Nine years ago, I was exchanging emails with an Internet reactionary. I had written something up on their community, which was having its fifteen minutes of fame. The protracted attention would prove terminal for their cohesiveness, but work out well for this particular individual, who has since successfully made himself the pet of some much wealthier reactionaries. One line from our exchange that has stuck with me is his accusation that my “typically Marxist inference” that the economic transformation of the past had wrought some fundamental changes to the human experience.
I don’t think of myself as some kind of vulgar small-p progressive; I see nothing inevitable about the advancement of scientific and technical knowledge, never mind moral progress. It never surprises me when we learn that some achievement of mathematics, medicine, or technology was known to the Ancient Near East or the Romans before being lost and rediscovered. We moderns seriously underestimate how sophisticated the old agrarian civilizations could get, as well as just how much can be learned and forgotten over thousands of years.
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