Too Like the Lightning: Any Progress on Progress Yet?

February 11, 2022 11:26 PM

January 5, 2017, a few weeks before the release of her first novel...
[I]n the middle of so many discussions of the causes of this year’s events (economics, backlash, media, the not-so-sleeping dragon bigotry), and of how to respond to them (petitions, debate, fundraising, art, despair) I hope people will find it useful to zoom out with me, to talk about the causes of historical events and change in general. Historian Ada Palmer writes about the history of the idea of progress, the role of individuals in history, the (simulated) Papal election of 2016, and what it all means for us here in 2017.

Ada Palmer Previously on Metafilter: 1 2 3 4

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also btw...
Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress [ungated] - "The sci-fi author writes about the 25th century and teaches college students about the 15th. The past we think we know is wrong, she says—and so is the future."

If there is any concept from her books that Palmer hopes will catch on, like “robot” and “cyberspace” did for other authors, it is a model of living called a bash'. The word is derived from a Japanese term, ibasho, which means “a place where you can feel like yourself.” A bash' is any combination of people—adults, children, friends, couples, polycules—who have decided to live together as a chosen family. Historically speaking, the nuclear family is a very recent invention, which makes it, in Palmer's view, an unstable isotope. The family of the future, she thinks, will include a far more diverse set of molecular arrangements...

As a teen, Palmer began to struggle with pain she could not easily explain. She would later learn that she had developed Crohn's disease as well as polycystic ovary syndrome. The latter, a hormone disorder, also caused her to develop a mustache and the body odors of a pubescent boy, and she felt ostracized by the students at her all-girls school. She identifies now as a “masculine woman,” a term she learned from anime that is easier to convey in Japanese.

At the time, though, all she knew was that she only seemed to belong in places where being different wasn't a problem. Her father, a hardware engineer, hosted a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game where Palmer became a fixture. They went to sci-fi conventions together, where they played immersive role-playing games and she performed filks—costumed musicals set in fantasy worlds. At home, she started writing her own stories, drawing from Greek poetry and novels inflected with Norse myth. Her mother tried out Catholicism for a couple of years, and Palmer took to the faith “as a herpetologist might love reptiles”—fascinated but held at a little distance. Once, she says, she asked a priest “why there was a special school for Catholic mythology but not Norse or Greek mythology.” Of the three, Catholicism seemed to offer her the least useful advice for how to live.

And then, at age 15, relief. Palmer left high school for an early college program in western Massachusetts. She found friends who liked books and learning, a chosen family. She was cut out, she discovered, to be the ringleader, the Alpha Nerd. The bright edges of her life became the whole of it.

Ecclesiastes in the Age of Progress: "where can we go from here? Specifically, given that we, as a society, need something like wisdom literature in our modern age, what might Ecclesiastes look like in an era steeped in the idea of progress?"

posted by kliuless (3 comments total)

Thanks for sharing these! I'm a third of the way into The Will to Battle now and these books are so dense and so interesting. They've taken me weeks and weeks to read, unusual for me, because I really need to just take it a few pages at a time. I hesitate to even recommend them to friends because reading them has truly been a Project, but I've found it very thought-provoking and edifying. I'd been meaning to learn more about Ada Palmer and am happy to have gotten this nudge from mefi!
posted by potrzebie at 4:57 PM on February 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Potrzebie, same for me. It's like I need to take a break so my brain can process some things and then I can go back for another chunk - very meaty!
posted by esoteric things at 12:01 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

>Specifically, given that we, as a society, need something like wisdom literature in our modern age, what might Ecclesiastes look like in an era steeped in the idea of progress?"
First, let's consider the premise: yes, there's a problem of how-we-know-to-be-true-what-we-believe-to-be-true (that has a snappier name of epistemology) and, yes, there's a gulf between people rich and poor in the skills and tools of assessing truth, partly because poorly-educated people make pliable marks for grift ... but "something like wisdom literature" isn't going to cut it.

Literature is ideas in poem or prose and we've learned you give people skills by having them do stuff -- this is definitely one of those things you can practise distinguishing fact from fiction, and explaining why the things you already trust as facts support or disallow other ideas from joining in a coherent system. (Gödel reminds us there are exceptions to a consistent system that escape that system.)

Our shared consensus on what's real and how we know it also has to change, because everybody testing every lie for themselves is weak against sheer weight of liars spouting lies. We can form collectives who trust each other and use reputation to keep track and reduce the lies in our collective understanding. So that's praxis, not literature.

So Ecclesiastes?!? I think the praxis also has to focus on the journey of how much you don't know and how humbled you are each new thing you learn as that also comes with knowing there's more you don't know. Given our relative ignorance, what are the great traditions elsewhere on Earth and what reputations have they earned?

How do you make progress and not repeat the same work (re)assessing your choices? (N.B. outcomes matter; outcomes are influenced by our actions; and we're responsible for the consequences of our actions and choices -- so reassessing choices is important but only moderately important.) What tool should we imagine? Maybe we have some kind of 'decision record' that matches the choice with the contingent information which shapes the choice at the time you made the decision. It can be updated later. It might be shared. When shared, you will find incomplete overlap with people who share intersections of interest with you, so some may be sympathetic or not for your choices -- even making reputational choices over fact-driven ones.

Those contingent facts make a fractal space for or against the decision, both as time goes on and as more knowledge informs the edges of the decision. Reputations can give rise to gatekeepers, and hoarded or kept-private information skews the ability for people to arrive at the same decision you did.

Those are the labels or terms of reference, not an algorithm to use when building nor a model of the whole system. I think there's a lot more to this (or it's banaloty renders it meaningless). Maybe I need a book written by people overwhelmed by their place in the system and needing to know there are others who struggled with knowing they didn't know much and yet had to work miracles with what little they had?
posted by k3ninho at 2:10 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]