The Divergence Machine II

Progress as a non-stationary argument

In the first two months of our book club this year, we read Voltaire’s Candide (chat thread) and Henry Farrell’s Underground Empire (chat thread), which I think of as establishing boundary conditions on our period and topic: The beginning and end of the installation phase of the divergence machine. I laid out my basic thesis in the introductory post of this series, The Divergence Machine. In this second part, I want to introduce the two choices for the March reading, and a question I’d like us to keep in mind as we read: What is Progress?

Pick at least one of these two books to read, and ideally both (they’re not as short as the January/February reads, but it wouldn’t be a heavy lift to read both).

The Argument of Progress

In the context of the modernity machine, which we explored last year, capital-P Progress was an uncontroversial and relatively naive notion of increasing material well-being yoked to fiat idealism, handed down by religious leaders and the monarchs who patronized them. To participate in Progress was to participate in an essentially religious story, underwritten by the state. The “proof” of the story, as it were, was some combination of the material plenty and sense of spiritual well-being it delivered. The explanatory basis for good and bad outcomes tended to be the morality or immorality of human behavior, per an established rubric. Bad times were punishments for bad behavior. Good times were rewards for good behavior.

This kind of fiat notion of Progress, call it Fiat Progress, emerged in the 1200s, and was institutionalized worldwide by 1600. It has governed grand narratives ever since. Most specific ideologies of Progress through the 20th centuries were merely secularized and globalized descendants of Fiat Progress stories. Even radically modern-sounding grand narratives like those of Buckminster Fuller (Progress as ephemeralization — more and more for less and less) look like Fiat Progress stories once you learn to detect the characteristic features.

In the context of the divergence machine though, the story starts to get more complicated. It is my contention that in the period 1600-2000, the seeds of a new way of understanding Progress were planted. This was Progress as a kind of evolving argument. Let’s call this the Argument of Progress.

The Argument of Progress can be defined as a dynamic pluralist discourse reflecting a changing understanding of a rapidly expanding scope of experienced reality. It has been taking shape for approximately 400 years now, but is only just becoming the mainstream way of thinking about Progress, displacing Fiat Progress narratives.

The rapid expansion is a central feature. The scope of experienced reality must expand significantly within single lifetimes for the Argument of Progress to be distinct from just timeless philosophical argumentation.

It is an argument rooted in history rather than metaphysics, and specifically, history moving fast enough (and recorded reliably enough) to require significant accommodations of novelty within single lifetimes.

What sort of argument is it? Even though Hegel belongs in this period, I don’t think the Hegelian dialectic (or any dialectic) qualifies. The thing about the divergence machine was that it featured a constantly expanding scope of experience, itself generated by the new experiential possibilities of the mature modernity machine. The pressing matter was not to address obscure metaphysical polarities like Being vs. Time, or yin vs. yang, or advaita vs. dvaita but (for example), to accommodate Galileo’s discoveries, reports of the explorations of the Americas, and growing entanglement between Europe and Asia. The Argument of Progress played out on rapidly expanding phenomenological, rather than metaphysical ground.

Marx almost got it, but I think the Marxist dialectic of history is fatally flawed as a successor to Fiat Progress. The model I want to propose here is rooted in the fundamental phenomenon of expanding scope of reality data, rather than “class struggle” (or any notion that presupposes a set of societal moral concerns). You could say Marx tried to have Fiat Progress and eat the Argument of Progress too. Following the central figures of the March books, we’re simply going to abandon Fiat Progress altogether.

Progress is not a Game

The Argument of Progress is not an argument in the sense of opposed sides of a debate, with winners and losers, or even a thesis-antithesis-synthesis spiral. Rather, it is a partially cooperative mutual exploration of novelty as it emerges on an expanding frontier, and contending schools of thought attempt to make sense of it, and update their world views.

One way to remember this is to think of argument in the sense of both:

• A chained series of claims and counterclaims, and

• The argument of a mathematical function, such as x, in y=f(x).

