatedly throughout history, and that new civilizations often have to pick up the pieces or preserve the memories or fix the broken bits of the civilization before it. In some cases the setbacks are severe, in other cases less so. The Romans had cement. We lost it completely for centuries. We had religious tolerance in Greece and Rome only to lose it in the final days of the United Roman Empire. Gays were once accepted, only to be persecuted for millennia afterwards.
My hypothesis is that “progress” only really works in times of peace and plenty. Rich societies can afford such things. Poor ones can’t. Rich societies can expend lots of resources and spend lots of time educating people. Poor ones don’t have the excess wealth to allow their children to learn and do nothing else for long periods of time. In pre-industrial societies, adulthood started at 16-17, in part because every able body was needed to either till the field or make tools or move goods around. Even today in very poor countries, people don’t go to school nearly as long as modern western states do. That education preserves the knowledge we already possess and allows for better understanding and invention.
As a society approaches collapse, these luxuries of the previous era contract. When you’re worried about survival of the tribe, the guy in a dress starts looking like a wimp and a liability. That minority starts looking like a potential threat or turncoat. The education needed to run the previous high culture tools — let alone invent something more complex. Complexity gets reduced. It doesn’t go to zero; the European feudal states had metal and horses and farming. And I think when the West collapses, we’ll still have at least steam power. Feudal elites could read, but they couldn’t produce the high levels of art and culture that High Rome had.
Civilizations come and go, and I think we’re slowly ascending a ladder here. But I don’t think you can simply point to modern inventions and assume that the technology is permanently ours, or that civilization is a single unbroken line from Egypt to USA. We aren’t the same people.
I don't think you need to establish the existence of a single unbroken line (whatever that means) to say that civilisation has progressed between those two points -- it least in terms of material progress. I'd say morally too, but that's more mixed.
But I would say, that the modern USA is one inheritor of knowledge that goes back to ancient Egypt and beyond. So in that (tautological) sense, there is some kind of unbroken line.
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Germany chooses to spend it on more worker protections or welfare, but having excess resources can just as easily be directed at (e.g.) binding women's feet, sacrificing people to the gods or building the Great Pyramids. I don't really have a good way to think about what causes countries to divert resources to one thing or another, but I don't think it's as simple as just having abundance.
Yeah, I'm inclined to think the causality runs the other way. When new things are getting discovered, there are riches to be found by exploiting those things.
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I guess I would consider peace and plenty more as necessary conditions, they aren’t magic, but without them you’ll be highly unlikely to achieve the progress you think you will. This is why democracy fails in poor countries. They don’t have the confidence in the system to think that letting someone else rule isn’t going to harm them.
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I'm one of the people you're looking to debate, but haven't had a chance to read the article yet. Will try to get to it this week though.
In the meantime, a couple framing questions:
First, does it matter if Progress-advocates have emphatically endorsed a definition of "progress" that extends much further than "the growth of knowledge", "productivity", "social complexity", or "human health" (that last in particular being very sensitive to equivocation)? If they had explicitly committed to a far more extensive definition of "progress" than the one you are defending, why is it unreasonable for us critics to hold them to that definition, rather than accepting yours? For a concrete example, consider the concept of a "war on poverty".
Second, consider a modern gunfight between two people armed with automatic rifles, thermal vision, scout drones and body armor, compared to two primordial humans attempting to kill each other with fist-sized rocks. Is the core nature nature of what a "fight" is and means, in a philosophical sense, altered by the absurdly vast technological gap between these two scenarios? Under your argument, it seems to me that there should be some fundamental difference between primitive!fight and progress!fight, but it doesn't seem to me that such a difference exists.
More generally, what does it mean to be human? What is the human condition? What is human nature? Have any of these answers changed meaningfully over time? If so, high-quality analysis of these questions should fall out of date as the ground-reality being assessed changed, yes? So texts from antiquity focusing on these questions, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, various religious texts from the BCs and so on, should be obviously out-of-date with the humans we observe all around us. Is this what you observe?
Thanks, these are interesting questions. Sorry I took me two weeks to get to them (I hope you get a chance to read the article itself!).
You are right to think in terms of definitions of "progress". There can be absolute progress of moral importance towards The Good; and there can be mundane progress towards other things. I believe both kinds are real, but agree with you that they should not be conflated. Also I'm showing that the mundane progress shouldn't be lightly ignored. My examples are there to show that any attempt to do so, distorts the word far away from it's ordinary meaning.
