We use the term “technology” when we discover a process that lets you get more output for less investment, whether you’re trying to produce gallons of oil or terabytes of storage. We need a term for this kind of institutional metis – a way to get more social good for every social sacrifice you have to make – and “social technology” fits the bill. Along with the more conventional sort of technology, it has led to most of the good things that we enjoy today.
The flip side, of course, is that when you lose social technology, both sides of the bargain get worse. You keep raising taxes yet the lot of the poor still deteriorates. You spend tons of money on prisons and have a militarized police force, yet they seem unable to stop muggings and murder. And this is the double bind that “anarcho-tyranny” addresses. Once you start losing social technology, you’re forced into really unpleasant tradeoffs, where you have sacrifice along two axes of things you really value.
As for moral progress, see whig history. Essentially, I view the notion of moral progress as fundamentally a misinterpretation of history. Related fallacy: using a number as an argument (as in, “how is this still a thing in 2014?”). Progress in terms of technology can be readily demonstrated, as can regression in terms of social technology. The notion of moral progress, however, is so meaningless as to be not even wrong.
That use of ‘technology’ seems to be unusual, and possibly even misleading. Classical technology is more than a third way that increases net good; ‘techne’ implies a mastery of the technique and the capacity for replication. Gaining utility from a device is all well and good, but unless you can make a new one then you might as well be using a magic artifact.
It does not seem to be the case that we have ever known how to make new societies that do the things we want. The narrative of a ‘regression’ in social progress implies that there was a kind of knowledge that we no longer have- but it is the social institutions themselves that are breaking down, not our ability to craft them.
Cultures are still built primarily by poorly-understood aggregate interactions, not consciously designed, and they decay in much the same way. A stronger analogy here might be biological adaptation, rather than technological advancement, and in evolutionary theory the notion of ‘progress’ is deeply suspect.
Gaining utility from a device is all well and good, but unless you can make a new one then you might as well be using a magic artifact.
The fact that I can’t make a new computer from scratch doesn’t mean I’m using one as “a magical artifact”. What contemporary pieces of technology can you make?
It does not seem to be the case that we have ever known how to make new societies that do the things we want.
You might be more familiar with this set of knowledge if we call it by its usual name—“politics”.
I was speaking in the plural. As a civilization, we are more than capable of creating many computers with established qualities and creating new ones to very exacting specifications. I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
You can do this for governments, of course- but notably, we haven’t lost any information here. We are still perfectly capable of writing constitutions, or even founding monarchies if there were a consensus to do so. The ‘regression’ that Zanker believes in is (assuming the most common NRx beliefs) a matter of convention, social fabrics, and shared values, and not a regression in our knowledge of political structures per se.
I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
That’s not self-evident to me. There are legal and ethical barriers, but my guess is that given the same level of control that we have in, say, engineering, we could (or quickly could learn to) build societies with custom characteristics. Given the ability to select people, shape their laws and regulations, observe and intervene, I don’t see why you couldn’t produce a particular kind of a society.
Of course you can’t build any kind of society you wish just like you can’t build any kind of a computer you wish—you’re limited by laws of nature (and of sociology, etc.), by available resources, by your level of knowledge and skill, etc.
Shaping a society is a common desire (look at e.g. communists) and a common activity (of governments and politicians). Certainly it doesn’t have the precision and replicability of mass-producing machine screws, but I don’t see why you can’t describe it as a “technology”.
Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.
Re: social progress: see http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyranny/
As for moral progress, see whig history. Essentially, I view the notion of moral progress as fundamentally a misinterpretation of history. Related fallacy: using a number as an argument (as in, “how is this still a thing in 2014?”). Progress in terms of technology can be readily demonstrated, as can regression in terms of social technology. The notion of moral progress, however, is so meaningless as to be not even wrong.
That use of ‘technology’ seems to be unusual, and possibly even misleading. Classical technology is more than a third way that increases net good; ‘techne’ implies a mastery of the technique and the capacity for replication. Gaining utility from a device is all well and good, but unless you can make a new one then you might as well be using a magic artifact.
It does not seem to be the case that we have ever known how to make new societies that do the things we want. The narrative of a ‘regression’ in social progress implies that there was a kind of knowledge that we no longer have- but it is the social institutions themselves that are breaking down, not our ability to craft them.
Cultures are still built primarily by poorly-understood aggregate interactions, not consciously designed, and they decay in much the same way. A stronger analogy here might be biological adaptation, rather than technological advancement, and in evolutionary theory the notion of ‘progress’ is deeply suspect.
The fact that I can’t make a new computer from scratch doesn’t mean I’m using one as “a magical artifact”. What contemporary pieces of technology can you make?
You might be more familiar with this set of knowledge if we call it by its usual name—“politics”.
I was speaking in the plural. As a civilization, we are more than capable of creating many computers with established qualities and creating new ones to very exacting specifications. I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
You can do this for governments, of course- but notably, we haven’t lost any information here. We are still perfectly capable of writing constitutions, or even founding monarchies if there were a consensus to do so. The ‘regression’ that Zanker believes in is (assuming the most common NRx beliefs) a matter of convention, social fabrics, and shared values, and not a regression in our knowledge of political structures per se.
That’s not self-evident to me. There are legal and ethical barriers, but my guess is that given the same level of control that we have in, say, engineering, we could (or quickly could learn to) build societies with custom characteristics. Given the ability to select people, shape their laws and regulations, observe and intervene, I don’t see why you couldn’t produce a particular kind of a society.
Of course you can’t build any kind of society you wish just like you can’t build any kind of a computer you wish—you’re limited by laws of nature (and of sociology, etc.), by available resources, by your level of knowledge and skill, etc.
Shaping a society is a common desire (look at e.g. communists) and a common activity (of governments and politicians). Certainly it doesn’t have the precision and replicability of mass-producing machine screws, but I don’t see why you can’t describe it as a “technology”.
Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.