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"Progress!"

  
  

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elene
20:16 / 16.02.08
I really shouldn’t respond. Anyone who thinks he can take or leave the authority of a modern state, or that he gets to choose (for everyone) what progress is, clearly has a large (and false) sense of privilege. But never mind. You are so keen, squib.

Nevertheless, I’m going to neglect your apparent desire to keep the world virgin and pure. It’s childish, and just underlines that fact that you’ve been cosseted all your life.

Most of our history has been driven by our wish to make short, brutal lives, somewhat less short and brutal. People moved to cities long, long before technology made those cities hygienic or moderately safe from fire. They went seeking opportunities they had nowhere else, or running from some warlord who add asserted himself over their former lands. They went to be able to use their skills, to trade or to learn, or seeking shelter. And the world wasn’t an Eden before that. It was a world dominated by predators. Where a few wild dogs or some wandering mercenary might kill your family.

You seem to imagine that you have some absolute vision of reality which lets you recognise all that must be taken into account when choosing one technology over another. You seem to suggest that, for example, in the sixties (that’s the 1960s, squib) people should have seen that ever cheaper petrol engines must lead, via the greenhouse effect, to global warming. So they should then have been able to recognise the technology then as a dead end and avoid it.

But that’s not true. No one knew that, nor would anyone have thought it.

People can only make choices with the knowledge and experience they have. That we now know that everyone having a personal car is a bad thing – and many would still dispute this – does not mean we should have known it forty years ago. It also does not mean that this is a bad technology for farming, by the way. Certainly, it’s unwise to use a car to drive 300 meters to the tanning salon, or to build your house so far from your place of work that you must drive for hours each day just to keep body and soul together. That does not mean that tractors are a bad idea in general.

If we do come up with a better technology to replace the petrol engine, as we either must or accept that the bulk of the world’s population will die young, though not due to the ravages of environmental damage, then it will be at the end of a learning experience that has been ongoing since the engine was first invented.

I think most of us recognise that the atom bomb was not progress. Certainly Oppenheimer did. Rather it’s a warning, perhaps. A station on a species’ way that indicates if you’re not yet an intelligent species, you’re not long for this world? Nevertheless, it is superior technology. It does what it was made to do better than any weapon before it. It is technological progress.

Now, please stop bombarding me with silly example of modern capitalist production. Are millions of plastic Jesuses a sign of greater spirituality?
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
05:20 / 17.02.08
your making such assumptions about me, my position and with your answer.

dare I ask how you know what we all thought forty years ago? I was one year old, and I don't remember what I thought - probably that eating was a fine thing.

if this thread is about progress, then how do you define progress? is it simply change from one way of doing things to another? or is it a series of such changes? and if so, is it only in retrospect that we can call anything progress?

what do you consider "good" "better" and "best?"
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
05:56 / 17.02.08
elene's words from this thread

Anyone who thinks he can take or leave the authority of a modern state,

isn't that how it works? until someone physically forces you to change your behaviour?

or that he gets to choose (for everyone) what progress is,

I never said "for everyone" - please stop putting words in my mouth, and at least quote whatever it is you're referring to.

clearly has a large (and false) sense of privilege.

I have a large sense of privileged because I was born into privilege (as most of us with access to computers have been). It's not false. It's the nature of things. I don't speak for anyone but myself. If you don't agree, that's all well and good, but your dismissal is based on a false argument.

are you telling me you don't sense your own privilege?

Of course there’s such a thing as progress

as an idea, and a word., which you still haven't defined, only provided examples.

If we can reduce our carbon emissions to safe levels, that’s progress

that's an oversimplification of the issue of carbon emissions. How do you define a safe level? What forms of carbon emissions are "harmful" and which ones "aren't?"

If one can get an education when one’s parents couldn’t, that’s progress.

does that include educations that come with crippling student debt? What do you mean by progress?

why won't you tell us what you mean?

oh, and some poor assumptions:

your apparent desire to keep the world virgin and pure

please cite wtf you're referring to? I don't think the world is virgin nor pure, nor has it ever been, so why would i try to keep it something it isn't nor ever was?

It’s childish,

waaaa - your insults break my bones and make baby jesus cry.

and just underlines that fact that you’ve been cosseted all your life.

that would be cosseted then. Why are you insulting me based on an argument you invented? I have to wonder why you can't have a reasonable conversation where you define what you mean without resorting to infantile insults.

truly. can you not define what progress is? does it mean anything to you?

