A Short History of Progress

A Short History of Progress

By: Ronald Wright  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

It is Wright’s contention that only by understanding and ultimately breaking from the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we avoid the onset of a new Dark Age. Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own end by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to initially advance. Wright's book is brilliant; a fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid.

Description:
No hope, just an awareness of what's being done now and what's been done in the past, is what Ronald Wright will permit in A Short History of Progress, his grim, ammoniacal Massey Lectures, the 43rd in the series. In five lucid, meticulously documented essays, Wright traces the rise and plummet of four regional civilizations--those of Sumer, Rome, Easter Island, and the Maya--and judges that most, perhaps all, of humanity is making and will continue to make mistakes equally disastrous as theirs. He gives general reasons first for not reckoning we'll pull back from the brink. Important among them is an anthropological observation. As individuals, we live long lives. We evolve more slowly than we should, given our lack of vision and our aggressive, selfish nature. We seem to lack the collective wisdom and the insight into cause and effect to realize the limits to what Wright calls the "experiment" of civilization. What Wright calls natural "subsidies" underwrite civilizations' successes. The squandering of those gifts presages inevitable failure, but with careful, canny stewardship, a civilization can manage to muddle through eons. Wright cites Egypt's submission to the limits set by the Nile's annual floods and China's windblown "lump-sum deposit" of topsoil, used for hillside paddies instead of being put to the plough. Wright observes with unrelenting eloquence that our planetary civilization lives precariously, far beyond its means. "Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes," he acknowledges, neither claiming nor wanting to be a prophet. We certainly have the tools for change and remediation; we also know what our ancestors did wrong and what happened to them. We're faced, our author observes, with two choices: either do nothing--what he calls "one of the biggest mistakes"--or try to effect "the transition from short-term to long-term thinking." His evidence suggests we're taking the first alternative, which will include a swift, final ride into the dark future on the runaway train of progress. Wright's account tempts one to bet on the rats and roaches. --Ted Whittaker

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up - What is the difference between our 21st century global civilization, the ancient Sumerians, the Easter Islanders of Cook's day, empirical Rome, or the Maya civilization. Answer, not much. The last four are all societies that had their heyday, become stuck in a paradigm, and then brought ecological disaster on themselves via overpopulation and over exploitation of natural resources. "Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up", Wrights quotes from some pertinent graffiti. The cost this time could be in the billions of souls.

This a short book 132 pages of actual text with another 68 or so of footnotes at the end. It is a mad rush through human history exploring the collapse of those civilizations and a couple that have been more sustainable.

Wright also explores the traps of progress. That is mankind becomes so good at hunting he drives his food source into extinction. Then we become so proficient at an irrigation technology we ruin the land. We become so good at weapons we create bombs that could ruin the whole world. As a race, he contends, we seem to push every technology to the brink, to our collective woe.

I read with highlighter in hand. I had to restrain myself for marking whole long sections. As it is, the book now has a pink glow. Several pages have yellow tabs so I can find passages easily again. One such passage from the book summarizes it for me:

"The human inability to foresee - or to watch out for - long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer."

I remember as a biology major we studied the boom and bust cycle of animal populations. It was suggested in class that the human animal could follow the same cycle. The professor dismissed the idea, but not so Wright. He sees us at the high point in a few years, then the collapse unless we act now.

One other passage really struck home with me: "The idea that the world must be run by the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist delusion, Islamic, Christian, or Marxist." That tears at the very sand we have our society built on.

The sheer pace of Wright's march through history mirrors the author's urgency about how long we have to act to save our society. The countdown has already begun. The question remains, do we have the gumption to take the necessary action.

The book is at its heart liberal, and rightly so. Any possible solution to forestall the potential social collapse will not be from the top of the pyramid. They long ago seemed to have forgotten the concept of usufruct; we are just borrowing this planet from our children and grandchildren. Wright holds out a glimmer of hope, but the candle is flickering.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Will leave you with intellectual fallout of the best kind - Sometimes you see a certain movie or read a certain book and the images, ideas and issues reverberate with you for days afterward. This was one of those books for me. Wright makes every word count, just like Paul McCartney makes every note count on his bass guitar. He reviews a handfull of civilizations that have failed in the past, and warns us that we are on the same trajectory as these cultures just when they reached their apex and self-destructed. He leaves it up to the reader to judge whether we will learn, or continue to make the same mistakes. Even though these civilizations could see their resources depleting right before their eyes, and saw how their own behavior was responsible for it, they were not wise enough to change. To me this is collective insanity.

Written in over fives years ago, this book is relevant even more so today, especially with the problems that our modern societies and intensified globalization have created. There are plenty of books out there on global warming, natural resource depletion and civilizations in general. This book is an excellent bird's eye view of where we have been, where we are and where we are going.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
How many trees do we have left? - In this book, the author takes a look at the downfall of civilizations. Yes, that's plural. There are several models of how civilization is progressing. One is that we're getting better and better as time goes by. Another, less popular one states that we are actually in decline, going down from some sort of golden age. You'll find many of these proponents in the old age homes and such. For them, the only disagreement is when we are declining from.