I wouldn't condemn that critique. I even might join it, depending on what exactly is being critiqued. But I object to that critique being extended to a blanket claim that progress doesn't exist -- that would be to conflate absolute and mundane progress.
I think that's also what you are doing in your second question
No there doesn't have to be such a fundamental difference. Because progress!fight only differs from primitive!fight by mundane progress. Even though I believe absolute (i.e. moral) progress is real, this is not an instance of it.
Are you asking this from an Aristotelian point of view? I.e. "what is the Telos of Man"?
To take your question literally. I'd say human nature has not changed very much. I wouldn't say our Telos has changed at all.
No I don't believe they should be out of date. Nor is it what we observe.
Is your point that, were absolute progress real, then we would have moved beyond the problems which those works grapple with? Because that is a valid point, which I'd like to tackle if that's really where you are going with this.
I did, but got caught up arguing about it with others in the thread, rather than writing a more cohesive reply. I think this one gets to a lot of the issues, though.
I'll cop to not actually having read Aristotle, but from inference, that's the general thrust. I'd put it more in terms of values and experience and significant choices available. Fighting is a fairly significant part of the general human experience, and the core nature of a fight, what it is and what it means, its moral nature if you will, seems immune to technological progress. I think it is the same for love, friendship, ambition, curiosity, marriage, sex, procreation, pleasure, fear, sickness, pain, death, justice, betrayal, jealousy... every morally significant aspect of the human experience, in short. And if these aspects of the human experience are what we lean on to understand morality, and mundane progress doesn't change them, why should mundane progress change morality?
Does mundane progress have any moral weight? It seems to me that by asking this question, we're already saying that our primary concern is morality, the Good, and we're seeing if mundane progress measures up to a standard already set. We recognize a number of moral principles, all of which trade off against each other. If mundane progress has moral weight, then it too should trade off against our other moral principles, and technological progress should, say, offset injustice. if it has no moral weight, then I think we are forced to conclude that mundane progress can, in fact, be ignored, because it does not actually matter, it is not integral to The Good.
People use the word progress to mean "things getting better". I remember life before air conditioning, and I definately like air conditioning better. But there's still a clear difference with mundane preferences and moral imperatives, and it seems to me that the gap between them is unbridgeable.
As I see it, the people who first argued that moral progress was possible did in fact conflate absolute and mundane progress. They did not recognize a distinction between them, and they made a lot of testable predictions about how manipulating mundane conditions would improve the moral character of human society. For three hundred years now, they've been claiming that fundamental convolutions of the human experience could be solved outright, that crime, want, hate, jealousy, greed, and many more besides could be decisively and permanently deconstructed. This is my understanding of the claim of moral progress: that we become flatly better than we were before, that when we were a child we reasoned as a child, but now that we are a man, the childish things are put away. Progressives have spent a lot of time making that argument very, very explicitly, and it seems to me that they've been consistently wrong.
The question here, I think, is whether moral reality is absolutely unchanging, or whether it is malleable. If the later, a further question is whether that change is bounded, or whether it is unbounded. Progressives, to continue using the term loosely, seem to believe that moral reality is unboundedly malleable. I think it is narrowly bounded; there are better and worse societies, but making a society too much worse tends to crash society as a whole, and making it better runs into fundamental, unchangeable limits of human nature, and is very difficult to sustain in any case.
Just so.
The Progressives have been refreshingly clear on this point, with their predictions about the infinite perfectibility of man, the "new soviet man", the Master Race, their stated ambitions for Psychology flatly solving major aspects of the human condition, Wars on Poverty and so on. A lot of this gets sanewashed in retrospect, by necessity given the outcomes, but if you read their prior positions they were not kidding around. They expected actual, tangible, undeniable moral progress, a clear discontinuity in human nature and human experience. They expected obvious parts of the human experience to simply go away, and other parts to be radically altered in immediately obvious ways; the abolishment of the family, for example. None of this happened, and a lot of the attempts to make it happen generated significant areas of concentrated misery, vast moral sinkholes.
If moral progress exists, though, it could be argued that they were right to make the attempt. If mundane progress has moral weight, a lot of repugnant arguments seem to logically follow, starting with the idea that less-advanced cultures are of lesser moral weight than more-advanced cultures, with crimes between them being of unequal weight as well. A lot of variations on "the ends justify the means" and "for the greater good" come to the fore, because we're presuming that there are ends at play, that there is a Greater Good available.
