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.
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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
From Publishers Weekly
Progress can do us in, or so argues British historian Wright as he embarks on a lively if meandering journey through the development and demise of ancient civilizations to determine whether our current one is doomed. By reading the "black boxes" left by departed societies (like those of the Easter Islanders, the Sumerians and the Mayans), we can learn to avoid the mistakes that led to their downfall, he suggests. Many of those errors revolve around the plundering of natural resources and the development of social hierarchies that allow elite groups to indulge in over-consumption at the expense of the masses. Other errors involve "progress traps," technologies or advances that, like weapons, are initially useful but become dangerous to civilization once fully developed, especially if moral and technical progress diverge. The analogy of civilization as a kind a "pyramid scheme," which, like the sales scheme, thrives only if it grows, is one of several imaginative mnemonic devices Wright uses to round out his argument. Today's culprit, he declares, is "market extremism," which has "cross-bred with evangelical messianism to fight intelligent policy on metaphysical grounds." This laissez-faire capitalism, he reasons, will spell the end of the planet, and our civilization, if it is not controlled. Wright crafts an entertaining tale of eras gone by, incorporating relevant facts on subjects as diverse as the lifestyles of early hominids and recent patterns of climate change, and demonstrating the holistic importance of natural resources to a society. And if he never specifies exactly what the proper choices for modern civilization are, or how they will bring deliverance from the coming storm, his book will nonetheless convince readers that we are at a crossroads where the right choices can still be made.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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71 of 78 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The central thesis of this extraordinary little book is that civilization is a pyramid scheme in which the people of the present rob from the people of the future. Like bacteria in a petri dish of nutrients, people multiply until they have overrun and despoiled their resources, and then the population crashes. Historian and novelist Ronald Wright (not to be confused with Robert Wright, author of e.g., The Moral Animal) explores in some fascinating detail examples as ancient as Sumer and as recent as Easter Island and the Americas.
The main resource is arable land which soon or late becomes exhausted. We exhaust the soil with continual planting, or we irrigate the soil until the salt content becomes so high that crops will not grow on it, and then we abandon it to the winds and move on. Or we pave it over with roads and buildings. There are exceptions of course, China and Egypt have maintained continuous civilizations for several millennia, but Wright argues they were able to do this because in the case of Egypt, the Nile continually revitalized the soil and prevented the Egyptians from building on it because of the yearly floods. In the case of China he argues that it was a fortuitous circumstance that allowed the Chinese to grow crop after crop on the same land for century after century because the land had topsoil hundreds of meters thick, blown there by ancient winds. Exhaust one layer, let it blow away. No problem, the next layer is fertile. Not so almost anyplace else in the world.
Wright begins before agriculture, which would be before civilization of course. The hunters and gathers of the Upper Paleolithic period, Wright avers, killed off their way of life in "an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue." He explains, "The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game." (p. 39) The mastodons, the giant bison, the giant sloth, the great herds of horses...they constituted the nutrients of the petri dish, and the hunters the bacteria.
We are aware that this happened in North America. We have found the bones. And it happened in Russia where great dwellings were constructed from the tusks and bones of the woolly mammoth, hunted to extinction. But Wright points out that this happened in western Europe as well. The cave paintings of the Cro-Magnons "falter and stop. Sculptures and carvings become rare. The flint blades grow smaller, and smaller. Instead of killing mammoth they are shooting rabbits." He adds that the hunters at the end of the Old Stone Age "broke rule one for any prudent parasite: Don't kill off your host. As they drove species after species to extinction, they walked into the first progress trap." (pp. 39-40)
Progress as a trap--that is also Wright's thesis. With the discovery of agriculture and the rise of civilizations, were people better off? Wright answers in the negative, calling agriculture and civilization "a series of seductive steps down a path leading, for most people, to lives of monotony and toil." (p. 47) Elsewhere Wright points out that the bodies of people living in the first agricultural societies were stunted and there was more evidence of malnutrition compared to the bodies of the hunters and gathers. (Too much reliance on a monoculture starchy diet can do that.) They were also smaller in stature, and according to some recent ideas, not as smart. We are domesticated animals. We have domesticated ourselves. (Or, our staple crops have domesticated us.) Domesticated animals are not as smart as wild ones. So it is said.