Wright takes a look at the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilizations, taking examples from several once- prospering civilizations. This book stands as a call to action that something must be done to grow smartly and be careful on how we allocate the scant resources we have left. While he doesn't hit an anything new, this book's strength is its concise nature. The several examples are familiar and in that have more impact.

The strongest example is one he visits several times to show an analogy of current times: Easter Island. This isolated speck in the Pacific was once a thriving mini-civilization with culture and art. And a lot of trees. These trees helped the islanders fish and raise their ceremonial head sculptures. However, these trees also were a poorly cultivated resource. Someone not too long ago cut down the last tree, and the island is now a wasteland and anthropological curiosity. We are doing the same thing. How many trees do we have left to cut?

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Unnecessarily Shallow - At first I found the work annoying. An approximate 70 page overview of human history discussed none of the competing paradigms but stuck with the conventional default view of history. An overview observing competing theories would be interesting, but that was not Wright's goal. After the ~70 setup, he started talking about environmental destruction.

What Wright did is set up a playing field to discuss various ways we may choose to destroy ourselves. It is a sort of cliff notes version of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel plus Collapse without the erudition, insight or sense of doom.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is whereas in Sumer and the Easter Islands they destroyed themselves, possibly without the knowledge of how they were doing so or a civic structure to stop the process, ancient Greeks and Romans observed how specifically they were agriculturally compromising their future. The Greeks and Romans did not act to stop the self destruction.

The drama that we over 6 billion people are in the midst of now is one where our natural inclination to act like our present behaviors have no future repercussions competes with a proliferation of communications technologies that place high quality knowledge in the hands of those that can most use that knowledge to moderate our tendency to ignore the future.

From my perspective we are engaged in a race to produce hybrid human beings.

I've hypothesized that humans 4,000 generations or so ago were matrifocal, mostly anomalously dominant (both cerebral hemispheres were the same size) and largely primary process thinkers. As primary process thinkers we were not so much engaged in ruminations on the past or imagining the future. We did not tend to devour resources since we were not dividing the world into narrative interpretations that could be easily broken down into cause and effects. We were in the present. Life was very horizontal. We were associative thinkers. We were vulnerable.

Along came cerebral lateralization, early childhood synapse pruning of the left hemisphere and a diminution of the corpus callosum. Right handedness proliferated. We became facile with time, emerging from the dreamlike world of primary process to be able to easily estimate the effects of our actions. We became narrative thinkers. Observing the patterns of our surroundings we developed an ability to predict those patterns, store what we learned, and use that information to accomplish personal goals, with an emphasis on the word personal. With the new patrifocal paradigm individuality emerged. Even with an ability to predict the future, there was little attention provided to repercussions of present actions since the people in the future effected by present action had no relationship, no connection with the people in the now.

Thesis: People living in cooperative communities with relatively few negative effects upon their environment, associative thinkers with little sense of individuality, little hierarchy, everything is transparent, what you see is what you get.

Antithesis: People living in competitive mass societies with widespread environmental degradation, narrative thinkers reveling in cults of individuality, stratification, secrecy, the congregation of information into protected professions, the segregation of ethnicities, information and resource access.

Synthesis: The merging of a sensitivity to time with an ability to experience the now. A collapsing of hierarchies featuring secrecy and segregation by transforming information distribution from a pyramid model to a horizontal web or grid with no single source of information storage or control. Instead of associational or narrative frames of reference, you integrate both together in a context where one can both imagine the future and experience the repercussions, feeling the estimated repercussions as useful information informing present behavior. Instead of viewing the commons as place where the individual acquires assets, the individual becomes respected for his or her contribution to the commons.

The problem I had reading Wrights book is that it was all narrative, no association. Without an understanding of what we humans are outside what we sequentially have been engaged in, there is little ability for us to feel our way into the future. Paradoxically, modern humans with all their narrative strengths spend little time exploring our past back when we were not narrative thinkers, or the future when we may learn how to integrate the two thinking paradigms.

We have imaginations. It's time to brainstorm what we will be like when we've learned how to live within our world.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Examining the flight recorders of crashed civilisations... - A very readable, thoughtful overview of where/why we have gone wrong before, leading to an idea of where we are going. It is a smaller book than, say "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond, and excellently written, so everyone should be able to tackle it. I would say that the subject matter is so important that everyone really ought to read it. The original lectures, read by the author, may still be available on the Internet, but I thoroughly recommend getting a copy of this book to read and discuss with your friends. Being smallish, it cannot go into as much detail as some other books, but (it seems to me) just the right amount of detail is there to allow the "big picture" of history to stay in focus. The book is neither flawed nor biased in the selection of examples, in my opinion, and speaks of very human traits found across the world and through history that lead to progress, and to obsessive behaviour in the name of progress, and ultimately to destruction.

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