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: 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.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Of "Progress Traps" and inflexible thinking -
A concise, readable, and punchy description of the manner in which a number of historical societies rendered their way of life obsolete and destroyed themselves by failing to adapt and to think ahead.

He describes as "progress traps" the apparent improvements of technology or culture which are too effective for the survival of the society which deploys them. For example, when hunting societies moved from catching individual animals to wiping out whole herds by driving them over cliffs it gave a short-term bonanza but soon led to the elimination of their food supply.

Particularly powerful is the description of the way the society of Rapa Nui, on what we call Easter Island, destroyed first the local ecology and consequently itself by felling every tree on the island to build the frames to support and move the huge and imposing Moai statues which are the only surviving remnant of their culture. European explorers were to wonder how such giant statues could have been built in such a desolate place: they weren't, it was man who rendered the island a desert in the act of building them.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the book is when Wright quotes some contemporary rulers or critics who actually foresaw the problems which would ultimately bring down their civilisations, but were unable to persuade enough of their fellow rulers or citizens to generate the necessary political will to take effective action. For example, Solon and Pisistratus foresaw the impact which deforestation would have on the ecology and economy of Athens and tried unsuccessfully to halt it, Ovid foresaw some of the problems of Ancient Rome.

We had better pay more heed to some of the warnings of the dangers facing our civilisation than some of their contemporaries did. This book is one such warning.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Wright is right - The fact Wright attacks popular concepts of progress is enough to merit five stars.

Until 1955, when I was 25, I naively believed progress was inevitable, natural, and simply a part of human nature and society. I attended the Earl Lectures that year. Swiss Theologian Emil Brunner presented three addresses on "Faith, Hope, and Love" at Berkeley, California. Westminster Press published his series in a book given the same title. I shall quote a few remarks.

Brunner traced the burgioning faith in progress to the nineteenth century, when "Darwin's theory of evolution seemed so to support and enlarge this optimistic evaluation of progress as to see it in a cosmic perspective." But the doctrine of progress is not the same as evolution.

"Although this idea of progress had a success for which the word 'triumph' is hardly an exaggeration, there were warning voices raised against it, voices of men of weight and importance who were not willng to accept the new doctrine," he said. "It was a new doctrine because it was not known to antiquity, it was not known in the time of the Reformation, it was unknown in all Asiatic culture. It was a new thing! The idea of progress became an axiomatic conviction which needed no proof and could not be disproved."

At one point, Brunner said, "Since Hiroshima the world does not believe in progress anymore." The end of WWII was still fresh in our memories, and I suppose that's why he said it. We know, today, that it didn't take long for much of the world to revive and renew its faith in progress. And now it's stronger--and more dangerous--than ever.

I'm not opposed to every aspect of progress. Progress, when it moves in wholesome and healthy directions, is a blessing. I'm glad my dentist is able to fill--and save--my teeth without pain. And when it came time for my doctor to pull my cataracts and replace them with implanted lenses, I marveled at the miracle. It was a quick and painless operation, and now I have wonderful vision.

It's that dogmatic idea of progress based on greed and cold indifference to global warming that concerns me. It's that ongoing waste of limited resources, whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral, that concerns me. We are pulling the carpet from beneath our feet, and the king is pulling hardest of all. And who is the king? Ignorance! Ignorance is king!

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.

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