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Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
I think there is a strong case to consider that the pill is a result of feminism. From to Will Durant's citing Roman sources, it appears that the Romans had abundant access to various herbs and knowledge of practices that could basically prevent pregnancy. And if that all failed, there was always exposure. The Roman elite died out, and were replaced by more very fertile Christians who had a very a hard-line against contraception. And then only after feminism took hold in the 1920s, the Lambeth conference legitimized birth control for the most powerful Anglo-American denomination, states started legalizing birth control, etc. Only after that did companies start investing in research on contraception. In previous eras, they would have simply been forbidden from doing so.
TMK proven Roman methods of birth control were things that required male cooperation, although there are lines in early Christian writers condemning the use of contraceptive drugs we don’t know how well they worked. A fertility transition using lots of the pull-out-method(and IIRC that was doing most of the work behind the 19th century French fertility transition) and infanticide it doesn’t seem fair to blame feminism for because those things were probably down to male heads of household desiring smaller families.
Do you mind elaborating on your position? Are you arguing that the 19th century fertility transition being due to men basically just pulling out more ("men's pull out game was stronger")? Assuming for the sake of the argument this is true, why did this occur?
Isn't the social effects of industrialisation in the 19th century a more reason explanation (including mass urbanisation)?
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This has become a bit of a cliche but I think it's quite a lot more complicated than this. It's probably not wholly untrue, but, for instance, the issue of how efficient American plantation slavery was in the context of an industrialising economy has never really been settled. Time on the Cross has come in for a lot of criticism since its publication, but I think most people do now accept that American slavery was not simply going to be annihilated by the modernisation of the American economy; it really was quite 'efficient'.
Necro!
Anyhoo, I liked this particular bit.
Of course it's a lot more complicated, this was some Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy style analysis. I do think it's a useful frame.
Slavery counterfactuals aside, technology provided an option to slave labor. It didn't need to annihilate it. It just had to be a viable alternative, and I imagine that point in time was different for different technologies and different jobs. John Henry is a folk tale about this process, and he, of course, is a freed slave. Freed to have a labor competition with a steel-driving machine.
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What do feminism and air conditioning have to do with each other? Is it a reference to how women purportedly like different temperatures in the office than men, or something else?
A sentiment I've seen floating around is that women weren't interested in office work until air conditioning was invented, i.e. when office work went from hard work in hot (or cold) cramped quarters to sitting on cushions drinking lattes in a temperature-controlled environment.
Seems kinda silly, because women were DOING work (and not just office work) in worse environments than that. Perhaps might apply to women of a certain SES and above only, but the timing doesn't work out -- women had largely replaced men as secretaries by the 1920s, long before A/C was common.
Sure, just explaining the reference.
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Lots of fairly educated middle-class women in comfortable air-conditioned suburbia with nothing to do, meant there was far more time to start reading Betty Friedan (or becoming her in the first place), because your house is comfortable, you have less housework to do, and there's no danger of ending up with six kids.
I think though, this is somewhat overrated - like OK, you hate modern feminism, fine. But, even the vast majority of tradcath mothers with six children in rural Iowa would find the America of say, 1970 insanely sexist. So, I'd say the conditions were ripe, especially in a society with the founding myth of equality America has.
If you said the vast majority of rural church attending stay at home moms you might be right(although it’s probably a close run thing in 1970. 1950, sure), but actual IRL tradcaths fit in pretty well with gender norms from… actually well prior to that.
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Trying to not lose sight of the point you're making because of history not gelling with it in all instances, as many are squabbling about below:
Looking at the changes technological progress had on the world as gradual, it allowed more and more people to be informed of and worry about things like abolition and whatever else instead of being starved and homeless fending off the barbarians, as an overdramatic example. In that sense it's undoubtably true that technology is a necessary factor to facilitate whatever social change. I am assuming that's the gist of what you are saying?
On the other hand I don't believe you can tie technology as a cause for why some policy or opinion reigned over another. Technology can only serve to free the mind towards whatever can dominate it when the last immediate threat is taken care of. To say what dominates when, where and why might certainly be a product of technology in some sense, but calling it that makes the term so broad it becomes most everything. Why not enslave more rather than less? Technology can't answer that question.
However, if we look at the history of the world as the genetic expression of those who utilize technology to free their will unto their environment, we have more tools at our disposal to pontificate on the when, where and why.
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In a future where we could create cheap, tasty vat-grown meat which was a perfect or near-perfect substitute for the natural variety we should expect the animal rights movement to gain a lot of steam. I would expect industrial animal husbandry to fall, but I think small scale hunting and farming might hold on by virtue of protecting and practicing long-running cultural practices.
