A Short History of Progress
By:
Ronald Wright
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Description:
Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up. The twentieth century—a time of unprecedented progress—has produced a tremendous strain on the very elements that comprise life itself: This raises the key question of the twenty-first century: How much longer can this go on? With wit and erudition, Ronald Wright lays out a-convincing case that history has always provided an answer, whether we care to notice or not. From Neanderthal man to the Sumerians to the Roman Empire, A Short History of Progress dissects the cyclical nature of humanity's development and demise, the 10,000-year old experiment that we've unleashed but have yet to control. 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
intresting - this was an interesting book discussing the possibility of collapse. wright makes a point that there is a tendency for something to bring itself to an end, whether this is intentional or not. there is the extinction aspect, sometimes a species or group of people just can't cope with a change and they die out, like the sabre toothed tiger, as wright discusses. sabre toothed tigers survive on big game, thats why they need those big teeth to rip into the huge animals, but those teeth get in the way if they were hunting say a rabbit, so as big game died out so did they. but the other kind of extinction, the one more relevant to us today, us being the leading countries with the power to carry out wright's fears, is very much intentional. an example from wright explaining this is the easter islanders... there were a few but i like this one best because it makes it more real for me as i live in suburbia. the easter islanders cut down all the trees on their island and because of that went extinct. that sounds kind of ridiculous to us, but we're doing the exact same things today. wright calls these progress traps and examples would be farming and neuclear weapons. we have become so dependent on farming and use that solely to produce food that if the climate were to change we'd be in something of a pickle.. and i'd assume you can guess how neuclear weapons would hinder the progress of the human species. wright brings our attention to our possible demise by our own hand. a decent quote is "the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine".
it's not so much a history book as it is a call to attention. it uses history to explain the theories it proposes, because history is all we have, but it is not an all encompassing guide to the progress of humanity throughout time. i thought it was a pretty good book, readable.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
History of Progress - This book is a great read for leisure, not only does it give you a basic history lesson, it also leads you to every civilizations' end. If you enjoy reading about how cultures and civilization grow, and how their people slowly destroys themselves, this is a must read.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Essential reading. - This book covers the same material as Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE in less than a quarter of the pages; and it's much better written.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Ronald Wright's Construction of the Past: A Short History of Progress with a Partisan Agenda - Ronald Wright immediately engages his readers in A Short History of Progress by briefly summarizing the troubled and by extension interesting life of Paul Gauguin. After getting us to accept Gauguin as an existentially wise figure, Wright extracts three questions from one of the troubled artist's masterpieces: "'D'Où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?' Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?'" From the moment Gauguin's questions are raised, though, it takes little time to notice some serious historical problems with Wright's narrative, which in the end takes more the form of mainstream liberal propaganda than a convincing call to action.
Wright's Version of History
Wright makes sure to distinguish his project from other works that ask "'we're the winners of history, so why didn't others do what we did?'" (p. 47), thus challenging William McNeill's Rise of the West and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Looking to interpret various human developments as accidental results, Wright traces human history back to its African roots some five million years ago. Along the way, humans may have emerged from a genocidal conflict in which Cro-Magnons prevailed over Neanderthals, meaning "we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide" (p. 31). Humanity soon thereafter fell into its first "progress trap," when mastery over hunting techniques led to a population boom, leading to increased hunting, and thus reduced animal populations. This by necessity pushed farming to the forefront, giving birth to the civilization "experiment." Humanity further progressed its way into progress traps as innovations typically lead to increased populations at rates that outstripped ecological capacities, while ever-decreasing territorial availability made it increasingly difficult to start over elsewhere after an ecological meltdown. This historical narrative eventually focuses on the historic collapses of the Maya and Easter Islanders in the new world, and the Sumerians and Romans in the old world. A running theme emerges from these analyses: the price goes up every time history repeats itself (p. 107).
This account may appear--at first glance--to merely summarize human history for audiences perhaps not well versed in the subject. A closer inspection, though, reveals a biased historical account, conveniently selective of historical examples, and employing loose correlations that do not reveal causation. One central argument, that ecological ruin is responsible for the fall of past civilizations, offers only negligible evidence and gives little consideration to rival explanations. "It is no coincidence," Wright argues, "that Greek power and achievement began to wane" around the time that deforestation became widespread in Greece (p. 88). Are we then to consider it a coincidence that Greek power began to wane after centuries of warfare had taken their toll, culminating in the protracted thirty-year Peloponnesian War that significantly weakened Greece's foremost powers? Wright does not even mention the centuries of warfare between Hellenic city-states that paved the way for Philip II to bring Greece under Macedonian control. Employing a similar line of argument, Wright states that Rome fell in the west from its inability to ecologically regenerate. This may have contributed to Rome's difficulties, but factors like incessant civil war during the centuries following Commodus' death, poor leadership from numerous incompetent emperors, and the barbarian push across Roman borders due to the fearsome Huns' western migration. Even when the empire teetered on the brink of anarchy it was able to regain decades-long stability during the reigns of powerful and responsible emperors like Diocletian and Constantine, who ruled when Wright suggests that environmental degradation was sending the empire into an unstoppable downward spiral.
