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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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[Mary Harrington's][rfem] recent [podcast][mhdh]

I these dogmatists

Either you've got some formatting issues or you're using weird shorthand with which I'm not familiar.


Anyway! By this standard, I'm not sure I've ever actually talked to a progress-skeptic. Education, GDP per capita, lifespan, personal luxuries...it's not hard to find someone who will disavow one or more of these, claiming they are not "progress" but a new avenue for oppression. But all of them? Arguing that all "progress" is māyā is a bold statement for a motte. Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?

I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded. It reminds me of the old neoreactionary claims about Victorian England. Paging @Hlynka_CG, I guess.

Finally, if you haven't seen it: Ars longa, vita brevis. A short story about the nature of technological progress.

My favorite 'progress' metric is the decline of child mortality. Sure, saves a lot of grief.

On the other hand, according to Kondrashov, the only person to ever seriously study relaxation of natural selection experimentally, we're in for very nasty issues down the road. And not that far down.

One can see us getting there if we get 'aligned' AI and 'rules based international order' doesn't die succeeds in destroying the Han state and corrupting other civilization-states.

Overall, sure, there's progress in technology and some parts of science. However:

there's also a profound decline ongoing, with vast swathes of population unwilling to even breed, an increase in violence, a decline in the quality of political speech, decline in social trust, brutal increases in time it takes to complete building projects, absurd costs, etc.

In America and partly in UK, this is coupled with a lack of will to police the lumpen classes, to police property crime, and so on.

This is all obvious decline from the first decades of the last century.

In addition, the only people who seem to exhibit some sort of 'will-to-power' are the radical left, who have insane aims (equity) and insane policies (like depolicing, end of meritocracy, etc)

Everyone else seems lost and floundering.

No objections to most of your examples, but:

an increase in violence

(Counter) citation needed? The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out. The very recent trend is worrying, but even "let's just ease up on this whole 'police' thing" doesn't seem to have been nearly as disastrous as whatever combination of "let's empty out the asylums" / "let's set a trillion gallons of leaded gas on fire near our kids" / "let's try All The Drugs" / something-else doubled homicide rates in the 60s through 90s.

the only people who seem to exhibit some sort of 'will-to-power' are the radical left, who have insane aims (equity) and insane policies (like depolicing, end of meritocracy, etc)

This is a problem, but is it a major increase? The biggest powers contending for the last century were:

  • FDR's USA: where we shredded the Tenth Amendment to the point where we no longer even realize "United States" is plural, we imprisoned an entire ethnicity, we tried to micromanage the economy with theories as mad as "let's destroy food during the Great Depression", and even our best anti-Depression scheme was the one where we robbed people of gold like cartoon villains. Oh, and we also were lax about nuclear secrets and discharged 85% of our military in the couple years between WWII and the Berlin Blockade, because we trusted "Uncle Joe".

  • Stalin's USSR: the aftermath of radical left gaining power, not just proposing insane policies but killing millions of their own people with them via a sick combination of incompetence and its ensuing scapegoating malice, then doubling down on incompetence by trusting their entire nation to the sanctity of a secret agreement with Adolf freaking Hitler after mutually wiping out the buffer state between them.

  • Hitler's Germany: the very idea of "will-to-power" appropriated from Nietzsche and taken to the extreme, rampaging across subcontinents in an insane attempt to dominate the entire world, but distracted by the obsession with slandering and murdering millions of their own people, and finally defeated in part because ideas like "don't trust that Einstein guy's physics, he's a Jew!" and "let's open up the war on two fronts at once!" are the sort of things you come up with when ruled by your own madness.

I'm not sure how to find political insanity on a graph, and I'll admit it feels like there's been an uptick over the last decade, but we're still nowhere near the heights we scaled during the last century.

The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out.

It should be constantly falling as forensics, cameras, and so on improve, as the country gets richer. Likewise, life expectancy should always be rising. Real wages should always be rising. Technology improves after all.

If the US is like the UK, charge rates will have dropped significantly too: https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/1629785524599762946

I can't understand how the UK Home Office thinks 'literally all crime that happens is reported but our charge rates are under 5%.' I can't easily find charge rates for the US and I suppose there might be useful context in the paywalled Times article... But I believe that most crime figures are gross underestimates.