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?
I agree. But I don't think our forebears understood their far-forebears' morality that much better than we ours when both deviated. And- I can be confident that tree gods do not literally, physically exist in the way some hunter gatherers claim they do, despite not fully understanding why they believed that, or what benefits they gained. I'd like to understand, and it'd be useful to, but there clearly is correctness.
"X is meant to appease tree gods, but tree gods aren't real, so X isn't valid" is good enough for the purposes of this point. Yes, there are the "oh, but what if there's some benefit that the HGs don't know about" issues, but the HGs are clearly wrong there regardless of whether you're right, and noting that they're wrong isn't just being pop-culture-Dunning-Krugered.
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