If it is so obvious that everything is going so great in contemporary times, why all these books about it? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Because the idea that everything is getting worse is so widespread, not because everything is getting worse.

Things might be getting better in absolute terms, but they are getting an ever smaller fraction of the increasing potential.

Because the idea that everything is getting worse is so widespread, not because everything is getting worse. — jamalrob

But if it is obvious that everything is great and will only get better, why write long books about it?

Like Berman said, if it's something that is obvious then writing a book about it is like writing an 800+-page book saying that the Pope is Catholic.

Of course it depends on how you define and measure "progress". If "progress" is material developments that make a major difference in daily life, then I think much of what is considered "progress" today is at least a century old. Some of it two centuries old. Steam power and railroads; photography; telegraphy; civil engineering and sanitation -- water and sewer systems; the germ theory; electrical generation, lighting, and motors; telephone; radio; sound recording, internal combustion engines; and steel frame buildings made a great deal of difference, and continue to influence daily life.

Since 1917, the most important material progress event has been the discovery of sulfa drugs and penicillin (and similar antibiotics).

Though ubiquitous, Computers, television, rockets, satellites, cell phones, jets, CT and MRI machines, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, atomic weapons, plastics, and so on make less difference in the experience of daily life than earlier inventions. YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter capture attention in ways that telegraphs didn't, but that doesn't make them significant samples of progress. (Abraham Lincoln liked to hang around the Army's telegraph office near the White House to read the latest dispatches from the field as soon as they arrived.)

If "progress" is defined as cultural innovation, then there is far less to report on. For cultural innovation we have to look over millennia. The major innovation that Stephen Pinker talks about (centralized governmental authority) was implemented maybe 5,000 years ago. Writing is about 5,000 years old. Language is... don't know -- scores of centuries old. Philosophy is what... 3,000 years old. The major religions are at least 2,000 years old (with the exception of johnny-come-late-islam). Agriculture is around 8,000 years old. What have we done lately (in units of centuries or millennia)? Well, there's the printing press -- fairly big deal -- 500+ years ago. Gunpowder--progress or not? Science and technology developed over the last 700 years--things like better plows and better yokes for horses made a big difference.

So in the times that everyone here has been alive, really very little "progress" has occurred.

But if it is obvious that everything is great and will only get better, why write long books about it?

Like Berman said, if it's something that is obvious then writing a book about it is like writing an 800+-page book saying that the Pope is Catholic. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is not obvious. That is precisely why the books are being written. It takes an effort to look beyond the doxa, which has it that things are getting worse, to see what is really the case.

(Note, I'm not saying everything is great and that everything has been getting better)

Progress, or at least the idea of it, seems like a mixed bag. The old joke is "Q: Are things getting better or worse? A: Definitely!" Of course, technology and electronic products are getting better by the day. It's wonderful! We can be spied upon much, much better than in the past. :s Your cellphone is the spy in your pocket, telling whomever really wants to know where you have been, and what you have been doing. It is the closest thing to mind reading i can imagine. It does feel to me at that we are close to living in a dystopia, if we are not there already. One of my former jobs was as a manager in a virtual sweatshop, with people getting paid far less than they deserved. The experience has made me skeptical of capitalism ever showing any form of compassion or wisdom. It is against its programming, which is profit uber alles. How can we re-program the code of our civilization?

I think there is a close connection between desire as 'lack of' and progress as its fulfillment. The connection has to do with our attitude towards time, our cultural bias towards a linear future as the probable or improbable satisfaction of our desires.

“One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

These arguments take the form of pragmatism, skepticism, stoicism, hedonism and so on.

Of course it depends on how you define and measure "progress". If "progress" is material developments that make a major difference in daily life, then I think much of what is considered "progress" today is at least a century old. Some of it two centuries old. Steam power and railroads; photography; telegraphy; civil engineering and sanitation -- water and sewer systems; the germ theory; electrical generation, lighting, and motors; telephone; radio; sound recording, internal combustion engines; and steel frame buildings made a great deal of difference, and continue to influence daily life.