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I think it's true that technological progress generally leads to moral progress. Here I'm defining "technological progress" as "that which lets people get more of what they value at lower cost." If you are a utilitarian it's almost a tautology that "people getting more of what they value" leads to moral progress, because increasing utility is the definition of moral progress. Even if you are not a utilitarian, I think you should agree that "people getting more of what they value" generally tends toward moral progress, because it gives people the option to choose between more alternatives and therefore more freedom to choose the morally best alternative.
This is why I often disagree with people here who see preserving one's culture as a good in and of itself. Culture is a form of technology - different cultures differ in terms of how well they enable their adherents to get what they value for a given cost in a given context. Therefore cultural progress is possible as a form of technological process. Cultural change should only be resisted to the extent it's not technological progress.
I don’t see why you should agree. If you’re not a utilitarian you can say “people getting more of what they value” can be a bad thing if their values are confused, perverse or evil.
I will grant that the theoretical TikTok maximally viral culture can eventually meet the condition of “the most people possible getting what they want”, but that says nothing about whether what they want is worth anything at all.
Right, this is why I said "generally tends towards."
For instance, let's say you're a deontologist and your morality consists of the maxim "obey the ten commandments." If someone is dirt poor, they have to do what it takes to survive, they have little freedom. Maybe they are forced to steal or kill to survive, thereby breaking the ten commandments. As people get wealthier and have more options, so they have more freedom to choose to follow the ten commandments. This doesn't mean they necessarily will do so, but it means that they are more able to do so. They have more capacity to be morally good actors under any moral system because they have more freedom of choice.
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Child labor is an interesting consideration along these lines.
I seem to recall that union concerns (shrinking the size of the labor pool) was originally part of the motivation there as well, though.
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The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
And much like other technology-to-political thrusts, people will intentionally mistake technological capability with moral rectitude.
"We have an alternative to meet that's cheaper, more nutritious, and doesnt hurt the cows."
"Cool, I'm gonna eat this cow."
"Why wouldn't you want cheaper and better and no-harm-cow?"
"I just like what I like. It's tradition for me."
"JAIL!"
Exaggeration and hyperbole because I'm on an internet forum, but this is the blueprint of a Clear and Present Danger (great move, BTW).
To be clear, I'm a techno accelerationist who is incensed that we continually step on our own foot and prevent amazing human achievement for very vibes based reasoning (candidate 1: nuclear power) .... but I am a cultural traditionalist that believes that supporting tradition in culture - even when it falls out of vogue - is the only way to prevent the sky robots from reading our brainwaves. (I'm having fun today).
Here's an example you may not have thought of; e-mail addresses. E-mail addresses are now de facto on almost every legal document you will encounter. This was not the case well into the 2000s. Now, if you decide you do not want to use the "miracle" of Al Gore's internet, you are self-selecting out of a massive amount of economic opportunity in the western world. Nevermind a telephone number / cell phone.
It's fun for me to point and laugh at Vegans right now, but their moralistic hectoring and willingness to weaponized emotional propriety are the exact same strategy and tactics as the Transcult. They are coming not for my Big Macs, but my right to exist as a Big Mac enjoyer.
It also won't matter if the technology is any good. It'll be like light bulbs -- "Here, we have this perfect substitute which uses a lot less energy" (hands you flickering, over-large, buzzing, mercury-filled fluorescent emitting weirdly colored light). With meat it'll be "here's this disgusting slop in the vague shape of a steak... it's good enough, meat's banned".
And it was worth it. LED lights with good CRIs are better in every way that matters when compared to incandescents.
I think it's unfair to the Vegans to imagine that they want the quality of meat substitute to always remain slop, though given their purity politics I think it's only mildly uncharitable.
At any rate, they haven't won that culture war, just managed to carve out a niche from which they struggle to progress further, especially to the wider world that doesn't really give a shit about the conditions the chicken on their table lived in.
If I believe that incandescents are "better" in a "way" that you believe does not matter, is it alright for me to own and operate one?
Sure. Why should I care?
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Incandescents were banned before LEDs were available (and most LEDs have terrible CRIs)
I am aware of that, hence the whole passage that followed after about barely passable slop not staying that way.
You didn't seem to address the "mist LEDs have terrible CRIs" part.
And LEDs with great CRIs are available for those who care. The overwhelming majority of people don't, at most they dislike overly cool lighting, which is even easier to solve.
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I even think "cultured meat" will be a dead end and plant based substitution products will win:
https://www-merkur-de.translate.goog/verbraucher/als-vegan-variante-unternehmen-sieht-langfristige-entwicklung-ernaehrung-wurst-klassiker-jetzt-nur-noch-92781805.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
I'm seeing an awful lot more vegan products in supermarkets, and often they're quite good. They wouldn't shift me from meat eating just yet, but get a product out there that looks and tastes as good as meat, be that cultured meat or plant-based, and can be easily swapped into recipes where meat is used, and I'd give it a try.
