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toadworrier  11mo ago (text post)   Edited 11mo ago   1583 thread views

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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It difficult to see how these are not moral improvements. Indeed even the more modern rights revolutions fighting various quarter-, eigth- and sixteenth-slaveries have been mostly on target.

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?

The Reformation|| and ||the French Revolution?

I tried to phrase the question in such a way as to imply "changed circumstances" rather than "changed understanding". It seems I failed, so oops on that.

Oh. So which events made slavery more or less morally abhorrent.

In that case, they've got to have something to do with the New World. Mass enslavement for global networks has got to be categorically worse than a small-scale practice.

What did you have in mind?

Forgot to publically state this.

I meant 1) food surplus (gradual improvement over the years - I picked 1400 as about the time Europe started to break out of Malthusian conditions - then sudden spike in the 20th century as birth ceased to keep pace with food production) making imprisonment without forced labour something that doesn't necessarily result in innocent deaths - when you look at the other plausible punishments for serious crimes (i.e. maiming/exile-beyond-the-frontier/execution), in most cases the criminals would rather be enslaved; 2) change in military value of conscription (up drastically with firearms, then down drastically with mechanisation); during the period where conscription was extremely valuable, countries that didn't adopt it tended to be quickly conquered by countries that did.

Lesser examples include indentured servitude becoming far less of a win-win with the closure of the frontier.

My point here is - slavery and slavery-like things went away, to at least a large extent, because of technological progress rather than moral progress. Our ancestors had a harder problem to solve than we do, and declaring ourselves morally superior because they didn't take an option that didn't exist is, well, overweening pride.

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