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.
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
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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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I don't know what "māyā" means, but there's that infamous exchange from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
Maya means something like “illusion.” I used it for the metaphysical connotation of mistaking the material for the real.
I can see how Lewis fits progress-skepticism. As might Tolkien, who was quite the pastoralist after his experiences in the World Wars.
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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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No objections to most of your examples, but:
(Counter) citation needed? The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out. The very recent trend is worrying, but even "let's just ease up on this whole 'police' thing" doesn't seem to have been nearly as disastrous as whatever combination of "let's empty out the asylums" / "let's set a trillion gallons of leaded gas on fire near our kids" / "let's try All The Drugs" / something-else doubled homicide rates in the 60s through 90s.
This is a problem, but is it a major increase? The biggest powers contending for the last century were:
FDR's USA: where we shredded the Tenth Amendment to the point where we no longer even realize "United States" is plural, we imprisoned an entire ethnicity, we tried to micromanage the economy with theories as mad as "let's destroy food during the Great Depression", and even our best anti-Depression scheme was the one where we robbed people of gold like cartoon villains. Oh, and we also were lax about nuclear secrets and discharged 85% of our military in the couple years between WWII and the Berlin Blockade, because we trusted "Uncle Joe".
Stalin's USSR: the aftermath of radical left gaining power, not just proposing insane policies but killing millions of their own people with them via a sick combination of incompetence and its ensuing scapegoating malice, then doubling down on incompetence by trusting their entire nation to the sanctity of a secret agreement with Adolf freaking Hitler after mutually wiping out the buffer state between them.
Hitler's Germany: the very idea of "will-to-power" appropriated from Nietzsche and taken to the extreme, rampaging across subcontinents in an insane attempt to dominate the entire world, but distracted by the obsession with slandering and murdering millions of their own people, and finally defeated in part because ideas like "don't trust that Einstein guy's physics, he's a Jew!" and "let's open up the war on two fronts at once!" are the sort of things you come up with when ruled by your own madness.
I'm not sure how to find political insanity on a graph, and I'll admit it feels like there's been an uptick over the last decade, but we're still nowhere near the heights we scaled during the last century.
Yes, homicides fell. However, the gradual but undeniable advances in trauma medicine since the Vietnam war have made it far less likely that violence ends in homicide.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203?journalCode=hsxa
So in all likelihood, you have a more violent society with fewer people dying.
As American society does not value interpersonal violence, it's hard to claim the increase in violence as a good thing.
This isn't the data I linked to. The violent crime rate is about 75x the homicide rate, and both fell in half.
This talks about a lethality decrease from the 1960s to 90s. I'm talking about reductions in 98% non-lethal crime from the 90s through 2010s.
It's especially hard if violence decreased 50%.
Non lethal crime is much more easily decreased by changes in reporting, incentives to report and so on.
For example, if you believed San Francisco police statistics, theft in shops is down.
We don't know whether violence decreased.
Consider for example the disparity between black and white lethal and non-lethal victimization rate.
There are 400k cases of black on black violence associated with about cca 4000 homicides.
There are 2.2 million cases of white on white violence associated with ~ maybe 3000 homicides.
What's your explanation for the disparity ? Reporting rates differ. We don't really know how much non-lethal violence is out there.
This is true. So what happens when we track violence independently of reporting, via victimization surveys? "From 1993 to 2021, the rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older." The decline is even more astonishing.
I find this all rather astonishing because while the homicide rate hasn't changed much, was at about 80% of the early 1990s peak due to the post-floyd boom, supposedly there's only 1/5 th of the incidents yet almost the same amount of dead people.
Mhmm.
Homicide isn't tracked by victimization surveys. Unless there's vampire homicides and a particularly brave interviewer, I suppose.
Is the decoupling of homicide from other violent crime during a mass panic something to be really surprised about, though? With 98% of violent crime non-lethal, it only takes a tiny change in conversion rate. If a burglar is suddenly looking at a bunch of Covid-locked-down houses that no longer ever seem to empty, it doesn't seem a priori implausible that a few percent of them are going to say "no, too risky for me" (so the violent crime rate component of robberies still drops) while a few percent are going to say "I need the money, and if it's not empty, I can fix that" (so the homicide rate skyrockets). For that matter, what happens to the other side of the equation during the post-Floyd period? A homeowner who might have said "I'll run and call the police" is now more likely to conclude "the police might just shoot me by accident" or "the police might not even show up tonight" and take things into their own hands. Still a robbery, still 1 violent crime, but maybe now it's 4% likely to turn into a homicide instead of 2%.
All this said .. could you answer my original question? "(Counter) citation needed?" I'm getting the impression that you're so confident of "an increase in violence" over these decades that no new evidence will change your mind, and I'd really like to know whether the explanation is that there's some far-more-compelling old evidence that you've neglected to mention, or whether this is just confidence not based on evidence. I can come up with a dozen reasons the latter sort of confidence might exist (witness the long tails of these responses - surely the news wouldn't hammer on a category of story 24/7 if it was about as common as deaths by lightning!) but I'm hoping to stick with the former for myself.
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The difference between now and those is they resulted from massive social upheaval, massive amounts of physical force, or both. The modern woke advance was done with no Great Depression, no world war, no dictatorship.
I think the (possibly weak) counter to this is "the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and Web 2.0 all provided enough force and upheaval to nurture the woke surge."
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It should be constantly falling as forensics, cameras, and so on improve, as the country gets richer. Likewise, life expectancy should always be rising. Real wages should always be rising. Technology improves after all.
If the US is like the UK, charge rates will have dropped significantly too: https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/1629785524599762946
I can't understand how the UK Home Office thinks 'literally all crime that happens is reported but our charge rates are under 5%.' I can't easily find charge rates for the US and I suppose there might be useful context in the paywalled Times article... But I believe that most crime figures are gross underestimates.
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