Most of our history has been driven by our wish to make short, brutal lives, somewhat less short and brutal.

has your life been short and brutal? mine hasn't I know a few people who've had it hard (I live & work in the poorest neighbourhood in my country), and continue to grind it out, but they are more full of vitality than the affluent pasty-faced office workers. Most of our history? where do you get this from?

And the world wasn’t an Eden before that. It was a world dominated by predators.

I never said the world was an "Eden." thanks again for making things up to argue about. What predators dominated the world? what are you talking about? Dinosaurs?

Where a few wild dogs or some wandering mercenary might kill your family.

do you get your history from Guy Gavriel Kay novels?

But that’s not true. No one knew that, nor would anyone have thought it.

thanks again, elene, for sharing with us your prophetic powers in determining what everyone thinks and thought.

That does not mean that tractors are a bad idea in general.

tractors are harmless as an idea. As a material technology, an industrialised plow, they require the industrialised infrastructure to exist. this means that all of the toxins and waste that are a part of this system are inherent in the very existence of a tractor. If all you see is the good, you're not looking at enough of the picture.

I'm not suggesting any alternatives, so if you want to jump to the conclusion that I'm a neo-luddite, you have no basis to. and i'm not anti-technology. I don' think a tractor is better than a horse for farming, for many reasons beyond how easy it is for the individual farmer.

I've raised buildings out in the bush, taken week-long boat trips, lived in remote villages for months at a time, and lived in some of the most populous and technologically-rich cities.

I'm neither here nor there.
 
 
elene
11:28 / 17.02.08
What made me suspect you want a pure and virgin earth were passages like,

you're completely ignoring all the bad things that go with that tractor. Before you even start it up to get it going, it has polluted land, river and air, through the extraction, refinement, manufacture, marketing, transportation and assembly of all its parts. There are lots of people involved in this whole network, and for many of them, their physical labour has increased with a move to industrialised cities.

Avoiding all of these supposed ills would leave us in the stone age. No mining, smelting, etc. means no technology beyond wood fire, horses, flints and sharpened sticks. But, please, ride on, Kimosabe! Don't wait for the rest of us to follow you, though.

This discussion is probably over, but, as you keep asking me to define it, squib, my use of the word ‘progress’ (and ‘better’, for that matter) has been colloquial throughout. If you genuinely didn’t know what I meant you might have used the same dictionary you used for ‘cosseted’. I’m sure it would have been more interesting, and pertinent, for you to ask SMS, as that meaning seems to involve the end of the world in some, still unknown, way.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
14:36 / 17.02.08
it's a dead thread, elene, because you jump to conclusions, make up arguments, ignore my commentary, and use childish insults (and a dictionary apparently).

I said you're ignoring the breadth of the harm associated with "tractor" and you're telling me I demand a virgin earth.

you may want to remove your head from whichever orifice you've lodge it in.
 
 
elene
14:48 / 17.02.08
Bye bye, squib!
 
 
SMS
02:13 / 19.02.08
I understand that this thread may not be able to live, but I have a few things I feel I should say, by way of explanation of my own thoughts.

I think progress, as an idea, is a way of interpreting the things we encounter. To be sure, special projects (building construction, the mapping of the human genome, or enacting a revolution) seem to have the idea of progress built into them, so that there are steps forward and backward depending on what actually takes place. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that progress is built into the changing nature of ideas over time. It isn't a given that something like the movement of society from City-states to Empire to Feudalism to Monarchy/Nation-state to Democracy/Nation-state ought to be seen as a series of forward and backward steps. But it does seem to me that something like this is in the way we think about things. Certain ideas are medieval and backwards while others are progressive/oriented toward the future. There is a kind of notion that says, we have finally got to this step. Now, there are these people that want to take us back and those people that want to take us forwards.

It may be that this is absolutely the best way of looking at the world; it may be that it isn't particularly good or bad; it may be that it is bad. But I don't think it is the only or inevitable way of seeing things.

