My claim has always been we've made progress and the world is better off now than in the past.
“The world is better off now than in the past.”
I disagree with this because I disagree with the way you frame each key phrase included. Let us begin with “the world”.
You have repeatedly refused to consider the world as it exists beyond the very, very narrow life experience of a few humans. First of all, the world ought to mean exactly what it says, which is “the world”. Meaning the planet earth, or at least conditions for life on the planet earth. We can call this definition 1. Beyond that, if you insist on saying “the world” and meaning “life for humans”— which is I believe quite dishonest and manipulative— then it ought to mean for all humans. We can call this definition 2.
The next thing is “better off now”. Your defense of this has been the extension of human lives and the providence of new material conditions to those lives. Considering definition 1, which is the world meaning the world, I hope you can see how these metrics are effectively meaningless to the majority of the consideration. In fact in many ways this is an actual detriment to the world at large. The extension of the human life means the extension of the time period of consumption at rates unlike any other creature, of resources untapped by any other creature.
The providence of new things to the human occurs at the expense of “the world”— it means the extraction of mineral and other natural resources in ways which physically, chemically, and biologically wreak disaster on the environments from which they originate. No amount of improvement on the methods by which we extract or burn carbon will change the fact that we are burning carbon, for example. Mining iron or copper, or cutting down trees. These things affect the state of the natural world in a physical way that cannot be mitigated, often by virtue of the simple mechanics involved and beyond that in chemical and biological ways we can’t see. Frakking, still a useful example, not only physically removes a large volume of material that leaves a physical cavity underground, but also results in the inevitable poisoning of groundwater nearby and in the destruction of any habitats related even tangentially to those resources— physical and chemical— that are damaged by this extraction. This seems awfully specific but the generality can be applied to all manners of resource extraction. Fundamentally the human lifestyle that “progress” celebrates
cannot exist without this extraction.
Beyond that we have consideration 2— life for most people. Let us establish a timeline for agricultural civilization beginning around 8000 BCE. The beginning of history, right? The beginning of progress. That gives us roughly 10000 years of progress. The extension of agricultural civilization across the majority of the human population took thousands of years, almost always enforced by violence by state forces and, later, private forces.
@Lexicus explained this in a previous post. For the vast,
vast majority of that time— in most agricultural societies, I would argue until at the latest about 800 years ago— the conditions for common people living in agricultural societies were materially worse than they were for people living outside of agricultural societies. While I can’t provide you with statistics, since non-agrarian peoples tend not to keep records, anthropologists and historians are relatively certain that life expectancy, leisure time, physical security, food security, health and well-being, and many other factors were worse for the commoners living in agricultural society than for people outside of agricultural society. The majority of people, during the majority of the existence and imposition of agricultural society, were effectively harmed by its expansion. This brings me to the final contention.
“In the past” can be made incredibly arbitrary, which you have beautifully demonstrated. Since 1945? Really? Why then? Why the past 200 years? Why does progress get to begin then? It betrays either a historical ignorance or a willful, stubborn, intellectually dishonest reframing of our arguments on your part. It shows, OVERTLY, that you are less interested in thinking and analyzing critically than you are in justifying the imposition of modernity— however and whenever that shall be defined— upon people who openly resist, who are violently subdued, and who finally suffer for that imposition. By starting the timeline at 1945 you conveniently avoid most of the glaring and easily citeable atrocities on which the modern global-capitalist status quo is established. Even the Holocaust, the Bengal Famine, and the Holodomor, which could perhaps be called the punctuation of industrial genocide. The question is why should we be so convenient? Why not start our analysis of progress even 5 years earlier?
The answer: because 5 years earlier the planet, defined environmentally or anthropocentrically, was inarguably in the face of the absolute worse conditions it had ever seen, indisputably directly resulting from modernity. A lot of people like to think of World War II as the end of history, which tends to be a satirical assertion, but in a way it’s useful and telling for us that you choose to start
after this. I’m not trying to claim that all atrocities stopped after World War II by any means— indeed many industrial genocides are happening all around us this very day— but many of the ones that people like to trace as the ones that lead us into “modernity” occurred before, and even ended in, 1945.
Ultimately I don’t think Lexicus or myself are arguing for a return to pre-agricultural conditions for everyone on earth. Characterizing our arguments that way, and then choosing to reframe the battleground for yourself to post-1945, is frankly a massive strawman that feels horribly dishonest to me.
As it happens I got caught up typing out this response so I won’t be able to break down your list until later, but I think this suffices for now. Lol at myself for saying I didn’t have the energy to respond and then typing all this out afterwards. This is still pretty abridged come to think of it, and I could probably write a dissertation-length essay about all the problems with how you’ve argued this point, but for now I’ll leave it at this: your framing is problematic and intellectually dishonest. Next post I’ll break down more specifically how each of the points you choose to frame are specifically dishonest.
