Mary's Motte and the case against progress

Useful knowledge grows.

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".

This was the starting point of self-described reactionary feminist Mary Harrington's discussion of her new book Feminism Against Progress on Bret Weinstein's podcast. I don't want to pick on Ms Harrington, this essay is only a critique of the case against progress, for which she is but the most capable advocate. It is not a critique of her book or of the podcast, during which she in fact thoughtfully refined her views in response to Dr. Weinstein's objections.

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.

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.

Next comes the view that there is no progress because civilisations rise and fall. Whenever I hear that, I wonder where archaeology has found the ruins of 20,000 year old Autobahns. Parcelling humanity up into discrete civilisations that can rise or fall is a slippery simplification. Tribes, nations, empires and networks can all collapse, but so far, there's always been others to carry on. Did Roman civilisation collapse around 410 AD or around 1453 AD? Or did it live on to conquer South and Central America where it thrives today?

This is why 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. Setting aside how weird that is, we should still answer Ms Harrington's challenge to the moral value of this growth.

Her argument is relativistic: if you set out to show that things are better now than in the past, you have to define your terms, and hence assume the thing you are purporting to prove. But even she doesn't seem to take the relativism seriously, and accepts Dr. Weinstein's response that it is desirable to fulfil human potential.

In view of human potential, I place myself on the bare feet of an ancestor toiling in a some medieval paddy-field. I am grateful to him and his folk for the heritage they bequeathed me. But I do not envy them. I do not want my children born into their estate. Though I honour that bygone culture, I also know that it was a system of caste and peonage that kept people in their allotted place of material and intellectual poverty. They did not have the same opportunity as the citizens of modern liberal republics to unfold their potential.

I've said that societies advance because knowledge grows. Knowledge is power, and power can be turned to both good evil. But empirical observation shows that for whatever reason, advanced societies, on average, murder less and provide more than forebears. So far at least, the unquestionable tyrannies and disasters of modernity have been the sidelines and also-rans of history. For an exhaustive survey of the empirics, look to fat tomes Steven Pinker. But for this short essay I'll concentrate on one thing we have learned: that freedom is better than slavery.

This is clearest in the case of true slavery. Modern civilisation, almost uniquely, abhors the keeping of humans as livestock and fiercely relegates it to dark undeworlds and barbaric fringes. It also abhors the half-slavery of ancient peasants who's legal rights were subordinate to their lords. It difficult to see how these are not moral improvements. Indeed even the more modern rights revolutions fighting various quarter-, eigth- and sixteenth-slaveries have been mostly on target.

Societies don't advance morally through just learning moral facts. But the value of individual liberty is indeed a learned moral fact. Sages have for millennia tried to define justice, and that'll be an ongoing project for millennia yet. But by 1776 the American revolutionaries could contribute the non-obvious discover that governments are instituted to secure the rights of the people.

This is just one gem in the glittering treasury of liberal modernity. Knowledge is lost through disuse, so the way to keep these treasures is to take off the blinkers of their denial.