Wright goes on to cite the experience of the Maya whose civilization collapsed as did that of Sumer and for much the same reasons. He writes, "As the crisis gathered [the crop failures], the response of the rulers was not to seek a new course... No, they dug in their heels and carried on doing what they had always done, only more so. Their solution was higher pyramids, more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity." (p. 102) Compare this to the infamous story of Easter Island. Almost exactly the same thing happened.
Wright applies this scenario to the modern world. He calls the invention of agriculture "a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. [Which is what is happening today.] The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around." He adds that the Chinese have an illustrative saying, "A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in." (p. 108)
Referring to the United States, Wright calls our prosperity (the greatest in human history, by the way), a "two-century bubble of freedom and affluence." We tend to think of it as normal and even inevitable, but he calls it "an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels." (p. 117)
Wright's is an eloquent and persuasive argument. You don't want to miss this book. It is an outstanding piece of work, beautifully written.
The main resource is arable land which soon or late becomes exhausted. We exhaust the soil with continual planting, or we irrigate the soil until the salt content becomes so high that crops will not grow on it, and then we abandon it to the winds and move on. Or we pave it over with roads and buildings. There are exceptions of course, China and Egypt have maintained continuous civilizations for several millennia, but Wright argues they were able to do this because in the case of Egypt, the Nile continually revitalized the soil and prevented the Egyptians from building on it because of the yearly floods. In the case of China he argues that it was a fortuitous circumstance that allowed the Chinese to grow crop after crop on the same land for century after century because the land had topsoil hundreds of meters thick, blown there by ancient winds. Exhaust one layer, let it blow away. No problem, the next layer is fertile. Not so almost anyplace else in the world.
Wright begins before agriculture, which would be before civilization of course. The hunters and gathers of the Upper Paleolithic period, Wright avers, killed off their way of life in "an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue." He explains, "The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game." (p. 39) The mastodons, the giant bison, the giant sloth, the great herds of horses...they constituted the nutrients of the petri dish, and the hunters the bacteria.
We are aware that this happened in North America. We have found the bones. And it happened in Russia where great dwellings were constructed from the tusks and bones of the woolly mammoth, hunted to extinction. But Wright points out that this happened in western Europe as well. The cave paintings of the Cro-Magnons "falter and stop. Sculptures and carvings become rare. The flint blades grow smaller, and smaller. Instead of killing mammoth they are shooting rabbits." He adds that the hunters at the end of the Old Stone Age "broke rule one for any prudent parasite: Don't kill off your host. As they drove species after species to extinction, they walked into the first progress trap." (pp. 39-40)
Progress as a trap--that is also Wright's thesis. With the discovery of agriculture and the rise of civilizations, were people better off? Wright answers in the negative, calling agriculture and civilization "a series of seductive steps down a path leading, for most people, to lives of monotony and toil." (p. 47) Elsewhere Wright points out that the bodies of people living in the first agricultural societies were stunted and there was more evidence of malnutrition compared to the bodies of the hunters and gathers. (Too much reliance on a monoculture starchy diet can do that.) They were also smaller in stature, and according to some recent ideas, not as smart. We are domesticated animals. We have domesticated ourselves. (Or, our staple crops have domesticated us.) Domesticated animals are not as smart as wild ones. So it is said.
Wright goes on to cite the experience of the Maya whose civilization collapsed as did that of Sumer and for much the same reasons. He writes, "As the crisis gathered [the crop failures], the response of the rulers was not to seek a new course... No, they dug in their heels and carried on doing what they had always done, only more so. Their solution was higher pyramids, more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity." (p. 102) Compare this to the infamous story of Easter Island. Almost exactly the same thing happened.
Wright applies this scenario to the modern world. He calls the invention of agriculture "a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. [Which is what is happening today.] The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around." He adds that the Chinese have an illustrative saying, "A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in." (p. 108)
Referring to the United States, Wright calls our prosperity (the greatest in human history, by the way), a "two-century bubble of freedom and affluence." We tend to think of it as normal and even inevitable, but he calls it "an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels." (p. 117)
Wright's is an eloquent and persuasive argument. You don't want to miss this book. It is an outstanding piece of work, beautifully written.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
By W. Chen
Format:Paperback
A concise history of our world in 132 pages and 50 pages of footnotes? I would have never believed it could be done. But Mr. Wright has done it. He minces no words and carefully uses every word chosen.