The limited evidence available for analyzing Sumeria, Easter Island, and the Maya makes it more difficult to determine causal forces behind their demise. As Wright points out, "because Rome was a literate society, we know of such woes as they affected higher levels of the human pyramid" (p. 93). It thus seems difficult to conclude as Wright does that environmental degradation was in fact the primary causal force for their fall given the lack of extensive literary sources for these three other case studies. With respect to civilizations that did not collapse, such as China and Egypt, Wright again presents loose causal connections, namely that their "generous ecologies ... allowed revival before the culture lost its headway" (p. 105). Yet, Egypt did not have the continuous 3,000 years Wright describes--Egypt fell with the rest of the Roman Empire in the west. Even before Rome added Egypt to its empire, the Persians and then the Macedonians had conquered it as well. If takeover by barbarian tribes represents Rome's fall, then why did none of these conquests mark Egypt's fall?
Foreshadowing Contemporary Horrors
Linguistic sleights of hand allow Wright to connect the past with recent tragedies. Wright's discussion on the death pit of Ur, for example, is not entirely comparable with the mass graves arising from ethnic cleansings in Bosnia or Rwanda (p. 73). These latter two resulted from persecution and intolerance, while the death pit of Ur entailed burying the royal entourage to serve the deceased monarch in the afterlife. If Wright is alluding to the horrors of recent persecutions, lone graves resulting from individual executions by intolerant societies have arguably more connection with 20th century mass graves than the death pit of Ur does. More outlandishly, Wright alludes to horrors like Hitler's final solution with his speculative account of genocidal warfare between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Wright suggests that it is inconceivable for Cro-Magnons to have survived without violence given the history of warfare in Europe over the last 2,000 years, and simultaneously presents Stone Age violence as foreboding of European violence. This is self-referential, though, as Europe's history of violence is used to defend the hypothesis of violence in the Stone Age, while hypothesized violence in the Stone Age is described as somewhat laying the foundations for European violence over the last two millennia.
Going with the Trend
Wright capitalizes on the recent trend of presenting humanity as a foolish and irresponsible species. This historical narrative takes the form of caricature more than anything else, essentially depicting man as irrationally moving from "me like make bang with rock" to "me like make bang with bomb." If we do any more damage, Wright argues, "nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end was a bad idea." Is the style humorous? Yes. Is there some justification for portraying humanity in this manner? Absolutely. Is this constructive? No. Watching a stand-up comic make fun of societal absurdities may be entertaining, but surely we can expect a little more from a book discussing the fate of the planet. Such a caricature should be accompanied by deeper explanations involving human and international relations, and how these have affected developments like nuclear weapons stockpiling. Without any such explanation, readers unfamiliar with history will come to only one conclusion--we are too stupid to survive in the long run. Balance of power theories, collective action problems, cross-cultural conflict, and the historically fine line between civilization and anarchy can never excuse mankind's atrocities and absurdities--but they can explain them, and as such, provide constructive criticism for our progression into a future hopefully devoid of additional progress traps.
In spite of these numerous problems, Wright appears at one point on track to furthering environmental awareness in a critical way: removing it from political agendas as a partisan issue by framing human history as a shared experience. In his final chapter, however, Wright departs from his historical analysis and launches into outright social commentary, from criticizing the war on terror, which he simplistically dismisses on utilitarian economic principles, to subtly attacking the American concentration of wealth and global poverty. These are of course valid criticisms, but they just fall under the international liberal media rubric of anti-Americanism and anti-conservatism when presented together without any detailed argument or critical explanation--such comments just dogmatically reinforce what those with environmental concerns already knew, while alienating those who need to be convinced of environmental threats. In so doing, Wright ends up further entrenching environmental concerns within a framework of liberal partisan politics.
Closing Remarks
Wright's thin explanations for historically disastrous behavior, the terribly loose connections he draws between causes and effects, and the ad hoc attacks on other politically conservative issues will leave many environmental degradation skeptics with their suspicions confirmed that environmental issues are simply liberal propaganda, no different than any other partisan political agenda. Beyond these shortcomings, and despite his jabs at Jared Diamond's work (p. 47; p. 143, n.28), A Short History of Progress ends up arguing far less convincingly much of what Diamond has already written in his "trilogy" The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Guns, Germs and Steele, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Critics who find Diamond's conclusions to be rather specious at times will most likely find Wright's causal connections unbearable and even more tendentious. Wright quotes Adolf Hitler as saying, "'What luck for the rulers that the people do not think!'" Based on this very short and manipulated history of progress, Wright certainly appears to also view mass audiences as quite easily convincible. Given the urgency of global environmental problems and apparent popular apathy toward the issue, however, Wright's construction of history may be granted some minor degree of redemption if it at least generates any additional attention to environmental issues facing the world today, and more importantly, tomorrow.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Absolutely well-written and thought-provoking - This is a really interesting book that briefly talks about the rise and fall of civilizations, the factors that leads to their collapse. At the end of each sections, the author poses questions to ponder. Why this happened and what caused that to happen. In very fine easy-going language, the author tours the whole history of mankind and raises philosophical questions about the directions of our present state. He starts with Paul Gauguin's questions, but these are time-immemorial questions asked by many others from antiquity, and then attempts to answer them from the lessons that we learned from past histories. This book compels one to do philosophical soul-searching in the light of history of civilizations and its repititive patterns.
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