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toadworrier  11mo ago (text post)   Edited 11mo ago   1605 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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My hypothesis is that “progress” only really works in times of peace and plenty. Rich societies can afford such things. Poor ones can’t. Rich societies can expend lots of resources and spend lots of time educating people.

Germany chooses to spend it on more worker protections or welfare, but having excess resources can just as easily be directed at (e.g.) binding women's feet, sacrificing people to the gods or building the Great Pyramids. I don't really have a good way to think about what causes countries to divert resources to one thing or another, but I don't think it's as simple as just having abundance.

Yeah, I'm inclined to think the causality runs the other way. When new things are getting discovered, there are riches to be found by exploiting those things.

I guess I would consider peace and plenty more as necessary conditions, they aren’t magic, but without them you’ll be highly unlikely to achieve the progress you think you will. This is why democracy fails in poor countries. They don’t have the confidence in the system to think that letting someone else rule isn’t going to harm them.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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