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 -
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.
Howdy.
You list four categories. Let's compare a primordial human to our current society. Lifespan is significantly longer, but not staggeringly so. Education, GDP per capita, and personal luxuries... are so astronomically far beyond that it's absurd. Compared to them, we live in a level of casual splendor beyond belief, beyond myth, beyond reason. They would not even have the words to describe the chasm between their possessions and ours. The question is, is this "progress"? Is it Capital-B Better? Is it more to the Good, in an objective, absolute values, Moral-Ends sense?
If it is, then there has to be "less good" and "more good", and the scale of that goodness has to be pretty wide, and the core claim is that means carry moral weight.
So the question is, if it's true that means carry moral weight, then what moral values could you see trading off against a large increase in means? What scale of increase off the bare-ass hominid baseline would you require to consider, say, full and permanent moral acceptance of rape? In principle, what level of increased per-capita GDP, lifespan, education, and personal luxuries are needed to offset an increase in serious, unequivocal moral evil? ...And the thing is, if the answer is a bounded number, it seems to me that number probably ought to fall somewhere between the primordials and ourselves, shouldn't it? The increase in all these things has been truly staggering, has it not? Hell, probably just getting to Rome or so is a pretty staggering increase from the ancestral environment, right?
If means carry moral weight, the above sort of calculation should be possible. If it's not possible, or if it turns out that our intuitions find the weight of mere means infinitesimal compared to serious moral concerns, that is pretty good evidence that means don't carry moral weight.
Not only is is such a calculation possible, it is unavoidable. Most moral goods have a material cost, and basically no human picks the maximally moral side of that tradeoff. Though it is the relative, not absolute cost that matters for people, which is why the world is getting so much better. The marginal cost of saving a human life anywhere on Earth is about 5k these days, which is orders of magnitude higher than when people starting tracking things like this, as modern abundance has allowed people to actually work at saving lives on a massive scale, picking all the low-hanging fruit.
And in general your framing of the examples is exactly backwards. Increased wealth is what allows for the luxury of moral good. For example, evidently the cost of abolishing slavery (including serfdom) is too big for a pre-industrial society.
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