Pointing out that neither Russia nor Iraq have evolved into liberal democracies the instant they escaped despotism, is hardly conclusive. The number of democracies in the world is always on the slow rise. When Russia overthrew the tsar, they thought they had a better idea and decided to give it a try. Not every experiment is a success. When South Korea escaped war with half a country, they traded occupation for an authoritarian Democracy that devolved into despotism and eventually evolved into a true liberal democracy. The process took a good 30+ years. Progress isn't linear, but it is steady.
The Fallacy of Human Freedom
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#42The author is really arguing two things. (1) There is no such thing as moral progress, because human nature is fixed.(2) People are not naturally inclined to be free. His first claim is demonstrably false. If you look at historical, statistical evidence you can rapidly demolish his position. Start with Stephen Pinker's Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen... His second claim is proba…
I think his definition of progress is steady change toward an ideal version of humanity. The main problem is that the ideal changes with the age, and not in a predictable way. If you were to ask someone 500 years ago what a perfect person was, it would be quite different from the answer you'd get today. What does progress even mean if the ideal towards which humanity is moving keeps changing? It just becomes a random walk.
Also, just because human behavior is changing, doesn't mean human morality is becoming better in any objective sense.
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived). You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to…
I completely agree with you that human knowledge, whether individual or collective, is severely limited compared to all there is to know in the Universe. Part of this has to do with the fact that we as a species has only been observing the Universe scientifically for ~500 years. But it probably also has to do with the physiological limitations of homo sapiens . I don't disagree with any of that. But what does that ha…
Agreed.
It should have read:
"The arc of human progress is an illusory one"
"The arc of human progress - as defined by the narrow parameters of decreasing
number of recorded human conflicts and genocides, declining number of
incurable devastating medical conditions, improving/degenerating overall
environmental health of the planet etc - is an illusory one."
as you put it
"true human progress is illusory" (whatever the parameters that determine it)
It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.
Eg: The Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1852).
So simply put
1. Knowledge is an absolute necessary element for the overcoming of
"cultural backwardness, blindness and folly" and to advance
"to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and
civilization" and thereby the progress of humans.
2. Human knowledge is said to be limited.
3. Ergo, human progress will always be stunted by the said natural
limit of knowledge.
4. Further: There is no necessary condition that prevents humans from
reverting to the ways of the past once that limit has been reached.Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#44> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical cla…
I think you may be arguing against a strawman.
The article, as I read it, said Gray was arguing against the ideal of progress in the human individual. The hope that the individual will use reason and knowledge to improve themselves, the world around them, and act moral / just / rationally. The endgame being no need for power structures but instead responsible and free individuals.
But, he's only addressing the individual. Humanity, the aggregate, does build organisations and power structures. We will forever trade our away our freedoms because the free individual will never be Good.
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#45The author is really arguing two things. (1) There is no such thing as moral progress, because human nature is fixed.(2) People are not naturally inclined to be free. His first claim is demonstrably false. If you look at historical, statistical evidence you can rapidly demolish his position. Start with Stephen Pinker's Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen... His second claim is proba…
I think his definition of progress is steady change toward an ideal version of humanity. The main problem is that the ideal changes with the age, and not in a predictable way. If you were to ask someone 500 years ago what a perfect person was, it would be quite different from the answer you'd get today. What does progress even mean if the ideal towards which humanity is moving keeps changing? It just becomes a random…
The phrase "random walk" immediately makes me think of evolution. :)
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#46Whatever one's thoughts on the article in its entirety , the initial implication that the thinkers listed could not account for Herzen's fish is disingenuous. Helvetius (one of the listed): "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale." If freedom refers not to…
And now beside having more slaves than any other time.in history in absolute numbers without counting prisoners in countries that allow prisoner slavery, like the US, we have people.that would happily.volunteer to.be slave if.they had a guarantee of food, we have sweatshops, we have young people desperately working in jobs they hate to pay student debts Oh, I am not slave, I am free, I am free to work in whatever job…
There are an estimated 12-27 million people currently in slavery[1]. With a current world population of 7 billion, this proportion is between .0017 and .0038, a dramatic decline, and probably the lowest in history.
