The Case against Progress

 This really is the key point on which the whole Western project rests. Does Western Civilisation make things better. If it doesn't I don't think anyone would wish to continue it. So does it make things better, is there progress?

If we believe in a fixed truth then it can't. Truth must be true at all times and places, what was true 1000 years ago must be true today. The only way those with a Fixed View of truth can believe in Progress is that this fixed truth is some how hidden and must be revealed through work. For some reason our ancestors were not privileged to know the Truth and our descendant will be. So what of us now? Have we revealed some of the fixed truth yet? How would we know ahead of time whether we have got to the bottom of things yet? Importantly we can't. If may well turn out that everything we have so carefully constructed today turns out to be false tomorrow.

A simple example is the "true" motion of the Sun and Earth. If you spend a day in the garden you will notice that the sun moves across the sky during the day. This obvious proof that the Sun moves has been the truth forever. However this unquestionable Truth was reinterpreted by Copernicus who said it was not the Sun but the Earth that moved. Essentially this is the truth we hold today, even tho that isn't quite true because the Sun itself moves around the Galactic centre. The most recent advance on this question is that motion is relative, and that was Einstein's great contribution-we need to look at acceleration to get the truth of motion. In general we can't know until tomorrow whether our whole world view will be turned upside down (literally).

SRH--a major thread of this blog--is looking for proof that you cannot make a total statement of truth because you would need to include that statement within itself, and provide foundation for that statement within itself, as there is nothing outside on which to found it. And if there is something not covered by the statement that contradictions the idea that it is totalistic.

Now the thing to observe here is that humans seem to have lived quite happily with the sun going around the earth! Copernicus didn't change anything in one sense. Indeed change is actually impossible. The important Truth hasn't changed. Whatever we needed to know to live 10,000 years ago was available to people then else obviously we would not have been able to live then.

So we must bin the idea of a Fixed Truth that is being uncovered and look at how one truth was available to people 10,000 years ago and an obviously different truth is available to people today.

For this to be the case Truth must change and be relative to the society that uses it.

To shorten this blog, hopefully we can see immediately that it is impossible to compare cultures and times. People 10,000 years ago knew exactly what they needed to know to live 10,000 years ago and the same now. So there is no Progress. QED.

Now this has huge implications for Empire. Wars are conducted by Empires seeking control of regions and they do this by arguing that they are superior in some way and the region will benefit. In the West we argue that we offer greater freedoms and technology. And (sarcastically) this is so obvious that we need to back that message up with superior firepower. One wonders how an Empire with superior firepower and the wrong message would fare. How do we know that the West does not succeed simply because it has a more powerful military and it has nothing to do with the message of freedom. But America conflates the two. Despite spending 40% of all world military on its own military it also likes to say it has the "better" culture. This makes no sense. America is just one of many Empires seeking for power. Famous past empires are the Ottoman, French, German and British. Famous current empires are the American, Russian and Chinese. There is no moral superiority there is only firepower.

Those with moral superiority are what Jesus calls the Peacemakers. They have no firepower. You know a good man because he does not carry a gun, they only carry their conscience, conviction and compassion. A gun can only kill, the future lies in inspiring the gun carriers to put down their weapons. 

Perhaps better for another blog but this raises an interesting question about what Truth is. In a nutshell there is an idea of Ethnotechnological Efficiency. This covers the "way of life" of a community. When we compare communities we need compare this. A group who feed themselves a lot via manual fishing like Jesus' community are going to be differ a lot from one who feeds itself through fossil fuel powered intensive agriculture. They both find food, just in very different ways. Truth needs to be understood in context and it can't be abstracted into a universal Law.

We see this in the natural world. People like to say that the Lion is a more "advanced" creature than the worm. But for a lion to do what a worm does it would need to become a worm. A worm is perfectly suited to what it does. It is the most advanced thing for doing what it does in fact. Likewise Imperialists like to say that the modern democratic human in New York is more advanced than the tribes member in the Amazon forest. But as Reality TV shows like to make fun of you put a New Yorker in the jungle and they are dead in a couple of weeks. Likewise you put the Amazonian in New York and they will end up dead as a homeless drug addict. It is bizarre in the supposedly "woke" 21st Century that the exact same Imperial prejudices and racisms exist at the heart of the US Empire as existed at the worst times of the Roman or British empires.

So what have I done here other than create a universal law that you can't abstract truth into a universal law? Well the context here is very limited. Who in my culture is interested in this subject, who will read this post, and will be able to make sense of it? The context here is already very limited!