Since 1917, the most important material progress event has been the discovery of sulfa drugs and penicillin (and similar antibiotics).

Though ubiquitous, Computers, television, rockets, satellites, cell phones, jets, CT and MRI machines, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, atomic weapons, plastics, and so on make less difference in the experience of daily life than earlier inventions. YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter capture attention in ways that telegraphs didn't, but that doesn't make them significant samples of progress. (Abraham Lincoln liked to hang around the Army's telegraph office near the White House to read the latest dispatches from the field as soon as they arrived.)

If "progress" is defined as cultural innovation, then there is far less to report on. For cultural innovation we have to look over millennia. The major innovation that Stephen Pinker talks about (centralized governmental authority) was implemented maybe 5,000 years ago. Writing is about 5,000 years old. Language is... don't know -- scores of centuries old. Philosophy is what... 3,000 years old. The major religions are at least 2,000 years old (with the exception of johnny-come-late-islam). Agriculture is around 8,000 years old. What have we done lately (in units of centuries or millennia)? Well, there's the printing press -- fairly big deal -- 500+ years ago. Gunpowder--progress or not? Science and technology developed over the last 700 years--things like better plows and better yokes for horses made a big difference.

So in the times that everyone here has been alive, really very little "progress" has occurred. — Bitter Crank

Interesting, thank you for sharing that.

Even though i might quibble somewhat about antibiotics being the top discovery in the last hundred years (I'd say it is in the top five. And that the combination of internet-computers-cell phones would be first. Though it is probably cheating to combine them into one!) I would agree that culturally or civilizationally not much has changed in terms of its foundations and institutions. It was about 100 years ago that the dark side of progress became evident for all to see, and impossible to ignore even if one wished to. Referring to WW1 of course. Before then, dissenters from the status quo (very broadly speaking) of various kinds were mostly on the fringes or in academia, or both. Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau, Malthus, Darwin, Marx, Dickens, and many others, for example. The fight to abolish slavery in the US also spurred much re-thinking of societal norms.

But much progress has been made. Skeptics might say that such progress as eliminating slavery or equal rights for women were correcting errors that should not have been made in the first place. In any case, any improvements are welcome, even if the specifics are arguable. Though it somehow feels all too precarious... like everything could be lost in a flash, or like the entire culture is in a game of high-stakes poker. We have climbed the icy mountain of progress one grueling inch at a time. It has taken the efforts of billions of people, from geniuses to laborers, stretching from the dawn of humanity until this moment, to get where we are now. But with one slip of the foot seemingly, we could tumble off our hard-won perch and onto the jagged rocks below.

Some people think progress is punctuated, others think it is continual. The punctuated theory makes more sense to me than continual progress.

Change is what is continual. In a society where no new innovations have been introduced in 500 years, there is still change: people die and people are born; houses fall apart and houses are repaired or built. Some years the weather is better than other years. There is happiness and tragedy, but life goes on pretty much the same as it has for centuries. A lot of human history is like that.

Sometimes there are major discoveries. Metal extraction and metal working were very big innovations thousands of years ago. Writing, of course. Stirrups were a major innovation. Likewise the wheel in the form of carts and chariots; horseshoes; improved plows; improved yokes for horses. The capture of power in waterwheels and improved gearing (late Roman); improved sails on boats to capture wind power. Much more recently, (late 18th century) the capture of power from combustion by steam engines, and so on.

Some people think that the major 'punctuated changes' of our contemporary period were pretty much finished up by the early 20th century. The changes between steam and radio occurred in a very short period during which major innovations cropped up all over the place. During the past century (1917-2017) we have been digesting all these innovations. Transistors were not equivalent to the wheel, they were a miniaturized vacuum tubes which were invented for radio. Telephony, telegraphy, photography, and radio made possible motion pictures, then television. Computing began with the punch card well over a century ago. (It was an innovation of manufacturing and data processing.) The cards enabled fast, mass counting and sorting operations.