Also, all of you were right that I should have clarified about the connection between the eschaton and the idea of progress. I had more than one idea in mind. I was, on the one hand, thinking of Marxist sorts of narratives (which I would call as modern as democracy). Alongside this camp, I would include any kind of post-millenialist vision of the world, from the social gospel movements to movements that attempted to outlaw war. I really don’t know if these had anything like a clear picture of the eschaton, but I called it a heretical Christianity precisely because I didn't have in mind a big apocalyptic breakthrough but a humanly-constructed world. In any case, I had no intention of being dogmatic about it, and if this really has no relation to reality, I plead only ignorance in my defense.

I do think that any kind of Wilsonian Democracy Project (whether or not this includes Iraq) is one way of thinking about Progress in the world. I believe that Democracy is much better than either Communism or Baathism. But I do think there is an additional component in the idea when it is considered not only an improvement but also an advance. And I don't think that Democracy is an advance over either one.

I think that both new technology and science generally constitute a real advance and improvement over something. And in that sense I respectfully disagree with squib (and I’m not arguing; I'm only putting my cards on the table). I think that "progress" becomes manifestly unhelpful when we try to use it to orient ourselves to other cultural practices and institutions (ie thinking of the Iranian theocracy as Medieval). From my perspective, there isn’t any ambiguity in those two regions. But those regions are hardly exhaustive.

Thank you all for your comments.
 
 
elene
20:55 / 19.02.08
Thanks for returning, SMS, and for the eschatological clarifications. I know nothing of the groups you mention, but will seek to learn something of them. I agree with you that there are domains where progress is a well defined and useful concept and others where it isn't.

This is a very interesting subject and I don’t consider it dead at all.
 
 
Olulabelle
21:02 / 20.02.08
I am actually finding it all very interesting reading as well, though I can see the people involved may be feeling a little fractious. However, just because you are disagreeing does not mean the conversation cannot continue.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:07 / 20.02.08
Indeed. Please continue to make Barbelith shit at your leisure.
 
 
SMS
22:43 / 20.02.08
I'm sorry, Haus. What?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
05:13 / 21.02.08
Well, SMS, as far as I can tell elene decided to troll squib, for reasons that remain obscure. Which sort of behaviour may help to explain why there is about one post to the Head Shop a week when nobody is getting trolled. Still, c'est la vie. At this point there's not a lot to be done about it, but I thought it was at least worth mentioning that grown up (sic) is not actually an admirable contribution to a discussion on progress. As you were, though.
 
 
Lurid Archive
06:05 / 21.02.08
Well, I think squib and elene were more or less getting stuck on semantics, which is pretty frustrating for all concerned. It is neither an entirely trivial, nor irrelevant question to actually define what is mean by "progress", although it is in the nature of these kinds of disagreements that they do need to be acknowledged before any kind of dialogue can take place.

Without really wanting to assign blame, I think it is a shame they couldn't get past that, since there was possibly an interesting discussion to be had from the contrasting points of view on display. The problem with the Head Shop is lack of traffic, in my opinion, rather than ill tempered posts.
 
 
elene
15:29 / 21.02.08
I certainly did not troll squib. I merely strongly disagreed with his position and found one of his claims childish and ridiculous. It was not nice to let him know that’s what I thought, but that’s not trolling.

Concerning semantics, I didn’t use ‘progress’ and other relevant terms in an unusual way. I didn’t, for instance, suggest that something that represents technological progress might not simultaneously represent a blight on humanity. I didn’t suggest that progress could be determined in some universal manner, independent of people’s individual choices. It’s certainly quite possible that squib was using the word ‘progress’ in an unusual manner, but then it was up to him to make that clear, rather than asking what I meant by the term.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:42 / 21.02.08
You said things like this:

Oh, grown up!

You seem to suggest that, for example, in the sixties (that’s the 1960s, squib)

But, please, ride on, Kimosabe!

Trolling. Rude, childish, basically disgusting behaviour. It might be better to let the Head Shop die rather than fill it with maggots and call the movement occasioned a sign of life.

Lurid - it's not so much a question of semantics, I think, as systems. Elene's narrative is traditionally teleological - she sees advancing technology as a process whereby people's lives get better, and sees people's lives getting better as equivalent with "progress". Thus:

Most of our history has been driven by our wish to make short, brutal lives, somewhat less short and brutal.

