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Mary's Motte and the case against progress

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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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!).

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"

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.

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".

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

...t, 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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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!).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll cop to not actually having read Aristotle, but from inference, that's the general thrust.

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'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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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,

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.