...On the other hand, my position requires biting a number of bullets. One of the bigger ones is that neither pleasure nor pain, nor even death, are admitted to have moral weight. If murder or sadism are to have moral weight, they must be for a reason other than their material effects, which I'd expect most moderns would consider a rather unintuitive claim. From where I sit, though, that logic is the best guard available against the embrace of atrocity and degradation. As they say, you can't make an omelet without killing a few people.
Interestingly, these moral claims don't seem to be unfalsifiable. People actually have been trying for some time to generate clear moral progress. If the tech curve goes exponential, if we see superhuman AI and a lot of the transhumanist claims come true, it seems hard to see why radical discontinuity would not be possible, and the skin-in-the-game has been recognized by both sides quite a way back; C.S. Lewis wrote a pretty good book making one side of the argument, back when Progressivism was running full-steam ahead, for example. How one assess that argument depends a lot on one's priors and perspective on both history and the current situation, but it seems to me fairly decisive; one can find the same argument made from other perspectives as well, for example Scott R Bakker's Semantic Apocalypse. To sum up the general form of the argument, even from a strictly materialist perspective, it seems hard to imagine how moral progress could happen without moral change, and if moral change is possible, it's not obvious that "progress" is actually a coherent concept, and the more accurate term would be something like "values drift". Our whole conception of the Good and of Progress assumes a fixed point, but there are solid reasons to believe that approaching that point requires an eschaton that nothing recognizably human would survive.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I haven't even finished reading it, so this is only a response to the first bit. My available time is going to the thinly sliced for a while, so I'm going to be doing things in bite-sized morsels.
Same here. But I've seen enough secondary and tertiary material to box a whole class of thinking in a category named "Aristotalean", whether or not it reflects the actual writings of the great man.
I tentatively agree. But I'll also note that fighting and reduced over the course of civilisation (go read a Pinker tome for the empirical argument). This has some negative consequences, but mostly it's a good thing.
Nice (though still incomplete) list! You are right that the story is much the same, and I think I have the same sort of response. Let's pick out "love, procreation, pain and death". I understand what you mean when you say they are in some sense unchanged. I'm writing this from the floor of a hospital room, where my two-day old son is sleeping peacefully (for now). All the really significant parts of the experience are ancient.
But there's also this: we have better obstetrics than the ancients. Neither this boy, nor his big sister would have been likely to have survived their births in medieval times. Or at least they'd have been left without a mother. But we live in modern times, and so here is our family is.
The point in my article was that by focusing on moral weight, we are distorting the common understanding of "progress". There's something sly about separating these things out. And I think that's what our examples above are drawing out, there's things of moral weight and mundane utility interpenetrate in ways that make them inseparable (which is perhaps why sensationalists confuse the two).
What? Why should we assume that we are forever at optimal frontier where everything is a trade-off? You have to be doing everything right to be be at that frontier, and even then the frontier can move when circumstances change.
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If you cannot understand the moral calculus of your forebears, it's a sin of pride to pronounce that calculus wrong. To say that your forebears are wrong and have that be more than a farce, you need to understand why they thought what they thought and be able to point to a mistake (of fact or of reasoning). Else, you have no way of really knowing whether you're simply a fool who denies the existence of that which is beyond his ken. Mere replacement in the public consciousness is no substitute; that proves memetic fitness, not correctness.
I'm dubious, for instance, that you actually understand the moral questions posed by slavery. Can you name the two developments which most changed the moral calculus of forced labour between 1400 and the present day?
Are you then taking a relativist stance, that slavery might have been OK for them even if it isn't for us? I'm sorry that sounds like a rhetorical-gotcha question -- it's not intended as such. I'm trying to understand you.
Am I taking a relativist stance? Maybe, depending on how you define "relativist". There is certainly a degree to which I'm nervous about mistaking what amount to ideological fashions for deep and lasting discoveries*. But in the case of slavery and slavery-like things, while I was indeed implying it was more OK for them than for us, I wasn't invoking relativism, merely changed technological circumstances affecting tradeoffs.
The first big one I was pointing at was punishment for serious crimes. Fines and humiliating punishments (the pillory, for instance) were already around in 1400, but for serious crimes (robbery, rape, murder...) that's not going to stop someone re-offending or provide a big enough deterrent. And, critically, the modern option of "stick them in a box and feed them" does not work in 1400; there is no food surplus, and innocents will die (perhaps not of starvation per se, but of disease due to undernutrition) if you have a significant amount of useless eaters. The remaining options all suck; you can maim them, you can enslave them (either privately or in a working prison), you can exile them (to potentially re-offend somewhere else, or quite likely die), or you can execute them. It is highly non-obvious that slavery isn't the best and most humane option there; certainly, most murderers would rather be enslaved than die!