So I agree that working on that (sausages that can be cooked like 'the real thing' etc.) instead of the moral sledgehammer to the head approach ("you are evil and wicked if you eat meat, because you support, condone, and approve of rape, torture and murder of sentient beings who have emotions and feelings and memories and moral worth every bit as much as a human does") will convert more people. I don't care if momma cow 'cries' over her calf being taken away for milk production, I do care if you can provide me with a 'steak' or 'roast' that isn't much worse than the original product.
You don't seem to be taking nutrition into account. Meat is very good for you. Pea protein blended into a seed oil slurry isn't.
Meat, good for you? Probably. It's very nutrient rich, and the dangers lie in overdoing it or going for red meat or processed forms (at least when it comes to colon cancer).
I don't know if pea protein is bad, for some reason, and I remain unconvinced about the recent hubbub over seed oils.
I will find it hard to be convinced that the 27-ingredient hyper processed slurry being sold as a ‘burger’ is as good for you as either a steak or some good old rice and beans, but it’s fairly plausible that it’s not worse for you than a Big Mac.
It seems to me that the most replicable finding in nutrition science is that extremely processed foods(like soyrizo or the impossible burger, although also candy, Cheetos, hot dogs, Diet Coke, etc) are very bad for you, but that it’s impossible to define ‘processed foods’ well enough to cover the options and only the options. With that in mind I think we should be very cautious about vegan meat substitutes being healthy.
I suspect that it is not so much "processing" (why would blending up pork scraps and extruding them into a sausage shape change the nutrition) but specifically preservatives which are bad over time. Unfortunately, preservatives are usually introduced into processed foods to make them more consistent and less prone to spoilage, making them cheaper as well.
This seems plausible but IIRC there’s some noticeable trend discontinuities on it. Not sure though so don’t quote me.
In any case I suspect mass market vegan ‘meat’ will have even more preservatives than sausages and cheap ground beef do today.
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I think technology expands the possibilities in politics and morality. Democracy really only becomes possible when a critical mass of citizens become literate enough to make decisions about complex issues they deal with. The ability to stop public execution was more a product of technology — we can tell you about a guy given a ten year sentence instead of marching him through town and flogging him in the town square. Things like jobs being too difficult or dangerous required the development of machines to do that work instead or at least to make the world safer.
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Impossible to predict moving forward. Even retrospective takes like yours need a lot of time and hindsight to parse out the effects of the technology.
I’ll be bold enough to make one such prediction though. Democracy/republics as we think of them in the west depend almost entirely on the written word (on paper) being the dominant form of communication. This allows one time to think, consider arguments as a whole, and respond with their own measured argument.
The shift to image-based and video communication becoming dominant will lead to entirely new political structures and forms of organization. Add in the sprinkle of chaos from these forms of communication being dependent on rent-seeking corporations that own the platforms and crucially have juiced the platforms with unbeatable and irresistible addictive potential and we will see some crazy shit in 100 years. Probably nothing good IMO.
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Slavery was abolished in England in the 12th century, replaced by serfdom, and then Elizabeth I freed the serfs in 1574. Some English people practiced slavery outside of England but on the island itself there was no institution of slavery. It's clearly not a purely technological issue.
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers. Slavery is just a way of giving the rich a larger share of the wealth at the cost of stifling economic growth.
Time on the Cross chapter 6:
Chapter 5:
Plus one for Robert Fogel, a criminally underrated fun economist. I'm a fan of his work trying to figure out how different productivity would be in we just built tons of canals instead of railways, mostly because I think that would look sick.
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This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
Not sure is Haiti with its accursed history a good example of something not being a good idea.
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes. But in this case profits are again wealth transfer from poor and it seems extremely likely that overall it was worse.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
Organic and ethical farms are actually dramatically more efficient at turning energy into food than industrial agriculture. Industrial farming lets you turn petroleum/oil into food, and despite being less efficient (and causing damage to the soil to boot) the sheer amount of energy contained within petroleum lets modern industrial agriculture outcompete organic and ethical farming.
You may have your own metric of what is "efficient", I use markets and capacity to produce at scale. You may use different idea of what "efficient" means including efficiently satisfying your aesthetic need but then we are not discussing the same thing. Slave plantations were able to produce more cash crops for cheaper compared to other types of agricultural production, that is why they emerged in the first place and it did not matter if it was French or Portuguese or English or Dutch or later Americans being in control, all of them were running slave plantations despite being of different religions, cultures, languages etc. Playing word games of what it means to be efficient does not change the economic incentives.
