A Short History of Progress

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 122.148.173.37 (talk) at 19:20, 24 May 2008 (m add intro line, external links, reviews and illustrated edition ref). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jump to navigation Jump to search

A Short History of Progress is a book length essay penned by Ronald Wright, published in 2004, and honoured with a subsequent reading by the author as a series of five one hour Massey Lectures given at the University of British Columbia and broadcast on the CBC Radio program Ideas of the same year. It spent more than a year on Canadian bestseller lists, was nominated for a BC Book Prize, and won a CBA Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year.[1] The book has since been expanded to include an illustrated hardcover edition.

Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization itself: a 10,000 year old experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. He examines the meaning of progress and its implications for civilizations past and present. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology that placed an unsustainble burden on all natural systems. The twenty first century represents our last opportunity to succeed where our forefathers almost without exception have not.

Book structure

The Book is divided into five chapters:

  • I - Gauguin's Questions
  • II - The Great Experiment
  • III - Fools' Paradise
  • IV - Pyramid Schemes
  • V - The Rebellion of the Tools

Synopsis

Wright writes a colourful history of our species and sets about asking of humanity three questions first posed by the reclusive artist Gauguin: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" (p. 2). Detailing amoungst other things how four historical civilizations in particular — those of Easter Island, Sumer, the Maya and Rome — self-destructed from a combination of lack of foresight and poor choices that lead to overpopulation and irreparable environmental damage. From his reading of the "flight recorders in the wreckage of crashed civilizations" (p. 129) such as these there follows the persistent concern that "each time history repeats itself, the price goes up", and the lessons our now global civilization should therefore have learnt from them in order to become sustainable today with reference also to global warming and climate change.

Wright begins his journey with pre-agricultural or hunter-gatherer man in the Stone age and the worldwide slaughter of megafauna whenever and wherever Homo sapiens migrated to new lands. He includes that other Ice Age hunter, Neanderthal man, and argues that our closest evolutionary relative and competitor may well have been the first victim of human genocide: "Or, worse, not the first — merely the first of which evidence survives" (p. 25).

In analysing his four particular cases, Wright notes that Easter Island and Sumer failed due to depletion of natural resources: "their ecologies were unable to regenerate". Whereas the Maya and Rome failed in their heartlands, "where ecological demand was highest," but left remnant populations that survived. He asks: "Why, if civilizations so often destroy themselves, has the overall experiment of civilization done so well?" For the answer, he says, we must look to natural regeneration and human migration (p. 102).

Wright argues that while most ancient civilizations depleted their ecologies and failed, few thrived. Large expanses of our (now shrinking) planet remained unsettled and available for migration. And a handful of civilizations — as evidenced by Egypt and China (pp 103–104) — experienced greater longevity for atypical reasons:

  • an abundance of resources, particularly topsoil, with alluvial deposits from annual Nile River flooding and wind-blown glacial loess that was exceedingly deep, respectively
  • farming methods that worked with, rather than against, natural cycles
  • settlement patterns that did not exceed, or permanently damage, the carrying capacity of the local environment

Wright borrows from Joseph Tainter in identifying three models of societal collapse — the "Runaway Train", the "Dinosaur", and the "House of Cards" (p. 107, 128) — emphasizing that they usually operate in combination and going further in suggesting that civilization itself "is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps" (p. 108).[2] In addition to technological "progress traps" — including even agriculture itself — he labels cultural beliefs and interests that act against sustainability and hence civilizational survivalability as a whole an "ideological pathology".

Changes brought on by the exponential growth of the human population — over six billion by 2006 and adding over 70 million additional people every year — the world-wide scale of resource consumption — an area of farmland the size of Scotland lost to erosion every year — have altered the picture.[3] Ecological markers now indicate that human civilization has surpassed (since the 1980s) nature's capacity for regeneration. Humans in 2006 used more than 125% of nature's yearly output annually: "If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital of nature" (p. 129).[4]

Appealing to the "precautionary principle" Wright concludes that "our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance" (p. 129). "It is a suicide machine" and "Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now" (p. 131).

Just as for the Easter Islanders before us the collapse of human civilization appears imminent if we do not act immediately to prevent it and his final prognosis for our future is a far less positive one than is that of Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.[5]

Concluding exhortation

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees’ seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right.

— page 131-132

Film

Film rights have been sold to the Canadian company Cinémaginaire for a forthcoming documentary adaptation, with Martin Scorsese, Mark Achbar and Betsy Carson acting as executive producers.

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/canada-europa/united_kingdom/artsnewsJanFeb-07-en.asp
  2. ^ e.g. Tainter, Joseph A., The Collapse of Complex Societies, p. 59.
  3. ^ Population growth today – in 2008 – though slowing, is closer now to 80 million more human beings per annum.
  4. ^ See for example the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report.
  5. ^ See the concluding chapters in Part Four of Diamond, Jared M., Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, (2005).

References

  • Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, Toronto: Anansi, 2004, ISBN 0-88784-706-4.
  • Massey Lectures 2004: A Short History of Progress - Broadcast Lectures, CBC's Ideas broadcast, Produced by CBC Audio, Audio CDs, Approx. 5 hrs., ISBN 0-66019-330-2.
  • Ronald Wright, An Illustrated Short History of Progress, Toronto: Anansi, 2005, ISBN 0-88784-206-2.
  • Ronald Wright, "Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme", an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday 5th August 2000.

See also

Online Reviews

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Short_History_of_Progress&oldid=214678804"