The second big one was conscription. Conscription was not actually a humongous deal in 1400 AIUI, but between then and now it went drastically up and then drastically back down. This had nothing to do with morals and everything to do with military reality: guns made mass untrained armies really good, and then mechanisation plus nuclear weapons made them less useful again. In the meantime, there wasn't really an option of "don't do conscription"; you'd just get conquered by someone who did.
You can go into tradeoffs in a lot of these cases. Indentured servitude was invented as a solution to the Parfit's hitchhiker problem when colonising new land; getting rid of it was the right thing to do, but mostly because we stopped colonising new land. And we do still have it, in a highly-regulated form - if you join the army, you are required to follow lawful orders to the point of death, because the Parfit's hitchhiker problem is still a big deal in that profession.
There are limits to this; I can't make an argument in favour of hereditary slavery or slave raids that I'd truly accept, regardless of time period. But in a lot of instances, this was clearly technological progress and not moral progress; it wasn't that people in the past were ignorant and evil, they just had a different problem to solve than we do now, and that meant different policy choices.
And this is why I pointed to the whole Chesterton's Fence idea. If you understand why something was done and can point to some mistake, or some reason it no longer applies, then sure, tear it down. But if you can't do that, then you haven't ruled out the scenario of "I'm an idiot with delusions of wisdom", and that demands caution and humility.
*I'd suggest reading the Cornerstone Speech to see a particularly-extreme historical example - Ctrl-F "tedious" to skip to the relevant bit.
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The best steelman for slavery I could think of that doesn't go into casteist ideology is "back then, lifetime service in exchange for shelter and food was actually a good deal for many people, and it being forced simplified things". But of course, there is demand for being a devoted retainer, a plucky squire or a loved concubine. There is no demand for being a disposable helot.
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I agree. But I don't think our forebears understood their far-forebears' morality that much better than we ours when both deviated. And- I can be confident that tree gods do not literally, physically exist in the way some hunter gatherers claim they do, despite not fully understanding why they believed that, or what benefits they gained. I'd like to understand, and it'd be useful to, but there clearly is correctness.
"X is meant to appease tree gods, but tree gods aren't real, so X isn't valid" is good enough for the purposes of this point. Yes, there are the "oh, but what if there's some benefit that the HGs don't know about" issues, but the HGs are clearly wrong there regardless of whether you're right, and noting that they're wrong isn't just being pop-culture-Dunning-Krugered.
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I tried to phrase the question in such a way as to imply "changed circumstances" rather than "changed understanding". It seems I failed, so oops on that.
Oh. So which events made slavery more or less morally abhorrent.
In that case, they've got to have something to do with the New World. Mass enslavement for global networks has got to be categorically worse than a small-scale practice.
What did you have in mind?
Forgot to publically state this.
I meant 1) food surplus (gradual improvement over the years - I picked 1400 as about the time Europe started to break out of Malthusian conditions - then sudden spike in the 20th century as birth ceased to keep pace with food production) making imprisonment without forced labour something that doesn't necessarily result in innocent deaths - when you look at the other plausible punishments for serious crimes (i.e. maiming/exile-beyond-the-frontier/execution), in most cases the criminals would rather be enslaved; 2) change in military value of conscription (up drastically with firearms, then down drastically with mechanisation); during the period where conscription was extremely valuable, countries that didn't adopt it tended to be quickly conquered by countries that did.
Lesser examples include indentured servitude becoming far less of a win-win with the closure of the frontier.
My point here is - slavery and slavery-like things went away, to at least a large extent, because of technological progress rather than moral progress. Our ancestors had a harder problem to solve than we do, and declaring ourselves morally superior because they didn't take an option that didn't exist is, well, overweening pride.
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Either you've got some formatting issues or you're using weird shorthand with which I'm not familiar.
Anyway! By this standard, I'm not sure I've ever actually talked to a progress-skeptic. Education, GDP per capita, lifespan, personal luxuries...it's not hard to find someone who will disavow one or more of these, claiming they are not "progress" but a new avenue for oppression. But all of them? Arguing that all "progress" is māyā is a bold statement for a motte. Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?
I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded. It reminds me of the old neoreactionary claims about Victorian England. Paging @Hlynka_CG, I guess.
Finally, if you haven't seen it: Ars longa, vita brevis. A short story about the nature of technological progress.
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
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Howdy.
