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 -
This essay is not a review of that podcast; rather it is my case for progress shaped as a response to three arguments of Ms Harrington. First she admits that society evolves but denies this represents an improvement of moral value. This is a defensible motte from which she moves to a wider bailey. She reckons that history shows that there's no progress because civilisations rise and then collapse. All this underpins her view that belief in a long term arc of improvement is a teleological or religious faith.
This motte-and-bailey is no dishonest trick cooked up by Ms. Harrington. It's an earnest part of the world-view of every progress-skeptic I talk to. Yet however earnest, it's still tricksy to quietly admit that modernity has brought us electricity, obstetrics and moon rockets while loudly proclaiming, with scant context and no qualification that progress is a fiction.
That's how progress-skeptics sneak out of their narrow moral motte. Given half a chance, they reach to wider territories, beginning by branding the idea of progress as teleological or religious. But this ignores a simple a causal explanation: society progresses because useful knowledge grows.
I don’t see this as much of a true motte and bailey. The simple fact is that civilizations do rise and fall repeatedly throughout history, and that new civilizations often have to pick up the pieces or preserve the memories or fix the broken bits of the civilization before it. In some cases the setbacks are severe, in other cases less so. The Romans had cement. We lost it completely for centuries. We had religious tolerance in Greece and Rome only to lose it in the final days of the United Roman Empire. Gays were once accepted, only to be persecuted for millennia afterwards.
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. Poor ones don’t have the excess wealth to allow their children to learn and do nothing else for long periods of time. In pre-industrial societies, adulthood started at 16-17, in part because every able body was needed to either till the field or make tools or move goods around. Even today in very poor countries, people don’t go to school nearly as long as modern western states do. That education preserves the knowledge we already possess and allows for better understanding and invention.
As a society approaches collapse, these luxuries of the previous era contract. When you’re worried about survival of the tribe, the guy in a dress starts looking like a wimp and a liability. That minority starts looking like a potential threat or turncoat. The education needed to run the previous high culture tools — let alone invent something more complex. Complexity gets reduced. It doesn’t go to zero; the European feudal states had metal and horses and farming. And I think when the West collapses, we’ll still have at least steam power. Feudal elites could read, but they couldn’t produce the high levels of art and culture that High Rome had.
Civilizations come and go, and I think we’re slowly ascending a ladder here. But I don’t think you can simply point to modern inventions and assume that the technology is permanently ours, or that civilization is a single unbroken line from Egypt to USA. We aren’t the same people.
I don't think you need to establish the existence of a single unbroken line (whatever that means) to say that civilisation has progressed between those two points -- it least in terms of material progress. I'd say morally too, but that's more mixed.
But I would say, that the modern USA is one inheritor of knowledge that goes back to ancient Egypt and beyond. So in that (tautological) sense, there is some kind of unbroken line.
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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.
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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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