The Fallacy of Human Freedom

> It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.

I already said that I'm no fan of "universal liberal humanism". If someone thinks the Irish famine was progress because everything progresses all the time, they're wrong. But just because liberal humanism has problems doesn't mean that one must run to the other extreme. "If you hate my enemy, join my side" might be a useful tactic in war, but in philosophy people will just shrug and say "No way, you're both my enemies." My opinion is that humanity sometimes progress, sometimes stagnates, and sometimes regresses.

Anyway, here's my objection:

    1. Agreed.
    2. Agreed.
    3. Nope. Human progress will be limited by the aforementioned
       limit of human knowledge, but this is a very large limit,
       so there's plenty of room for progress before we hit the limit.
       We might have already hit the limit in some areas, but that
       doesn't mean we won't keep making progress in other areas.
    4. Agreed, but there is no necessary condition that says that
       humans MUST revert to an inferior state, either.
       Maybe they'll just stagnate until evolution produces
       a superior species with higher limits of knowledge. Why not?
       Just because X isn't necessary doesn't mean that
       not-X is necessary. Usually, they're both unnecessary.

A couple of thoughts:

1) A hard upper limit on the intellectual capacity of an individual human being does not directly necessitate a corresponding limit to the capacity of humanity as a whole. There are now reliable means of preserving past knowledge and experience, and population growth means more minds are available to ponder difficult problems.

Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to where we are today in computer hardware - an individual processor's power is limited, but large gains are yet to be made by adding more processors, and storage of information is increasingly exponentially.

These kinds of gains are not linear as you would expect from an increase in processors' speed, but they are gains nonetheless.

2) Even if you do assume that the individual human's finite capacity does imply an upper limit on human progress, it is still possible for progress to increase indefinitely; the gains will merely be increasingly marginal.

I agree that the idea that progress is an inevitable force of nature is completely false. It is a goal, not a natural force. I personally don't know anyone who actually believes this though, so I feel like this is something of a strawman.

It's relevant because if people only behave better because they're in a better environment, you haven't really changed them. The goal is then dislodged from getting people more freedom and converted into creating better environments. It is easy to see how a goal of creating better environments could be hijacked to justify all kinds of unsavory political actions. And indeed it has been.

Gray isn't implicitly granting premises of progress by saying this form of governance is better than that, for the same reason that accepting local optimality doesn't grant global optimality. In other words, having a greedy algorithm that improves things doesn't imply that the greedy algorithm always finds a most-optimal state, or even that such a most-optimal state exists. Gray is arguing that it is a fundamental assumption of progressivism that there is a most-optimal state and that progressive political behavior of implementing liberal political agenda items is believed to move one closer to it. I don't see how any of your points address either of these assumptions nor do I see how others debating you are conceding them.

And yet, slavery is now frowned upon in much of the world.

Interesting observation. I completely agree that as the amount of information needed to be synthesized to understand any issue multiplies exponentially, the capacity of an individual voter to grasp all of the necessary information is quickly exceeded. So people resort to shortcuts, voting based off of quick proxies for true discernment such as party affiliation or ideology.

I would even say that ideology can be considered as little more than a shortcut, a cache if you will of information and answers to tricky problems. Unfortunately, most people's "cache" never actually expires and they go to their grave still holding to hopelessly outdated data.