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 -
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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