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.
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.
So, contra Harrington, you would say progress is a coherent concept. But you would deny that we've had any net progress in last two decades or so?
I wouldn't strongly disagree with that assesment.
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