Don't get me wrong -- I love my very fast miniaturized powerful computer, in the same way I loved typing on the IBM Selectric typewriter introduced in the 1960s -- the little ball replacing the levers of the typewriter. But the Selectric typewriter was only an improvement on the manual and electric typewriters of the latter 19th century. And before computers there was the Comptometer, a multifunction machine which could mechanically carry out computations in a series. (These were replaced by electric calculators in the early 1970s.)

The punctuated progress theory holds that we are at the end of major technological invention. What we will see for a long time is continual change and only slight improvement. Electronic gadgets may end up being implanted in our heads at birth, but that will be possible only because of much earlier innovations. Atomic powered flying cars will still be cars, and the morons driving them will still be morons.

Skeptics might say that such progress as eliminating slavery or equal rights for women were correcting errors that should not have been made in the first place. In any case, any improvements are welcome, even if the specifics are arguable. Though it somehow feels all too precarious... like everything could be lost in a flash, or like the entire culture is in a game of high-stakes poker. — 0 thru 9

All true.

Atomic powered flying cars will still be cars, and the morons driving them will still be morons. — Bitter Crank

This morning's traffic 'copter report... traffic is flowing smoothly, except for the backup at Center Rd and Ninth St. where a fender bender has caused a nuclear holocaust. Should delay things for at least 45 minutes, so please find alternate routes! :o

All true. — Bitter Crank

Thanks! (Y)

Likewise the wheel in the form of carts and chariots... — Bitter Crank

That strikes me as extreme ethnocentrism.

As I am sure plenty of thinkers have pointed out, in some environments there were no animals suitable for domestication and therefore there was no need to invent the wheel.

But that seems to be what all of the proponents of "progress" do: take their own culture's development (the modernist West), project it onto all peoples and places in all times, and say that the results show a linear process of "progress" with "advanced" people like them being the agents and everybody else being hindrances.

The fact that "advances" are often just adaptations to problems created by previous "advances" (the "advance" known as agriculture resulted in infectious disease; the "advance" known as microbiology and antibiotics was coping with the consequences of that earlier "advance") never seems to be on the radars of the progress preachers.

The dumb luck and tragic consequences of "progress" always seems to be left out of the narrative of "progress". Apparently we are supposed to believe that the "discovery" of the New World was something deliberately engineered by geniuses, not the culmination of greed, narrow politics, and an unexpected good break on the sea. Apparently we are supposed to pretend that the infectious diseases that that "discovery" later brought to the New World killing a large percentage of the indigenous population there is something minor or something that never happened. It's always nothing but a sunny, rosy, self-congratulatory picture from the progress preachers ("Our genius European ancestors from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment developed advanced navigation techniques and that led to trade, prosperity and the high standard of living and quality of life that we enjoy today! We are living in the most glorious period ever to be alive!").

Sing it, Adorno....:)

Taking exception with a handful of aspects of modern society isn't really a strong enough argument to convince everyone that "progress" is not progress.

Nobody pretends that agriculture didn't lead to some disease or that European diseases didn't wipe out huge swaths of indigenous peoples; we know what happened and we've learned from it. If you mean to ignore all the beneficial technological and medicinal applications of modern science and focus only on it's failures and the risks, that's fine, but you're going to wind up painting a far from realistic picture of the world. (instead of the purely optimistic western liberal which you denounce, you become the exact opposite: a purely pessimistic Luddite/troglodyte).

Let me explain what I mean:

Imagine that a small island tribe one-day discovers a new kind of fishing technique (nets) that allows them to catch more fish than they can possibly eat. As a result, let's imagine that the population of this island tribe increased by a factor of 20 in only a few generations. Once a tribe of only 300 is now a tribe of 6000, and eventually the local fish population starts to decline due to their increased fishing habits, which then poses a problem to the population that is entirely depends on that food source.

At this point, starvation could cause the island population to decline until they strike a balance with how much fish they catch and how quickly the fish population can replenish itself. That would surely be a bad thing (the starvation), but would it mean that the invention of the net ("progress") was a bad thing from the get go? Many would argue that the many extra living souls on the island are thankful for the net because it was required to bring about their very existence.

