Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal societies cultural values change, so no information can be preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may contain positive depictions of acts that are considered morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape, etc) or simply physic…
When you are talking about millions of works, you need to approach it statistically. That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations. So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which i…
>Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible
Which is clearly not true.
In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies are statistically better at preserving works in general" this is also demonstrably not true in the wide statistical sense. They are just as likely (if not more) to deliberately discard works that disagree with the general ethos of that society. Heresy is not really a big deal in a liberal society, but it will get some books burned and practitioners slaughtered (reducing social transmission of ideas) in a autocratic theocracy, for example.