Taken together the Argument of Progress is an evolving narrative about an expanding and accumulating scope of historical data about reality. Data that does not come with a prefigured ideology baked into it as a “natural” interpretative lens, but requires the construction of new lenses (a metaphor that will become significantly more potent in a minute).

The Argument of Progress is the data, and the process of making sense of it, through the discovery or construction of new patterns of thought.

In the 17th century, if you heard that Galileo had seen moons around Jupiter (new x), you’d have to actually come up come up with new ways of making (new f) sense of it (new y), perhaps by considering the merits of Copernican vs. Ptolemaic ideas of the movements of celestial bodies. You would not find either x, or a suitable f, in the Bible or the works of Aristotle. And y might not be a reassuring confirmation of a religious value, but a new yardstick for value in the world, calling for ontological updates.

In the Argument of Progress, the argument-as-data x is the rapidly expanding scope of stuff you had to make sense of. The “world” in “world view.” The value of the function, y, might be understood as some sort of understanding of reality, with f being the argument-as-process sense-making. It is interesting that the word value here emerges from a new process of making sense of new data. It is not a doctrinal belief arrived at through moral reasoning from first principles.

In this view, older modernity-machine views of Progress might be understood as degenerate special cases, with x being a constant, f being some received interpretive tradition (rather than discovery or construction tradition), and y being a value that could only be sacred or profane according to some existing ontology.

This degenerate understanding of Progress naturally lends itself to gamified “debate” framing, between say Catholic versus Protestant views of sin. It is a not-even-wrong way to approach the matter of the newly discovered moons of Jupiter (is the fact of Jupiter having moons confirmation or heresy with respect to the Bible? The question is not even interesting). It cannot deal with a rapidly changing scope of experiential reality. It cannot comprehend telescopes and microscopes.

The non-debate aspect tempts some into treating the Argument of Progress in game-theoretic terms. After all, debates are zero-sum, with winners and losers. Therefore if it is not a debate, it must be non-zero sum. If it is non-zero-sum, the Argument of Progress must obviously presume, and be about, some property of the positive sum set of futures, with the negative-sum set of futures to be regarded as regress. This reduces the Argument of Progress to a higher-order contest between optimism and pessimism, understood in received terms.

This view of progress, in my opinion, is not even wrong, and a reduction of a divergence machine behavior to a less expressive modernity machine behavior. The modernity machine assumes that new discoveries must necessarily be classifiable as good or bad within existing valuation schemes. The divergence machine assumes that new discoveries may subvert old ontologies so deeply, new notions of good and bad have to be reconstructed alongside models of reality itself.

Whether you call it Whig history, Leibnizean optimism, Collison-Cowen Progress Studies, Thielean determinate optimism, or a16z-ish American Dynamism doesn’t matter. This reduction of the Argument of Progress to a debate-like argument between optimisms and pessimisms of various sorts is essentially a Fiat Progress narrative scaffolding. A feature of the modernity machine rather than the divergence machine.

Is the Argument of Progress at least an infinite game in the Carse sense? This is a more reasonable idea, since Carse associates good with trying to continuing the game rather than winning it.

Viewed this way, our y=f(x) mnemonic might be interpreted as the never-ending story of trying to keep the infinite game going, and give up on notions of winning/losing and good/bad as foundational categories. To hold on to those categories is a philosophical error. You must be willing to rebuild their functional equivalents from scratch every time reality expands sufficiently abrupty. And while it is expanding, you will not have workable categories. You will need to live in a state of ontological dread. The fundamental modernist error is letting that dread force a premature commitment to some existing scaffolding of good/bad, and adopting an “optimist” or “pessimist” stance within it. The fundamental divergentist move is to simply accept the dread, and avoid premature commitments, choosing instead to live in ontological doubt while the nature of reality shakes itself out in your mound.

The first person to make the modernist error, in what is arguably still the most brilliant way, was Leibniz, the inventor of optimism in the modern sense. And the first person to make the divergentist move of accepting ontological doubt as a state of being, was Spinoza.