Instead of starvation occurring, it could be that the now 6000 strong island is motivated and able to build bigger and better boats which can take them further out to sea for better fishing ("more progress", or as you would put it "progress to deal with the problems caused by previous progress"). It's possible that this tribe then discovers new islands and subsequently populates them over time. Under the right conditions, these tribes could become distinct enough that violent conflict emerges between them in the form of tribal warfare. This war would likely lead to individuals traveling further afield (finding new regions to populate where territory is not contested) and cause many socio-economic developments that spur constant cultural and technological innovation and "progress" where growing powers seek to secure their long-term existence.

----

New problems will always arise because we're not perfect or all-knowing, and so change can be chaotic. But to suggest that "progress as a whole is a bad thing" because of this is merely to assert "I would rather deal with the current and known problems forever rather than through changing states of affairs try to improve our conditions and risk more/greater/different problems.".

You're basically asking mankind not to invent things or to find and exploit more resources. Your attitude would have the island tribe kept at low and vulnerable population levels, forever living out the same primitive lifestyle.


P.S: I have this sneaking suspicion that everything you say is satirical, including your name. It's a bit of an oxymoron; "wisdom" is supposed to be well tested, but the reactionary attitude that is contemporary post-modernism is a green babe compared to the values of the enlightenment which it seems to reject. Are you serious about your dedication to "post-modernism"? If so, where did you learn about your post-modernist ideas?

That strikes me as extreme ethnocentrism. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Well, progress is ethnocentric, because some group is responsible for each piece. Humans in all environments innovated appropriately to their settings. Amerindians have a list of innovations which is quite impressive. For instance, the glue they extracted from birch bark ( a slow heating process) is very strong. You probably have eaten some of their innovations within the last 24 hours -- tomatoes, potatoes, and corn (maize) for instance. These food crops had to be developed from very primitive, unimpressive progenitors over a long period of time.

That Europe benefitted from the innovations of western Asia isn't the fault of Europeans. It was luck that western Asian innovations could be readily transferred to Europe (as well as south and east Asia). Innovations in agriculture, animal traction, metallurgy and so forth travelled east and west along a narrow geographical parallel.

The innovations of Western Asia couldn't go south and north because the climate kept changing ever few hundred miles, and what worked at one parallel didn't work at the next parallel closer to the poles. The Amerindians had the same problem. Innovations that worked in what is now Washington couldn't work in what is now Arizona. Innovations in Central America could only go so far north and south.

As a consequence of geography, Amerindians weren't able to accumulate and transfer technology as easily as Europeans and Asians (from the Island of Britain to Japan) could. They didn't have draft animals, true, and there were no candidates for draft domestication in the western hemisphere. Llamas aren't quite big enough and they aren't 'built' for traction. Buffalo do not tolerate the sorts of things that domestication would ask of them.

Could the Amerindians have used wheels? Sure they could have. It would have been much easier for humans to pull a load on wheels than drag it along behind them. But again, their north/south distribution (rather than east/west distribution) made accumulating innovation less likely. If they had brought cattle with them (a highly impractical idea), the cattle would have had a lot of difficulty adapting to everything from the tundra to the desert. That's why Africa didn't have the same animals as Europe and Asia -- Cattle don't do well in the tropics. Neither does wheat. Neither do wheels.

If you don't like that, blame the planet.

True enough, killer diseases did arise from domestication. Close proximity to domesticated animals enabled bacteria and viruses to adapt to humans, and so they did. Of course, there were diseases that didn't come from domestication which remain just as problematic today as ever. Amerindians had diseases which are troublesome which didn't come from domestication of cattle, horses, donkeys, chickens, camels, goats, sheep, and dogs.

You're basically asking mankind not to invent things or to find and exploit more resources. — VagabondSpectre

"WISDOMfromPO-MO" is doing that. He also seems to hold the idea that progress should eliminate human problems. Lots of people expect that. "Well, with all these inventions and progress life should be damned near perfect!"