You list four categories. Let's compare a primordial human to our current society. Lifespan is significantly longer, but not staggeringly so. Education, GDP per capita, and personal luxuries... are so astronomically far beyond that it's absurd. Compared to them, we live in a level of casual splendor beyond belief, beyond myth, beyond reason. They would not even have the words to describe the chasm between their possessions and ours. The question is, is this "progress"? Is it Capital-B Better? Is it more to the Good, in an objective, absolute values, Moral-Ends sense?
If it is, then there has to be "less good" and "more good", and the scale of that goodness has to be pretty wide, and the core claim is that means carry moral weight.
So the question is, if it's true that means carry moral weight, then what moral values could you see trading off against a large increase in means? What scale of increase off the bare-ass hominid baseline would you require to consider, say, full and permanent moral acceptance of rape? In principle, what level of increased per-capita GDP, lifespan, education, and personal luxuries are needed to offset an increase in serious, unequivocal moral evil? ...And the thing is, if the answer is a bounded number, it seems to me that number probably ought to fall somewhere between the primordials and ourselves, shouldn't it? The increase in all these things has been truly staggering, has it not? Hell, probably just getting to Rome or so is a pretty staggering increase from the ancestral environment, right?
If means carry moral weight, the above sort of calculation should be possible. If it's not possible, or if it turns out that our intuitions find the weight of mere means infinitesimal compared to serious moral concerns, that is pretty good evidence that means don't carry moral weight.
Not only is is such a calculation possible, it is unavoidable. Most moral goods have a material cost, and basically no human picks the maximally moral side of that tradeoff. Though it is the relative, not absolute cost that matters for people, which is why the world is getting so much better. The marginal cost of saving a human life anywhere on Earth is about 5k these days, which is orders of magnitude higher than when people starting tracking things like this, as modern abundance has allowed people to actually work at saving lives on a massive scale, picking all the low-hanging fruit.
And in general your framing of the examples is exactly backwards. Increased wealth is what allows for the luxury of moral good. For example, evidently the cost of abolishing slavery (including serfdom) is too big for a pre-industrial society.
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I don't know what "māyā" means, but there's that infamous exchange from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
Maya means something like “illusion.” I used it for the metaphysical connotation of mistaking the material for the real.
I can see how Lewis fits progress-skepticism. As might Tolkien, who was quite the pastoralist after his experiences in the World Wars.
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My favorite 'progress' metric is the decline of child mortality. Sure, saves a lot of grief.
On the other hand, according to Kondrashov, the only person to ever seriously study relaxation of natural selection experimentally, we're in for very nasty issues down the road. And not that far down.
One can see us getting there if we get 'aligned' AI and 'rules based international order' doesn't die succeeds in destroying the Han state and corrupting other civilization-states.
Overall, sure, there's progress in technology and some parts of science. However:
there's also a profound decline ongoing, with vast swathes of population unwilling to even breed, an increase in violence, a decline in the quality of political speech, decline in social trust, brutal increases in time it takes to complete building projects, absurd costs, etc.
In America and partly in UK, this is coupled with a lack of will to police the lumpen classes, to police property crime, and so on.
This is all obvious decline from the first decades of the last century.
In addition, the only people who seem to exhibit some sort of 'will-to-power' are the radical left, who have insane aims (equity) and insane policies (like depolicing, end of meritocracy, etc)
Everyone else seems lost and floundering.
So, contra Harrington, you would say progress is a coherent concept. But you would deny that we've had any net progress in last two decades or so?
I wouldn't strongly disagree with that assesment.
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No objections to most of your examples, but:
(Counter) citation needed? The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out. The very recent trend is worrying, but even "let's just ease up on this whole 'police' thing" doesn't seem to have been nearly as disastrous as whatever combination of "let's empty out the asylums" / "let's set a trillion gallons of leaded gas on fire near our kids" / "let's try All The Drugs" / something-else doubled homicide rates in the 60s through 90s.
This is a problem, but is it a major increase? The biggest powers contending for the last century were:
FDR's USA: where we shredded the Tenth Amendment to the point where we no longer even realize "United States" is plural, we imprisoned an entire ethnicity, we tried to micromanage the economy with theories as mad as "let's destroy food during the Great Depression", and even our best anti-Depression scheme was the one where we robbed people of gold like cartoon villains. Oh, and we also were lax about nuclear secrets and discharged 85% of our military in the couple years between WWII and the Berlin Blockade, because we trusted "Uncle Joe".