Leibniz and Spinoza

The first person to be not-even-wrong in the particular sense of reducing the Argument of History from a sense-making process to a contest between optimism and pessimism was Leibniz. Genius though he was in many other ways, he was fundamentally a philosophical reactionary, trying to rescue the Aristotelian philosophy of classical antiquity and the flavors of Christianity that rested on it, from the onslaught of the phenomenology of modernity. Voltaire saw through the desperation, mercilessly parodying Leibniz as Pangloss in Candide (our January read).

This popular and tempting mistake continues to be made. Some 18-year-old dealing with ontological dread is making it right now.

Optimism vs. pessimism is not just a legible and attractive frame for minds vulnerable to ontological dread, it is also a politically potent frame for the pursuit of power. Promise an optimistic future, and a believable defense against pessimistic ones, and you gain power.

But the frame is still not-even-wrong.

The first of our two book picks for March (which I’ve already read), The Courtier and the Heretic, explores the emergence of the right response to ontological dread. It is about the relationship between Leibniz (1646-1716) and Spinoza (1632-1677), who likely encountered each other in person, and were certainly aware of each other.

Both, to be clear, were at the forefront of Progress, however you model it. Leibniz helped invent calculus and modern physics, and foresaw computing. He was also a practicing engineer, designing hydraulic mining equipment and researching early steam engines, among other things. With his monadology, he also launched a brave but (in my opinion) misguided and futile attempt to protect the philosophy of antiquity from the onslaught that Spinoza had helped unleash.

Spinoza laid the foundations of modern Western philosophy, and the separation of religious and secular traditions of thought and institutionalism. A non-trivial feature of his life is that he was a lens grinder, participating in the scientific revolution in optics that was unfolding at the time, expanding the human sensorium to include both the microscopic to the telescopic.

Of the two, Spinoza was, arguably (and the book argues precisely this thesis), the more evolved human. A ghost haunting the fledgling divergence machine rather than the recently matured modernity machine. It helped that he lived in Amsterdam, one of the earliest sites of religious pluralism in the modern sense, his family having fled the Portuguese inquisition (which features in Candide, our January read). He was expelled for his heretical ideas (he’s the “heretic” in the book title) from the orthodox Jewish community, but crucially, continued his work anyway, relatively undisturbed. In most parts of the world at the time, his tendencies of thought would have gotten him killed. Instead, in Amsterdam, a rising center of the young print industry, he could turn a life’s work into a legacy that would reshape first the West, then the world.

Leibniz does not come off looking any better in this book than he does as Pangloss in Candide. Unlike Giordano Bruno though, whom we encountered in our previous book club, Leibniz does not come across as merely an arrogant crackpot who got lucky. He was a legitimate genius, and the wonder is that he made all those practical and conceptual contributions he did to the future, while fundamentally resisting its most fundamental characteristics. He’s a tragic, rather than farcical figure.

If you choose to read this book, make sure you read Candide too, if you haven’t already.

What are we to make of the decades-long entanglement between the intellectual traditions of Spinoza and Leibniz, whether or not they actually met? It doesn’t sound like a debate (unless talking past each other counts) and feels too messy to be called a dialectic. I don’t think either term, or any such clean term applies. Both were at the forefront of rapidly unfolding changes in the world, and bringing their considerable intellectual powers to bear on them. Both worked independently, with at least some awareness of each other’s traditions. They represented weakly interacting divergent strands of intellectual history. Neither independent, nor tightly coupled. The sum was greater than the parts, but not in the sense of a “positive-sum game.”

I think the right characterization is this — they were two important centers in a polycentric narrative with a gradually moving “average” state. This was neither a negotiated consensus, nor a cleanly partitioned dissensus. Rather, it was like gradually rising zeitgeist temperature. The space of the thinkable expanding to accommodate the space of the experiencable. Spinoza was on the “hot” side and Leibniz was on the “cold” side. History was moving, or rather “warming,” in Spinoza’s direction. But it is important to note the shared features of their sensibilities. Both were practical individuals (lens grinding, hydraulic equipment) and at the forefront of developments. Both were paying as much or more attention to the real world than to received metaphysical traditions. Both were primarily oriented towards reality rather than theology, compared to their predecessors.