But it never is. Being animals, as we are, we are always treading the trail from the cradle to the grave, and invention, innovation, and progress do not change that fundamental fact. Progress has made life more pleasant in-between the cradle and grave (much to most of the time for many, at least) but in the end we get sick, injured, or aged and we die. Our deaths can be just as unpleasant as death has ever been.

The trail between the cradle and the grave can not be made a friction free, problem free, paradise either. Life can be quite wretched for individuals DESPITE material progress, and it always has been. We human beings are able to overcome our potential for happiness, peace and harmony and visit misery, violence, and harsh abrasion on each other for years on end, and we are quite able to do this on a one-to-one basis too -- and we do!

Taking exception with a handful of aspects of modern society isn't really a strong enough argument to convince everyone that "progress" is not progress. — VagabondSpectre

I am not even convinced that progress is real.

Sure, improvements are made.

But improvements are not proof of the existence of a linear, cumulative, inevitable process called "progress".

The intellectual alternative to progress is that history is cyclical.

Nobody pretends that agriculture didn't lead to some disease or that European diseases didn't wipe out huge swaths of indigenous peoples; we know what happened and we've learned from it. If you mean to ignore all the beneficial technological and medicinal applications of modern science and focus only on it's failures and the risks, that's fine, but you're going to wind up painting a far from realistic picture of the world. (instead of the purely optimistic western liberal which you denounce, you become the exact opposite: a purely pessimistic Luddite/troglodyte). — VagabondSpectre

I believe that the realistic scholars show that human biology and culture evolve under changing conditions and that all ways of life, cultures, and civilizations are eventually destroyed. There's nothing teleological or linear about it, in other words. It is evolutionary and cyclical, in other words.

If Ronald Wright is correct in A Short History of Progress, it would be absurd to say that agriculture was a progression from the hunter-gatherer / forager way of life. Agriculture and its cultural offspring, civilization, were lucky breakthroughs made in desperation after hunting and gathering left humans on the verge of extinction with depleted food supplies, Wright shows.

Rather than being some liberating, ever-accelerating trajectory that destiny has us on, progress has always been a trap, Wright shows.

Earlier thinkers believed that history is cyclical. This whole idea of progress is a very recent creation of the Enlightenment, as far as I can tell. To dismiss anybody who is skeptical of progress as unrealistic is absurd, if not the height of intellectual arrogance and condescension.

Let me explain what I mean:

Imagine that a small island tribe one-day discovers a new kind of fishing technique (nets) that allows them to catch more fish than they can possibly eat. As a result, let's imagine that the population of this island tribe increased by a factor of 20 in only a few generations. Once a tribe of only 300 is now a tribe of 6000, and eventually the local fish population starts to decline due to their increased fishing habits, which then poses a problem to the population that is entirely depends on that food source.

At this point, starvation could cause the island population to decline until they strike a balance with how much fish they catch and how quickly the fish population can replenish itself. That would surely be a bad thing (the starvation), but would it mean that the invention of the net ("progress") was a bad thing from the get go? Many would argue that the many extra living souls on the island are thankful for the net because it was required to bring about their very existence.

Instead of starvation occurring, it could be that the now 6000 strong island is motivated and able to build bigger and better boats which can take them further out to sea for better fishing ("more progress", or as you would put it "progress to deal with the problems caused by previous progress"). It's possible that this tribe then discovers new islands and subsequently populates them over time. Under the right conditions, these tribes could become distinct enough that violent conflict emerges between them in the form of tribal warfare. This war would likely lead to individuals traveling further afield (finding new regions to populate where territory is not contested) and cause many socio-economic developments that spur constant cultural and technological innovation and "progress" where growing powers seek to secure their long-term existence. — VagabondSpectre

That just shows that people adapt and evolve under changing conditions.

It is not proof of a linear, cumulative process.

New problems will always arise because we're not perfect or all-knowing, and so change can be chaotic. But to suggest that "progress as a whole is a bad thing" because of this is merely to assert "I would rather deal with the current and known problems forever rather than through changing states of affairs try to improve our conditions and risk more/greater/different problems.".

