Nice writing, Brad!
> ... high water mark of belief in Progress. By and large the past two
centuries
>have seen the reaction, and confidence in human Progress -- technological,
>political, humanistic, and moral -- fell out of intellectual favor.
I suspect an awful lot of that happened as a consequence of WW1, doncha
reckon?
>At its most basic level Wright's point is that interactions are
positive-sum:
>there are gains from cooperation. Thus human cultural evolution has an
arrow
>and a direction: toward greater complexity, toward higher civilization.
Mebbe we were interactive long before notions like mutual benefit occurred
to us. I reckon the 'utility' we derive from cooperation isn't a choice we
make; rather it *is us*. To relegate it to a preference or a rational
optimum would then be to place us outside ourselves, eh? And to risk
fashioning a world in which our social essence is potentially frustrated or
distorted.
>People are, Wright argues -- in my view correctly --
>naturally acquisitive in that they want useful things, and will eagerly
>copy new technologies they hear about.
I'm of the opinion that we naturally want *access* to such things.
Communication is the making of something - not so much Locke's idea of
making the private common (for how private can an idea really be - aren't
its constituents socially derived?), but rather a matter of the communion
giving rise to things. Which can then be expropriated by an acquisitor, I
s'pose.
>Thus Wright sees inventions such as
>agriculture as inevitable -- not as a lucky accident.
Works for me - as long as you've moved down to, say, the Euphrates/Tigris
basin first. Agriculture is an idea that is thinkable only where it is
materially possible/suggested, no? Nomadism/hunter-gathering would've made
a lot more sense in, say, the stony and drought-prone Armenian mountains
whence came the first Sumerians - or outback Australia, for that matter.
>He believes that the wide spread of religion in agricultural civilizations
proves that
>its productivity-boosting and division of labor-enhancing effects outweigh
>its exploitative side (p. 86)
So just why do productivity-boosting and division of labour require the
division of a society? Not enough premises here.
>those societies that did not have temples and priests did not flourish.
Genghis Khan's roving lads must have looked like they were flourishing to
their Chinese neighbours, though.
>Wright dismisses gloomy talk of barbarian invasions and the fall of
>empires by asserting that one goes from furs-and-swords to linen-and-pens
in
>three generations:
And, alas, back again - but much more efficiently, natch.
>And even when you do have significant regression -- in the post-Mycenean
Dark Age,
>in the post-Roman Dark Age, or in the wake of the Mongols - Wright reminds
us that
>"the world makes backup copies."
Well, that presupposes we know we didn't lose anything after Mycene,
Imperial Rome etc. And we don't, do we?
>The recipe that ultimately proved successful -- what Wright calls the
economic logic of freedom --
>was stopped in many places: "indeed, on balance, in the centuries after the
>printing press was invented, European governments grew more despotic"
>(p.185). But it only had to succeed once. And given sufficient cultural
>variation, sooner or later a breakthrough was inevitable.
But cultural variation is being dissipated by Wright's inexorable telos of
functional integration, isn't it? And, on the criteria he nominates
(boosted production and division of labour), Nazis could've snatched the lot
if only they'd come along a little earlier. So 'the economic logic of
freedom' warrants a tad more elaboration, I think.
>For why should organizational complexity be Progress? As
>Wright puts it: "... it would be hard to argue that there was net moral
gain
>between the hunter-gatherer and ancient-state phases of cultural
>evolution. The Egyptians had slaves -- which virtually no known
hunter-gatherer
>societies had -- and their soldiers returned from wars of conquest proudly
>brandishing the severed penises of their slain foes" (p. 206).
>
>So in the end Wright is forced to play a game of three-card monte to
>reach conclusions that support his belief in Progress. The card labeled
>"complexity" must be switched for the card labeled "Progress" without
>our noticing. In the industrial core, at the end of the twentieth century,
>we are inclined to tolerate this switch -- to say that it is obvious that a
>highly complicated and productive civilization will have widely-distributed
>individual wealth, lots of individual freedom, and soft forms of rule,
>and that social complexity is civilization. But back in the middle of the
>twentieth century this switch could not have been accomplished at all:
>"complexity yes," people would have said, "but progress no." And who
>knows how things will look in a hundred more years?
Onya, Brad! Mebbe I'd jumped in a little early.
>*The above review covers only the first two-thirds of the book. At that
>point Wright asks the question: "Aren't organic evolution and human
>history sufficiently different to demand separate treatment?"
>
>I think the answer to this question is "yes," and that the book should
>stop at that point.
So do I, Brad.
Thanks for a nice headful to take to bed.
G'Night,
Rob.
