Progress and loss
In this series, I’ve considered the important concept of “progress” (July 2022) and what happens when we lose cumulative knowledge (July 2023). Here, I want to re-visit both, but from other angles.
I frequently think the phrase “the problem of progress” because, intellectually, the concept is indeed problematic. Why? Because, while it has certainly been distorted into a powerful fallacy, which must be exposed for what it is, it is also real. We can’t just dismiss it as a complete fallacy. Humans—not uniquely at all, but effectively—pass on knowledge to subsequent generations. A technology that successive generations have found useful, and adapted as their understanding of that technology deepened, would not have arrived at its latest iteration if it had not gone through the preceding process of development.
Here, already, however, a potential fallacy is lurking close by. It’s there because of our strong tendency to think in linear terms, because of how we experience the passage of time in our own lives. It’s easy to line up iterations of a technology in chronological order and assume that one led to the next, et cetera, in a linear process of “improvement” or “progress.” Doing so, however, obscures the important truth that, in all likelihood, each of these distinct, but recognizably similar, iterations served a somewhat different set of wants and needs in its own time from those of earlier or later times.
Archaeologist Julian Whitewright points this out in the history of our understanding of different sailing rigs in the ancient Mediterranean. Assuming linear development and “improvement,” the old (technologically-deterministic) model claims that the square sail led ultimately to the modern “Marconi” rig that we use today on our yachts, through “intermediate” stages. In fact, however, square and triangular sails existed concurrently, throughout the entire period, with different users favoring one or the other for their own specific set of reasons. Whitewright shows that the central claim underpinning this linear model—that improvement of windward ability was the abiding, driving objective—must be false, based on the evidence.
And yet, the modern “Marconi” rig does have superior windward ability—if that’s what you’re after; which, as Whitewright points out, is clearly not primarily what ancient Mediterranean mariners were after. And, we can only build the modern Marconi rig because we know how to extrude strong aluminum alloys that resist metal fatigue, metal-wire rigging to support them, and strong synthetic sailcloth. The process of learning how to do all those things, which took generations, can certainly be called “progress.”
Having said that, I’m still not completely comfortable with the term; it is value-laden. It implies that the later development is “better” than the earlier version, and that’s a problem, because there is no absolute “better.” To understand each iteration requires understanding how it met the needs of the people who made and used it. That set of wants and needs will not be the same for any two groups in any two time periods.
Yes, stainless-steel wire rigging is stronger and longer-lasting than hemp rope. You could point out to me that, if people in 1850 could have produced stainless-steel wire rigging in a cost-effective way, they would have; and their use of natural-fiber standing rigging would have disappeared quickly. And that, you might argue, makes stainless-steel wire rigging “better.”
Maybe—but this is a rather useless hypothetical, is it not? They could not produce this technology in a cost-effective way in 1850.
Granted—but is it not “better” now, because we can produce it cost-effectively, and thus enjoy its benefits? Is that not “progress”?
Most people in our society would tend to call stainless-steel wire “advanced” and hemp rope “primitive.” If I pointed out that, for Society X, labor is cheap, hemp is plentiful, and the skills to make it into rope are well-diffused, while at the same time, these people have no access to stainless-steel wire, no currency with which to buy it, and no need for it that their hemp-rope rigging, even though it is weaker and must be replaced more often, does not meet, can we really argue that stainless-steel wire would be “better” for them?
If you do not have widely-accepted currency to spend, and/or self-sufficiency (whether individual or group) is important to you, then hemp rope rigging might well be “better” to you than stainless-steel. “Progress” just glosses over all of this. It paints with too broad a brush.
Fishermen using traditional sailing craft in parts of the world where money is scarce have adopted outboard motors with enthusiasm—to some extent. First, though, they have to be able to afford them, they have to be willing to modify their boats for them, and they have to be willing and able to bear the costs of maintenance and fuel for them. Assuming fuel is even available. Sailing is cheaper; local people make the sails, perhaps out of feed sacks or other scrap material. The wind is the fuel. The outboards are made in factories far away and shipped long distances. So are parts; no parts, no working motor. Are outboards “better”? It depends on your particular circumstances.
On the other hand, without Newton, you don’t get Einstein, and without Einstein, you don’t get Feynman and Hawking and Thorne…if I called that “progress” in theoretical physics, it would be difficult to contradict me.
Perhaps it is easier to identify “progress” in a specific intellectual discipline—especially a mathematical one—than it is in technology, which is culturally-situated in such complex ways.
I hope that, by posing these questions, I’ve at least made a case that this isn’t so simple.
Now, let’s accept the term “progress” as an umbrella term for the general accumulation of human knowledge passed down from one generation to the next—regardless of the means of transmission, whether direct (as in parent to offspring) or indirect (as through books, for example). I don’t find the term nearly so problematic used like this.
