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 -
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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