You're basically asking mankind not to invent things or to find and exploit more resources. Your attitude would have the island tribe kept at low and vulnerable population levels, forever living out the same primitive lifestyle. — VagabondSpectre

Straw man.

I do not know of any individual or group who has ever said that we should not try to make improvements.

What the critics of the idea of progress are saying is that we are deluding ourselves when we think that history is a linear, cumulative process.

We could already be past the point of diminishing marginal returns and all of modern Western civilization could quickly collapse and be destroyed (I once read Niall Ferguson saying that civilizations do not gradually decline, the abruptly collapse) along with our idea of progress.

Who knows what will emerge if all of this collapses. Whatever it is, I doubt that anybody will be calling it "progress".

P.S: I have this sneaking suspicion that everything you say is satirical, including your name. It's a bit of an oxymoron; "wisdom" is supposed to be well tested, but the reactionary attitude that is contemporary post-modernism is a green babe compared to the values of the enlightenment which it seems to reject. Are you serious about your dedication to "post-modernism"? If so, where did you learn about your post-modernist ideas? — VagabondSpectre

None of it is satirical.

I have always been skeptical of the sunny, rosy picture of modern Western civilization that was force-fed to me from the moment of my birth through high school.

There are individuals such as Wendell Berry and Ken Wilber who give reality checks to the progress narrative. But the one reality check on the intellectual landscape that seems to have undeniable intellectual and political teeth is the work of postmodern theorists. Therefore, I have gradually gravitated to and gained a lot of knowledge and wisdom from the latter.

The fact that anybody would say that the Enlightenment, a small drop in the pre-historical and historical bucket, has by itself produced tested wisdom is evidence of its delusional effect. The jury has not even heard all of the evidence for and against Enlightenment products such as the nation-state, yet people are already saying that the Enlightenment is time-tested wisdom?!

People confuse change with progress, until it gets explicitly adverse. So, more cars in 1955 equaled progress. It wasn't progress, but it certainly was change. In many ways (I'm sure you know the drill) automobiles have been an ecological and actuarial BAD thing. Yes, they gave millions great mobility with privacy to boot, but it was mostly a change in mobility -- not something new. After decades of smog, few people in LA, Beijing, or New Delhi think that unbreathable air is a sign of progress.

Air travel = progress, too. Gee, you can travel from London to New York to LA in a matter of hours. Amazing! Progress? Mostly an increase in speed--just change. One could go from London to New York in a very nice boat and then New York to LA in a very nice train.

Did you catch my bit about "punctuated progress"? Most of the time, we are not experiencing progress. We're just experiencing the sloshing back and forth of change. Once in a while something is invented or discovered that revolutionizes our understanding of the world and gives us new powers.

These periods of punctuated progress are usually not long. The innovations I mentioned--photography (1840), telegraph (1850), electrical generation and application (1880), telephone (1880), and radio (1900), appeared within a short period of time. Punctuated progress is one-time-only, not repeatable. Electrical generation can only be invented once. The late 19th century was a period of intense innovation -- and then that period was over. What followed was "digestion" -- integrating inventions like radio into life, and finding the possible applications for it.

A tremendous amount of new business activity is generated by the inventions of this punctuated progress, but eventually the benefits of increased economic activity level off then decline (because you can't reinvent the wheel, so to speak. You invent the wheel once, it finds it's best applications, it becomes part of life, and then your done with the innovation of wheels. Same thing with electricity. It's a once off discovery.

So progress isn't continuous; it happens every now and then (just a few times in the last 1000 years) and then what is new becomes routine, and it's back to the sloshing back and forth of restless change.

Philosophy is cool, but it can't replace reality. I grew up during the 1960's, and I don't see things getting any better. On the contrary, things are pretty scary - and I see no reason to expect better in the future.

Frankly, I think a lot of the talk about things getting better is just propaganda designed to make people think things are going to get better.

It's very effective, too. I encounter people all the time who think things are OK, even though they're stuck in dead-end jobs, can't afford to go to school, etc., etc. I guess if you're born in a corporate ghetto, you have no experience of a better place to compare it to.