Stalin's USSR: the aftermath of radical left gaining power, not just proposing insane policies but killing millions of their own people with them via a sick combination of incompetence and its ensuing scapegoating malice, then doubling down on incompetence by trusting their entire nation to the sanctity of a secret agreement with Adolf freaking Hitler after mutually wiping out the buffer state between them.
Hitler's Germany: the very idea of "will-to-power" appropriated from Nietzsche and taken to the extreme, rampaging across subcontinents in an insane attempt to dominate the entire world, but distracted by the obsession with slandering and murdering millions of their own people, and finally defeated in part because ideas like "don't trust that Einstein guy's physics, he's a Jew!" and "let's open up the war on two fronts at once!" are the sort of things you come up with when ruled by your own madness.
I'm not sure how to find political insanity on a graph, and I'll admit it feels like there's been an uptick over the last decade, but we're still nowhere near the heights we scaled during the last century.
Yes, homicides fell. However, the gradual but undeniable advances in trauma medicine since the Vietnam war have made it far less likely that violence ends in homicide.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203?journalCode=hsxa
So in all likelihood, you have a more violent society with fewer people dying.
As American society does not value interpersonal violence, it's hard to claim the increase in violence as a good thing.
This isn't the data I linked to. The violent crime rate is about 75x the homicide rate, and both fell in half.
This talks about a lethality decrease from the 1960s to 90s. I'm talking about reductions in 98% non-lethal crime from the 90s through 2010s.
It's especially hard if violence decreased 50%.
Non lethal crime is much more easily decreased by changes in reporting, incentives to report and so on.
For example, if you believed San Francisco police statistics, theft in shops is down.
We don't know whether violence decreased.
Consider for example the disparity between black and white lethal and non-lethal victimization rate.
There are 400k cases of black on black violence associated with about cca 4000 homicides.
There are 2.2 million cases of white on white violence associated with ~ maybe 3000 homicides.
What's your explanation for the disparity ? Reporting rates differ. We don't really know how much non-lethal violence is out there.
This is true. So what happens when we track violence independently of reporting, via victimization surveys? "From 1993 to 2021, the rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older." The decline is even more astonishing.
I find this all rather astonishing because while the homicide rate hasn't changed much, was at about 80% of the early 1990s peak due to the post-floyd boom, supposedly there's only 1/5 th of the incidents yet almost the same amount of dead people.
Mhmm.
Homicide isn't tracked by victimization surveys. Unless there's vampire homicides and a particularly brave interviewer, I suppose.
Is the decoupling of homicide from other violent crime during a mass panic something to be really surprised about, though? With 98% of violent crime non-lethal, it only takes a tiny change in conversion rate. If a burglar is suddenly looking at a bunch of Covid-locked-down houses that no longer ever seem to empty, it doesn't seem a priori implausible that a few percent of them are going to say "no, too risky for me" (so the violent crime rate component of robberies still drops) while a few percent are going to say "I need the money, and if it's not empty, I can fix that" (so the homicide rate skyrockets). For that matter, what happens to the other side of the equation during the post-Floyd period? A homeowner who might have said "I'll run and call the police" is now more likely to conclude "the police might just shoot me by accident" or "the police might not even show up tonight" and take things into their own hands. Still a robbery, still 1 violent crime, but maybe now it's 4% likely to turn into a homicide instead of 2%.
All this said .. could you answer my original question? "(Counter) citation needed?" I'm getting the impression that you're so confident of "an increase in violence" over these decades that no new evidence will change your mind, and I'd really like to know whether the explanation is that there's some far-more-compelling old evidence that you've neglected to mention, or whether this is just confidence not based on evidence. I can come up with a dozen reasons the latter sort of confidence might exist (witness the long tails of these responses - surely the news wouldn't hammer on a category of story 24/7 if it was about as common as deaths by lightning!) but I'm hoping to stick with the former for myself.
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The difference between now and those is they resulted from massive social upheaval, massive amounts of physical force, or both. The modern woke advance was done with no Great Depression, no world war, no dictatorship.
I think the (possibly weak) counter to this is "the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and Web 2.0 all provided enough force and upheaval to nurture the woke surge."
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It should be constantly falling as forensics, cameras, and so on improve, as the country gets richer. Likewise, life expectancy should always be rising. Real wages should always be rising. Technology improves after all.
If the US is like the UK, charge rates will have dropped significantly too: https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/1629785524599762946
I can't understand how the UK Home Office thinks 'literally all crime that happens is reported but our charge rates are under 5%.' I can't easily find charge rates for the US and I suppose there might be useful context in the paywalled Times article... But I believe that most crime figures are gross underestimates.
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