I call the Argument of Progress as embodied by the two of them a non-stationary argument, in the statistical sense of the “value” of the function, as it operated on the accumulating data of history, not being stationary distribution.

The argument played out in an open, expanding scope boundary. It produced dynamic understandings of reality. It was not restricted to terms of reference set by a particular religion or inherited tradition, but morphed in response to new discoveries from all sorts of explorations — of the very far through sail, of the very small through microscopes, the very large through telescopes, the very alien through print and translations, and perhaps most subtly, the very brief, and very long, through the clock and improved calendars. The evolving argument invented new ways to talk about new things worth talking about.

So the Argument of Progress, as represented by the two important and early sample points of Spinoza and Leibniz did not just move, it moved on an expanding reality canvas, rather than a timeless and static canvas laid out by scripture or received authority. It was the opposite of angels-on-pinheads.

Why would we call such agnostic movement “Progress” with all the positive connotations of that term?

One reason is to root our understanding of the term in the growth of knowledge, both appreciative and instrumental, rather than material plenty or spiritual well-being. Leibniz and Spinoza were among the first humans in history to embody Progress as a state of knowing about and doing in the real world, accessed through increasingly capable instruments. Whether or not they were materially better off or spiritually fulfilled relative to their ancestors is an unimportant question for the Argument of Progress. What matters is whether they had better ways of knowing and doing.

David Hume and Adam Smith

David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) were only a generation or two removed from Leibniz (1646-1716) and Spinoza (1632-1677), but it is clear from the second of our March books, The Infidel and the Professor (which I’ve just started) that the Argument of Progress had already matured significantly in a few short decades.

One sign of the maturation is that both Hume and Smith are best understood as intellectual descendants of Spinoza, with Leibniz (as a philosopher of Progress rather than mathematician/physicist/engineer) having already faded into irrelevance. Not least because of Voltaire (1694-1778) doing a proper hatchet job on him in Candide.

The lifespans are interesting to note here, incidentally, since a big part of my mental model now rests on the amount of change humans began to experience in a single lifespan. The rate of change was accelerating and lifespans were increasing.

• Spinoza: 45 years (1632-1677)

• Leibniz: 70 years (1646-1716)

• Hume: 65 years (1711-1776)

• Adam Smith: 67 years (1723-1790)

• Voltaire: 84 years (1694-1778)

These are modern lifespans with modern levels of eventfulness (think about everything that was happening between the extreme dates in the range, 1632 and 1790). But modernity in the sense of the modernity machine merely produces this condition. It does not provide resources to deal with it. The modernity machine created the problem the divergence machine emerged to solve.

Even Spinoza’s life reads like an unfortunately foreshortened one (he died of a lung disease, likely from the glass dust from his lens grinding) rather than a natural one. Recall, from our readings last year, that Montaigne (1533-1592, 59 years) was thinking and acting like an old man by his 40s. We might speculate that our set of early divergence-machine figures in this list experienced an order of magnitude more change in their reality-data scope than Montaigne did.

I don’t have as much to say about the Hume-Smith story yet, since I’m just starting the book, but it is clear that Hume (the infidel in the title) represented a radical continuation of the philosophical line of thought opened up by Spinoza. Adam Smith on the other hand represented an equally radical continuation of Spinoza’s thought in an entire new reality domain that was just beginning to acquire modern contours — economics. His entire approach to economic phenomena was ontologically different from (say) the approach of Ibn Khaldun, whose life and ideas we encountered in last year’s book club. Or even the approach of the Venetian merchants who inaugurated the reality-scope expansion that eventually required an Adam Smith to make sense of.

