A person in the future might perceive the privilege of receiving life saving chemotherapy almost surely as a totally nasty and brutish treatment,
Plenty of people in the present recognize this, and choose not to endure it. I would argue that this choice and the respect of differing opinions on related topics is fairly modern, and I strongly prefer the current equilibrium. I recognize that circumstances will change, and the tension between enforcing conformity vs accepting inefficiency will shift as a result. My preference isn’t a universal value judgement.
I think that’s the key area where I’m not sure if we agree, or if we just are somewhat aligned accidentally: I don’t think there is any objective valuation of individual or group behaviors. Many of us have preferences, but that’s an overlay of individual valuation on top of each of our framings of our experiences. This does include some pretty strong modeling of causality, especially in smaller subsets of space-time. But it doesn’t actually map to any territory.
You were arguing against the idea of history as a narrative of progress from the past to the present, yet you expect a narrative of progress from the present to the future. It seems to me there is an inconsistency there.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing against a simplistic “progress toward utopia” narrative (which seems obviously wrong), or against all narrative descriptions of the complex weave of individuals across the past (which I’m not sure what other options there are).
I have done some amount of thinking on it, and I consider myself very lucky to have been born in the circumstances that I find myself in. It’s not uniform, but generally “nasty, brutish, and short” does describe most lives before the 20th century. And honestly, most today—I’m lucky on more dimensions than just the historical period I’m in.
This is far different than progress being inevitable or monotonic. In a lot of ways the end of the last century was better than the current (for my personal lived experiences). But it is progress, and it’s pretty significant when looked at in half-century chunks for the last half-millennium. It’s much less clear about fine-grained improvements over longer timeframes.
This post ends before it even starts bothering to make arguments for why its central claim is true. It just repeats the claim with increasingly angry and profane language.
I’m not sure why you claim that narrative as default, maybe we could try to look at some stats on how many people hold that world view in the general population. I’m aware of plenty that hold the opposite; directionally, kind of: noble savage/romantic medievalist/conservative/good old days/nostalgic/cynical. Let’s pick noble savagism vs current-day Steven Pinkerism. There are plenty of people who would full-throatedly try to crown one or the other as supreme. I’m more epistemically reserved, without having spent too much looking into it yet—which is to say, you, the general you, feel free to take this as an invitation to make your case—though be advised, I might read your answer with my goggles of motivated-reasoning-suspicion donned given the forum we are here steeped.
I—and I think all—must grant that this conversation cannot be had value-neutral. So I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the answer is multi-context dependent, and X% of people might truly prefer one and Y another.
Only if they have something better. Sounds like you have an expectation of future progress.
Plenty of people in the present recognize this, and choose not to endure it. I would argue that this choice and the respect of differing opinions on related topics is fairly modern, and I strongly prefer the current equilibrium. I recognize that circumstances will change, and the tension between enforcing conformity vs accepting inefficiency will shift as a result. My preference isn’t a universal value judgement.
I think that’s the key area where I’m not sure if we agree, or if we just are somewhat aligned accidentally: I don’t think there is any objective valuation of individual or group behaviors. Many of us have preferences, but that’s an overlay of individual valuation on top of each of our framings of our experiences. This does include some pretty strong modeling of causality, especially in smaller subsets of space-time. But it doesn’t actually map to any territory.
You were arguing against the idea of history as a narrative of progress from the past to the present, yet you expect a narrative of progress from the present to the future. It seems to me there is an inconsistency there.
The title seems misleading.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing against a simplistic “progress toward utopia” narrative (which seems obviously wrong), or against all narrative descriptions of the complex weave of individuals across the past (which I’m not sure what other options there are).
I have done some amount of thinking on it, and I consider myself very lucky to have been born in the circumstances that I find myself in. It’s not uniform, but generally “nasty, brutish, and short” does describe most lives before the 20th century. And honestly, most today—I’m lucky on more dimensions than just the historical period I’m in.
This is far different than progress being inevitable or monotonic. In a lot of ways the end of the last century was better than the current (for my personal lived experiences). But it is progress, and it’s pretty significant when looked at in half-century chunks for the last half-millennium. It’s much less clear about fine-grained improvements over longer timeframes.
This post ends before it even starts bothering to make arguments for why its central claim is true. It just repeats the claim with increasingly angry and profane language.
I’m not sure why you claim that narrative as default, maybe we could try to look at some stats on how many people hold that world view in the general population. I’m aware of plenty that hold the opposite; directionally, kind of: noble savage/romantic medievalist/conservative/good old days/nostalgic/cynical. Let’s pick noble savagism vs current-day Steven Pinkerism. There are plenty of people who would full-throatedly try to crown one or the other as supreme. I’m more epistemically reserved, without having spent too much looking into it yet—which is to say, you, the general you, feel free to take this as an invitation to make your case—though be advised, I might read your answer with my goggles of motivated-reasoning-suspicion donned given the forum we are here steeped.
I—and I think all—must grant that this conversation cannot be had value-neutral. So I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the answer is multi-context dependent, and X% of people might truly prefer one and Y another.