A reply to this tweet from Steven Pinker

https://x.com/sapinker/status/2075197497387975131?s=20

"The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific." Chelsea Follett

@chellivia

describes The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days” https://humanprogress.org/the-grim-truth-about-the-good-old-days/ via

@HumanProgress

Such comparisons rest on a questionable premise. It's like looking back at today from 1000 years in the future and finding that cancer is still incurable, that people still have to do hard labor by hand, that they still use dangerous means of transport such as cars and airplanes, which cause countless deaths every year. They haven't even conquered hereditary diseases yet, nor bred fully resistant plants. Not to mention the countless factory farms and the deaths of animals for food. And their AI is still unconscious and stupid.

But this is not something we actually live through, it is a projection from a future we will never inhabit, and it has no bearing on how our present is actually experienced. And we not only don't know what the future might be like, we also have little reason to care, at least with regard to our own sense of life and the experience of living.

This is a back-projection under entirely incomparable conditions. Such comparisons carry less weight than they seem to, because they overlook the temporality, spatiality, and finitude of individual life. It is like invoking opportunity costs one could never begin to imagine, and in doing so it smuggles in something faintly inhuman, a standpoint that mixes eras and observer positions that were never meant to occupy the same vantage, judging a lived present against a view no one within it could ever actually hold.

The truth is, we are thrown into the world without being asked. It is our only life, and we have to accept it fully. As Nietzsche would say, amor fati. We don't feel like we're missing out on something better, nor that we're missing out on something worse. And every generation is equally entitled to, and indeed compelled to, feel this way. We only have what we have, know what we know, and can do our best given our situation. These historical pictures are ideas, speculations, hypotheses, that can only partially relate to the lived present. Even data, statistics, and anecdotal evidence fall short of simulating the experience of the situation in question. Life and experience are always bound to one's own perspective, and that perspective is always situated in one's own present, limited by the horizon of its time and being.

Just as a donkey can consume its haystack with the same enjoyment with which we humans enjoy a Bach symphony, everyone has, in a sense, equal claim to living in the best possible world. "Progress" is roughly equivalent to us looking into the jungle and laughing at the animals because they haven't invented penicillin. That would rightly strike us as strange.