Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yes.
I'll give an example. A few months ago, my wife and I welcomed our first born child. The birth did not go smoothly, and without medical intervention I would likely have lost my wife, my daughter, or both. Fortunately, we live in a time and place with access to modern medicine, and both my wife and my daughter are recovered and healthy. I expect them to remain healthy for the next several decades.
By my best estimate, the childhood mortality Bronze Age Chaldeans was 30-50%, largely during infancy. A significant fraction of parents would bury their own children.
That's not to say our modern world is perfect. Obesity is high. Attention spans are low. Children grow up hearing that they can be anything they want to be, anything at all, and then run head-first into reality at some point. People believe that they can have all the things they want in life, and, by trying to pursue too many different goals, frequently end up achieving none of them.
And yet.
We do not, as a rule, bury our children.
Yes. If you look at the list of problems about the modern world, you'll notice that they are problems stemming from abundance and choice. Sometimes, when people have lots of resources, they spend them destructively. Sometimes, when people have many choices, they choose poorly.
And so developments which led to more abundance, and to more choice, would deliver more progress. Enough progress and the differences start to look pretty fundamental. At the extreme end something like "a cure for senescence" would qualify, although I expect something much more modest like "cheap batteries with 10x the energy density of the modern state of the art" would also do the trick.
If you were hoping for a more philosophical take on Progress, I expect you'll be disappointed. But that's because I don't think progressive culture is downstream of progressive ideology so much as it's downstream of material abundance. To the extent that I have an ideological position here it's "abundance is good, choice is good, there are downsides to both but I don’t think we're anywhere near the point that having more abundance and choice is net harmful rather than net helpful".
Imagine two people equipped with IIR sensors, recon drones, automatic rifles and body armor trying to kill each other, versus those same two people trying to kill each other while naked and armed with rocks. Does the technology differential between these two scenarios change the fundamental nature of what they're doing?
My wife and I went through something similar to the situation you've described, and I likewise am pretty sure that without medical technology neither she nor our firstborn would be alive. On the other hand, I am quite sure that they and I will die, and I do not know when. What has actually changed?
Similarly, how has technology changed the fundamental nature of being rich or poor, of love or hate, of joy or sorrow, ecstasy or despair, contentment, yearning, frustration, misery, or any of the other highs or lows of the human condition?
When I read Ecclesiastes or the Epic of Gilgamesh, the concerns expressed in those bronze-age discussions do not seem to be mysterious or incomprehensible, but rather seem exactly as relevant to me as I presume they were to their original readers. When the author of Ecclesiastes talks about the dead being better off than the living, but the best off being those who were never born, that phrasing is not mysterious to me. When Gilgamesh fears his own mortality, that fear is not mysterious to me.
But hasn't this always been true? "Abundance", and for that matter "poverty", seem to me to be entirely relative. Some people have always chosen to spend their resources destructively. Many people have made poor choices, as far back into history as we can see. Further, the nature of those poor choices doesn't seem to have changed. When I read about the King of Carthage surrendering to the Romans, and his Queen cursing him and choosing to burn alive with her children, this again is not mysterious to me, because there doesn't seem to be a disconnect between their evident thinking and my own. Likewise the Melian Dialogue: we can continue the argument between the Melians and the Athenians seamlessly this very moment, because nothing about the human experience has changed in any way in the intervening millennia.
It seems to me that the problems of the modern world consist entirely of it being peopled with humans, and that these humans do not seem to have changed in any way across all of recorded history. Human problems come from human nature, not from abundance or lack. "What is crooked cannot be straightened, what is lacking cannot be counted."
Will murder stop? Will theft even stop? We are already vastly richer in every possible material sense than people four thousand years ago, and yet the poor are still with us, aren't they? You seem to disagree, and yet the idea of a beggar is still relevant, isn't it?
You point to the lowering of infant mortality, it seems to me that when one set of sorrows decreases, they are replaced by a new set seamlessly. It does not seem obvious to me that people now are fundamentally happier than bronze-age peasants four thousand years ago. I imagine those peasants ate when they had food, sang and danced and laughed and cried, married, had children, mourned their dead, were jealous of those they perceived to be better off, hated and loved and so on. So where do the fundamental differences kick in? Given the differential, shouldn't those differences be obvious now?
[EDIT] - Additional context here for the interested.
"Fundamental" is a slippery word but I'm going to go with "no". However, if we switch from "primitive/modern people trying to kill each other" to "one primitive/modern nation-states trying to conquer another and take their stuff", I think that the modern world in which nuclear weapons and reliable second-strike capabilities exist is fundamentally different than the primitive one in which those things don't exist. In the ancient world, the conquered could salt their own fields to prevent the conquerer from benefiting from their conquest, but it is only in the modern world that "I refuse to be conquered, instead we will all die in a fire together" is an option.