What is problematic, though, is the traditional assumption that progress is inevitable and inexorable. When you are trained in history in a Western graduate school, you’re taught that a naïve faith in progress—especially technological process—died on the slaughter-fields of the Great War (1914—18). I think this is much more true of the European intelligentsia than it is of any other group. That is understandable; that war was fought on their land and it consumed their people in the millions. Even after what in many ways was Chapter Two of that war (1939—45), faith in technological progress as the primary solution to human problems was still alive and well—at least in the United States, which was sitting pretty after that war, relative to the now-exhausted old European powers. So, the notion that progress was inevitable and inexorable survived.
The reality that strikes at the heart of this fallacy is that cumulative knowledge can be, and frequently is, lost. Sometimes it is deliberately destroyed, as in the European imperialist extirpation campaigns conducted against other cultures. Those campaigns were frighteningly successful; “post-colonial” cultural reclamation around the world is still very much a work in progress.
So, the Mayans of the first half of the twentieth century could not read the hieroglyphics of their ancestors. It took archaeologists and linguists a long time to crack that code, and it happened in my lifetime, five hundred years or so after the Spanish conquest.
In the preceding century, a French linguist of particular ability was able to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which, up to that point, really were the writing of an alien civilization. Egyptians at the time couldn’t read them. They read Arabic, the language of their medieval Muslim conquerors.
In East Africa, an old type of sewn-plank sailing craft called the mtepe remained in use long enough to become an anomalous technology in its world. Sewn-plank construction precedes the invention and diffusion of iron nails by millennia. Of course it was dismissed as “primitive” by Europeans, but these boats proved quite useful in filling a couple of niches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “mental technology” if I may—the learned know-how to build and rig them—was there, the materials were there, and the mtepe was cost-effective for its users to construct and use. It used a square sail, which we know people have used for several thousand years. That was not a distinctive feature. What was a distinctive feature was the fact that it could do two things that few craft can: survive the open sea, and get into very shallow water along the coast. Most seaworthy vessels do not have shallow draft; the converse is also true. This allowed the mtepe to continue as a viable technology in two trades: the harvesting and transport of mangrove poles, used as roof rafters in desert communities along the Persian Gulf with no access of their own to trees; and the coastal slave trade.
Sewn-plank wooden boats flex more than most nailed-plank boats. They can be beached and launched repeatedly without damage, whereas a nailed-plank hull might well develop serious leaks as a result of the fasteners being worked under the repeated strains. This was useful on the beaches and in the mangrove swamps of East Africa.
The mtepe could access the mangrove trees, and could also transport them across open water.
It could also get close to shore to pick up a group of slaves, and transport them to wherever they were to be landed. This was smuggling; the British actively suppressed this trade, and would pursue any vessel suspected of participating in it. The mtepe, though, could get into very shallow water, would go into the swamps, and could, if trapped, be beached, so that the crew could drive the slaves into the underbrush, where the British crews would not follow. The mtepe was economical enough for these people that they would readily sacrifice one in favor of a group of slaves, who were worth more money than the mtepe.
When these niches disappeared, for external reasons, the mtepe disappeared. The last one known was lying on a beach in the 1930s.
And that leads me, finally, to a consideration that ties progress and loss together. Once a technology is abandoned—say, the ability to build and sail an mtepe—then technological choice shrinks. It is highly unlikely that a group of people will choose a certain technology among alternatives, when no one knows how to build or use it any more. The exception to that is in cultural reclamation, but that has a drastically different set of values from the normal pursuits of livelihoods and power struggles.
It doesn’t matter much if sailing craft would be cheaper to operate than outboard-powered craft if no one left working knows how to sail any more.
What if we had kept developing electric cars in the early twentieth century, instead of abandoning them for their gasoline-powered rivals? Would we be where we are today with EV technology, or would we have learned much about it in the intervening decades?
To go back to Carl Sagan’s famous question: Where would we be if the library at Alexandria had not been destroyed by religious fanatics? He thought perhaps that cost us 2,000 years of intellectual, cultural, and technological “progress.”
So, we are left with “progress” in the end. I didn’t set out to get rid of the idea. I did set out to show that it is a tricky one, and one we should use carefully, rather than casually. Progress is real—but it is not inevitable and inexorable. It can stop, it can regress, it can accelerate. The cumulative knowledge of humanity will continue to accrue—if we see to it. It will not just happen, naturally. The assumption of inevitable, inexorable progress encourages complacency and passivity, which are just as dangerous to the human enterprise as dogma.
Julian Whitewright, “The Potential Performance of Ancient Mediterranean Sailing Rigs,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 40:1 (2011): 2—17.
Erik Gilbert, “The Mtepe: regional trade and the late survival of sewn ships in East African waters,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 27:1 (1998): 43—50.