Personally, I think that this is untrue - that the extension of human life and the improvement of the general quality of human life - have been largely circumstantial rather than the drive behind history. However, it's a standard teleology. Men apply themselves to making the world a better place for men, and this is progress. So, the system the output of which is that somebody who previously had to spend four hours ploughing a field with a horse can now spend one hour ploughing the same field with a tractor is a progressive system. Industrialisation is progressive, because it is a part of the human project to make life for humans easier and longer. Democracy, I suppose, may or may not be progressive in those terms, depending on its impact on life expectancy and quality. The atomic bomb is not progressive, as it does not extend human life or quality of life, but represents technological progress, which can interact with the broader teleology of longer, happier lives.

However, squib looks at that system and sees the system as a problem, and not as a progressive system. Nor exactly as a retrogressive system, but as a system that has, by existing, moved the load of labour from the individual with a horse to the world more generally, which has the energy and production cost of that three hour saving spread across various environments - just as the internal combustion engine, which may extend human life - by bringing food to people without food, say - and might improve its quality - by allowing people to visit Warwick Castle has associated costs which balance those benefits - for example, pollution, deaths on the roads and so on. There may be a way to decide whether benefit outweighs cost, and that might be the indicator of progress, but squib doesn't appear to recognise that as a denotation of progress - he accepts chronological "progress" as something like "the alteration to human society over time" - so we have progressed from hunter-gatherers to agrarians to republicans to empires to industrialised nations but that this does not represent progress in the more traditional sense of things getting better (such as the human ability to comprehend the world).

They are basically in agreement that technological progress is not the same thing as progress-in-itself, but since human enterprise for elene is ultimately progressive, in the sense of aiming to increase quality and length of human life, the products of human enterprise - such as technology - will, logically, bend towards such a goal. I'm not sure if elene has worked out that that's her argument's trend, but there we go.

(Incidentally, people were aware of some of the negative aspects of automobile ownership forty years ago - the first freeway riot was in 1956. Just FYI.)

Squib, meanwhile, is questioning, as far as I can see, whether _anything_ can be identified as "progress" in any sense other than linear and chronological progression, rather than simply a change of state.
 
 
elene
16:57 / 21.02.08
Those are your arguments, Haus, not mine. You really are worked up about poor squib! I’m surprised.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:27 / 21.02.08
A common tactic is to claim that the other party has become emotional, and therefore that they have "lost". This instinct, I think, comes from the playground, where to show any sign of emotion is taken as a sign of weakness. It rarely works on grown-ups, and yet is ventured remarkably often.

To clarify: I am not "worked up" about squib. I would like, in its dwindling days, however, for the Head Shop not to be a dumping ground for the issues of people who are not competent to make any worthwhile contribution to it for reasons personal or otherwise. If you are incapable of making contributions to this thread that are not rude, random or merely fatuous, such as Those are your arguments, Haus, not mine, then you should not be in this thread (see my previous comparison of a dead dog as against a dog full of maggots; one is full of life, and yet both are dead and one is noticeably more repulsive) - kindly do so in the Conversation, where fatuity has always been nurtured. If you can manage a decent contribution here, please do so.
 
 
SMS
02:27 / 22.02.08
Thank you for clarifying, Haus.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:03 / 22.02.08
it's not so much a question of semantics, I think, as systems. Elene's narrative is traditionally teleological - she sees advancing technology as a process whereby people's lives get better - Haus

Yes, there is definitely an element of that, but I think that elene is somewhat justified in the complaint that you have filled in too many of the blanks. I wouldn't say you have constructed a straw man, exactly, but I'd have prefered to have seen the argument come directly from someone defending it first before reading the critique.

But I think that the discussion between squib and elene stalled at a prior level, in that they seemed unable to reconcile what you might call holistic and reductionist reasoning. As you say, squib seems to be refusing to identify anything as progress, mostly because he is against considering elements of progress in isolation, I think, wanting to balance advances with their costs. This isn't an unreasonable thing to do, of course, but I think that insisting on applying this approach to any use of the word "progress" more or less meant that elene and squib were talking about different things. True, there was some indication of where they would go in a broader sense but I suspect that what Haus summarises as elene's argument is probably just a narrative meant to illustrate that some aspects of technological advancement could be said to constitute improvement. I'm not even sure they got to the point of actual disagreement rather than just talking past each other, which is a shame.
 
  

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