As has been pointed out below, my metric is actually energy returned on energy invested, i.e. input vs output on an energetic level. To the best of my knowledge this is actually what people usually mean when they use the term "efficient" and I'm not trying to play any language games here. Organic farming turns 1 calorie of input into 10 calories of output, petroleum/modern agriculture turns 10 calories of input into 1 calorie of output. To go back to slavery, slavery might even be incredibly inefficient, but the slaveowner doesn't care because he's using other people's resources without compensating them - slavery isn't really about efficiency.
As for changing economic incentives, I think there's actually a very substantial chance of that changing over the next few decades - go look at a chart showing conventional oil discoveries over time (you can look at the non-conventional discoveries too, but they need to be accounted for differently due to depletion rates etc). Modern industrial agriculture relies on petroleum and there are no substitutes, so expect economic incentives to change dramatically as oil's price changes.
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From what I remember from his other comments, his metric of efficiency how much energy you need to put in vs how many calories of food you get out. It's a valid metric IMO, and markets obfuscate it when energy is cheap.
I could ride my horse to the next valley for 10 potatoes. Or I could walk there for 3 potatoes.
The market has determined that generally people's time is more valuable than the energy, and the market's efficiency is calculated by taking the two factors (among others) into account. To say that the market result is not maximally energy efficient is a trivial, one-eyed view. The labour efficiency of organic farming is abysmal.
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That is a silly metric. You may as well count total weight of machinery produced and declare that USSR centrally planned economy was more efficient by West.
The whole point is that this system produced more luxury good and sucked at other things.
For a toy example: if you take over island and force people to work to death in a gold mine, then it is not a better economical system even if it produces more gold.
(and organic farms AFAIK are straightforwardly less efficient, Norman Borlaug was one of great heroes - also you can have unethical organic farm, using some type of fertilizers over another does not make impossible to use slaves etc)
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And then England had to abolish slavery again for real this time in 1834 at ruinous cost. So they didn't really quite abolish it previously.
It would be odd to say of England legislating the use of common law by English subjects in 14th century Ireland that England had to adopt common law for real this time. It’s more that English law lagged behind English possessions, and this was only fixed if England (or later the UK) started caring enough and had enough control to do it.
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And slavery was made illegal in Sweden in 1335 and serfdom never really existed either in practice or as a legal concept, even though there were major agricultural areas (Västgöta slätten, Östgöta slätten, Mälardalen).
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This didn't pass the sniff test, and sure enough, France outlawed slavery in the 14th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism
I think it works okay if you view things in a more fuzzy way. The idea of abolitionism didn't just magically appear at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just like the IR itself wasn't a single thing at a single time but a gradual progression over hundreds of years. Going from an idea written about by a few privileged elites to a movement endorsed by nation-sized populations and that nation-states are prepared to wage full-scale wars over is not an instant or automatic process. It seems very plausible to me that the IR powered the growth of abolitionism from something that they were willing to pass in places that didn't really have any slaves anyways to something that they were prepared to enact and enforce by force of arms in places where the entire economy was built on slave labor and the controlling imperial power was getting a fat chunk of the profits.
Slavery was extremely common in early Medieval England and yet it was abolished while still common.
I'm skeptical, but curious. I wonder exactly what "common" means here. Exactly how many are we talking about, who had them, how much money was invested in slaves in England overall, what kind of work were they doing, etc. The details could easily confirm or refute my presumption that it was relatively low friction to abolish in the places it was abolished early.
The elite class now sure doesn't seem to like farmers and ranchers, even though that's where their food comes from. It seems pretty plausible that a bunch of trend-following elites were willing to ban something that only hurt people they didn't care much about anyway.
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...in France. Not in its colonial possessions, which is where it actually mattered, until well into the Steam Age.
I’m pretty sure that there were lots of slaves available for trafficking into 1300’s France and lots of demand for the same thing.
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What colonial possessions? This is the 14th century.
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And yet there were approximately a million serfs in France when the Revolution kicked off in 1789.
"For legal purposes these are not slaves. They and their descendants are tied to whoever owns this plot of land. They are also not allowed to leave or owed any pay for their obligated labor. Those who shirk their duties will be punished accordingly. But at least we aren't like barbarous colonials forcing slaves to work under the lash."
I levee corvée. He has indentured servants. You are a slavemaster.
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I don’t think “anti-racism” is the right term. I think you’re looking for “abolitionism.” It’s very possible to be an abolitionist and a racist at the same time. By today’s standards, pretty much every abolitionist at the time of the American Civil War was a racist of the worst kind.
"Let's free all the slaves ... and return them all to their true home in Africa."
I think that's approximately correct.
There was also "the latest territory petitioning for statehood should be a free state... to keep the negroes out."
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It means the moral arc of history is going to take a hard bend toward paperclips now, paperclips tomorrow, paperclips forever.
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