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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