Both of them (Hume more openly and radically than Smith) continued the fundamentally naturalist and empiricist tendency of thought inaugurated by Spinoza. Hume, famously, went much farther than most people before or since, setting aside complex theories of causation in favor of near-pure phenomenology. In some ways, he’s the original philosopher of the AI age, offering the first of what has now become an endless series of “bitter lessons” delivered by the Argument of Progress.

This was quite astounding for his time. Newton (1643-1727) had already proposed his theories, and the huge temptation of the time would have been to believe in a deterministic clockwork universe governed by immutable and absolute divine laws (which is precisely what most thinkers did). But Hume was, to employ a modern computer science metaphor, only willing to treat the log files of reality as reality. Everything else was made up human conceits (Hume’s posture reminds me of a line attributed to Leopold Kronecker — God created the integers, everything else is the work of man).

Adam Smith did something similar to economics, with his notions of the invisible hand. The new discipline he inaugurated was fundamentally about noisy, messy reality data, with only weak edifices of emergent constitutive laws built on top. The opposite of divine design and direction.

A unified Hume-Smith theory of reality would be: Shit happens, but it’s not entirely unpredictable and disorderly. There are laws, but they’re just handy, contingent heuristics, not “reality” itself.

Where Spinoza and Leibniz could be viewed as being in at least a partially adversarial relationship, Hume and Smith are best viewed as collaborating allies who influenced each other in their campaigns on different parts of the frontier of expanding reality.

The two were close friends, and key figures in the Scottish enlightenment. Both also appear to have been highly concerned with theories of moral sentiments. In particular, rugging religious or institutional understandings of morality. This represented an important continuation of Spinoza’s project to separate secular and religious philosophy, and make heresy a viable career choice for a philosopher.

By Hume’s time, it wasn’t even a big deal to be an infidel. And the more diplomatic Smith even managed to hold down an institutional position (he’s the Professor in the title) while remaining effectively an undeclared agnostic.

We can already see, in the Hume-Smith bad-cop-good-cop assault on traditional moral and natural philosophy, the beginnings of the intellectual iconoclasm that reach its peak with Darwin (1809-1882).

I’m going to try and pick a Darwin-related read for the book club for later in the year, but it is important to note that Darwin’s evisceration of traditional religion was not actually that important. Literalist religion was already down for the count by the time Hume was done with it. Darwin’s real accomplishment was assaulting the secular philosophical foundations of the modernity machine. We’re skipping ahead a bit, but by making divergence and variety a load-bearing feature of how reality itself operated, Darwin put an end to the fetish for secular canonicity that marks world views before him.

Let’s wrap by connecting the dots between Progress and divergence.

Progress and Divergence

What I think we’ll discover as we read and discuss our March books, is that the Argument of Progress in the divergence machine is fundamentally a plural phenomenon. It is no accident that we are looking at it through two relationships between the views of pairs of people in relationships of loose mutual influence, rather than individual or canonical-institutional understandings of reality.

Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a parade of (mostly European) thinkers constructed a pluralist tradition that constituted a divergent Argument of Progress. By the 20th century, the tradition had turned global. But as late as 2019, it still hadn’t gone mainstream.

But the one-two punch of Covid and AI, I think, have made the Argument of History a mainstream thing. It is no longer possible to operate by a Fiat Progress narrative with a straight face. Even if you can afford to put billions of dollars and massive political operation behind it.

The Argument of Progress is neither a set of propositions about the nature of the historical process, nor a normative doctrine about how to value or engage with it for “good”, but an evolving understanding of expanding reality. An understanding that centers the “continue the game” features of unfolding reality.

What started to become important around Spinoza’s time, was not to agree on the nature of reality, but to continue to participate in it, without hindering the ability of others to participate in it. To approach rather than retreat from a changing human condition.

Tolerance and pluralism were born of efforts to make sense of an expanding reality. Morality slowly came to rest not on theology but on the existence of an expanding frontier. Only a marginal tradition of thinkers and leaders participated in this process, while the majority continued to operate by Fiat Progress narratives. But a minority was all it took to keep the divergence machine evolving and growing, inching ever closer to arrival.

And now it’s arrived.