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 -
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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