Regarding incarceration in the United States, despite a 10X increase in population from 31.4M to 311.8M and mandatory sentencing policies associated with the War on Drugs, the absolute number of Americans incarcerated in 2011 (2.2 million) was still less than the absolute number of Americans in slavery alone in 1860 (3.9 million).[2][3]
If you wish to move on to economic issues and contend there has been no progress in living conditions, a point the author of this article does not argue, I would challenge you to produce some actual metric and numbers for a similar period of time (after the dawn of philosophical liberalism) showing the average worker to be no better off, keeping in mind the enormous increase in life expectancy and GDP per capita which has occurred.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#47The main argument seems fundamentally flawed. It is argued that the idea of progress as a goal for humanity is pointless, because we are ultimately restricted by our nature, and instead of idealizing the concept of progress we should be satisfied with what we are. However, it is painfully obvious that we are not imprisoned by our nature. We were not born to fly, yet we do fly. We fly gigantic metal heaps, around the…
Another obvious counterpoint is this TED talk, Steven Pinker on "The surprising decline of violence": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk
The irony here is that Pinker then embraces the American prison-industrial complex in The Blank Slate as being a necessary part of this trend, when the US is probably an outlier.
There is a similarity between Pinker (at least in The Blank Slate) and Gray in that they both paint their targets with one big flaw before bashing them. Gray's template straw man is a humanist who didn't read The Selfish Gene.
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#48What if this were written in the 1850s? Of course slavery is normal. All cultures have had slavery. So all those loony abolitionists with their progress notions are beating their heads against the fixity of human nature.
Take your is-ought fallacy and... well... this is a family web site.
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#49I liked this. A lot. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it brings up some great "deep thinking" conversations. Excellent HN fodder.
It's ironic that this would be on the front page as the same time as "HTML 5 genetic cars" because the two are so related. I think an extended analogy is in order.
Gray's first mistake is to do exactly what he accuses others of doing -- making a value statement about whether one society later in history is better than another, or whether there is some "direction of progress". Gray thinks there is not. Others think there is.
What I've learned from political and systems theory is that small, self-optimizing systems always outperform other systems, because they are able to adapt better.
Does evolution produce "better", "smarter", or "more perfect" creatures? No. It produces creatures better adapted to current conditions.
So when you look at civilizations, you should think about those little cars. Sometimes early adaptations lead to performance problems later on. Many times there is no universal car. Different adaptations work at different times. The best we can hope for is a system where the cars adapt as they move along.
Likewise, human systems will not get "better" -- that's a value judgment, akin to "I like chocolate ice cream". Such statements are impossible to argue one way or another. Human systems will always adapt. The key, critical question here is this: are we encouraging systems of humans in which small units adapt and self-optimize? Or are we trying to create universal rules for all humans, thereby decreasing our ability to adapt to what lies ahead of us?
Moving farther to the right on the HTML5 cars app is not necessarily better or worse than spinning in place. But it does take us to places we haven't seen before. And that's pretty cool.
Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom
#50> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical cla…
I think you may be arguing against a strawman. The article, as I read it, said Gray was arguing against the ideal of progress in the human individual. The hope that the individual will use reason and knowledge to improve themselves, the world around them, and act moral / just / rationally. The endgame being no need for power structures but instead responsible and free individuals. But, he's only addressing the indivi…
I was responding to the review by Robert W. Merry, not to Gray, at least not directly.
My impression was that Gray has an axe to grind about the idea of progress as applied to both individuals and societies. The first few paragraphs of the review talks extensively about ideas of political progress, such as Fukuyama's "End of History". The review also gives us a glimpse of Gray's colorful political opinions, followed by an extensive discussion of what Gray thinks about the political history of Europe.
Maybe that's how the reviewer chose to read between the lines, rather than what Gray himself said. The review is written in such a way that it's difficult to distinguish the content of the book from the reviewer's embellishments. In any case, as I said, I wasn't trying to respond to Gray, only to the review. The reviewer sounds like he's dying to apply Gray's theory to politics, society, and everyone else. Too much enthusiasm and too little analysis.
By the way, I suspect that I might in fact have misinterpreted what Gray and the reviewer mean by "progress". The author's (and perhaps also Gray's) usage of the word seems to be very closely related to freedom, democracy, and a few similar words to which they attach extremely negative connotations. This is certainly unusual. But at the same time, both Robert and Gray also use the word "progress" to refer to what most everybody else means by it, and what I assumed as well: scientific progress. Proof: "Outside of science, progress is simply a myth." But if I am at fault for misinterpreting their unusual use of that keyword, they are certainly at greater fault for overloading that keyword with so much hidden agenda.