Lows aren't as low or as frequent, highs are mostly as high as before. I don't know if the "fundamental nature" has changed but the changes are large and important and I think to a certain extent arguing about whether things are "fundamental" comes down to word games.
In the end we all die. But our children will live first. If you don't value that I'm not sure what to say.
There's a minimal level of abundance below which people can't survive. In the industrialized parts of the modern world, we experience abundance that is so hilariously far above that threshold that it's easy to forget that the threshold exists. But for most people who lived throughout most of human history, that threshold was extremely salient to their lives some nontrivial fraction of the time.
It is informative that your example compares the experience of the ruling family of one of the world's mightiest states at the time against some internet rando. That's not to say the comparison doesn't work -- it works just fine. But I expect you'd find your experiences less reflective of those of a typical farmer at that time than they are of that time's royalty.
This is true now, but if you went back to Europe during the Plague it would have been laughably wrong. We've beaten back most of the non-human problems. The human problems remain, because we're still here and we're still the same hairless apes with pretensions we've always been.
Nope. But smallpox did stop, and malaria will stop, and polio and starvation and iodine deficiency are mere shadows of the specters they were in centuries past. Our homes are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We're having this conversation over the internet, a magical network which allows most people in the world to talk to most other people in the world whenever they want to, synchronously or asynchronously depending on their preferences. If we decided that the mere projections of each others' words through rocks we tricked into thinking was insufficient, we could each get into an airplane and meet up at some arbitrary city somewhere in the world at this time tomorrow, probably for less money than we each make in a month.
In the first world, beggars largely do not starve.
It sure seems to me that when non-human-generated sorrows decrease, they're just gone. Disease does not fight back. Scarcity does not fight back.
Would you trade places with a bronze-age peasant from four thousand years ago? Would you expect them to trade places with you?
I agree, but this is the core question I'm trying to get at. My understanding is that the main branch of the Enlightenment is specifically based on the assumption that this is not, in fact, true. It holds that human problems are not separate from non-human problems, and that human problems can be solved the same way we solve polio. My argument is that this specific question is a pretty good predictor of the large-scale split in values between the tribes. One side of that split believes that human problems are intrinsic to humanity and thus cannot be solved. The other side believes that human problems are an engineering failure, and if we get the engineering right they go away.
I don't think "fundamental" is a word game. Humans have been stealing for as long as they've existed. If you change things to the point that humans actually stop stealing, that's a fundamental change. Ditto for all the other goods and evils. That's my understanding of what "progress" means, from direct observation of progressives. Again, "war on poverty", "smash the patriarchy", "teach men not to rape", "give peace a chance", "New Soviet Man", and so on.
This is true. And yet, the hedonic treadmill appears to also be true, such that our desires and ambitions auto-adjust to whatever level of abundance we have and whatever level of hardship we face. I don't think people in the modern world are significantly happier than people in the ancient world. I think people in the ancient world laughed and cried more or less the same as we do, just over different things, and I think that based on reading their own descriptions of their lives.
The example is of a queen, because queens are notable enough to make it into the histories. I maintain that the core of the experience generalizes to all humans, and of all ages too. Kamikaze spite is a very human reaction to losing a conflict. I don't think wealth or status or anything else has any significant impact on the story. Honor does not seem to have been the exclusive preserve of the ultra-wealthy, then or now. If you disagree, we could change the example to the siege of Masada, which is essentially the same story without the involvement of royalty.
And yet, they still die disproportionately young, and the things they die of are generally described as "deaths of despair". If our absurd abundance is actual progress, why would "deaths of despair" be a meaningful category?
All of this is true. And yet:
...All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
...The above seems deeply true, based on my own experience. It also seems entirely incompatible with the concept of "progress".
I wouldn't call them a failure, exactly, just that our circumstances are getting ever further away from the original specification. And it seems to me that both sides generally agree with this, the difference is in what we're supposed to do about that, the options being RETVRN or re-engineering. And while the latter has proven much more difficult than some early optimists envisioned, the former seems to me to be entirely intractable.
Moving the entire society back to any desired pre-Enlightenment mode could only work if you can coordinate the whole world to play along with you. If they keep the nukes while you revert to crossbows then the outcome of any future conflict is pre-determined. Given that such coordination is miles away from the Overton window anywhere, let alone everywhere, what choices are there other than attempting to adapt or die?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link