My world travels and prior readings/videos has noted many aspects of what he talks about - but he puts it all together concisely and clearly. We keep running the same experiment over and over and it keeps ending in disaster, the only issue now is that the experiment is being run on the entire world now.
I've yet to read Collapse by Jared Diamond, but after only getting half way through Guns, Germs, and Steel (DVD is easy to watch), I'm glad Mr.Wright provides an accessible alternative.
The author's sole recommendation is to state the shift from short term to long term thinking - this sounds great in theory, but has rarely been heeded outside of some indigenous groups and a couple of nations (See below). Perhaps more insightful would be to address an even darker subject - Self Deception. I *highly* recommend - Why We Lie by David Livingstone Smith. Hope and fear arise out of self-deception. Learning about right-brain/left-brain imbalance is insightful too. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind is another insightful read on this too.
For the DVD minded - I recommend: Globe Trekker - Great Historic Sights (A veritable tour of the graveyards of 'our' greatest cities and societies), National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth, Charcoal People, Atomic Cafe, Orwell Rolls in his Grave (US-300 million and ONLY two political parties?!!), and Persuaders. The fictional movie Rapa Nui with Jason Scott Lee might be interesting too.
For the travel minded - visit Scandinavia and understand their way of thinking - therein lies the answer. - Jante Law - find and understand it on Wikipedia. Traveling to India and China to see how far self-deception really can go is insightful too. Or you could just watch any number of videos on genocide - whether they be Nazis, Rwanda, Cambodia, or any number in between. Or learning about factory farming...
My world travels and prior readings/videos has noted many aspects of what he talks about - but he puts it all together concisely and clearly. We keep running the same experiment over and over and it keeps ending in disaster, the only issue now is that the experiment is being run on the entire world now.
I've yet to read Collapse by Jared Diamond, but after only getting half way through Guns, Germs, and Steel (DVD is easy to watch), I'm glad Mr.Wright provides an accessible alternative.
The author's sole recommendation is to state the shift from short term to long term thinking - this sounds great in theory, but has rarely been heeded outside of some indigenous groups and a couple of nations (See below). Perhaps more insightful would be to address an even darker subject - Self Deception. I *highly* recommend - Why We Lie by David Livingstone Smith. Hope and fear arise out of self-deception. Learning about right-brain/left-brain imbalance is insightful too. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind is another insightful read on this too.
For the DVD minded - I recommend: Globe Trekker - Great Historic Sights (A veritable tour of the graveyards of 'our' greatest cities and societies), National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth, Charcoal People, Atomic Cafe, Orwell Rolls in his Grave (US-300 million and ONLY two political parties?!!), and Persuaders. The fictional movie Rapa Nui with Jason Scott Lee might be interesting too.
For the travel minded - visit Scandinavia and understand their way of thinking - therein lies the answer. - Jante Law - find and understand it on Wikipedia. Traveling to India and China to see how far self-deception really can go is insightful too. Or you could just watch any number of videos on genocide - whether they be Nazis, Rwanda, Cambodia, or any number in between. Or learning about factory farming...
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By B. Stein
Format:Paperback
Jared Diamond posed a question some time ago along the lines of what went through the mind of the person chopping down the last tree on Easter Island?
This book is a look at the same issues for our modern perspective (what will go through the mind of the person buying the last gallon of gas) by considering several premier examples of disasters past. In contrast to Diamond's book 'Collapse' it is short and sharp. This leaves some loose ends but I found the brevity encouraged an uninterrupted read and a better overview than the longer 'Collapse' which is heavier on ecology and details and shorter on politics. The end notes and references are useful additions and point out some very nice 'places to go'.
An essential read, and a nice complement to Diamonds effort.
This book is a look at the same issues for our modern perspective (what will go through the mind of the person buying the last gallon of gas) by considering several premier examples of disasters past. In contrast to Diamond's book 'Collapse' it is short and sharp. This leaves some loose ends but I found the brevity encouraged an uninterrupted read and a better overview than the longer 'Collapse' which is heavier on ecology and details and shorter on politics. The end notes and references are useful additions and point out some very nice 'places to go'.
An essential read, and a nice complement to Diamonds effort.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good on Review Short on Direct Experience
It is an extensive review of the literature on rise and fall of civilizations with observations on our's. Read more
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"Progress" indeed!
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college book
My daughter ordered this book for one of her college classes and she needed it in a rush. The book came fast and was just as the sell discribed it
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A short book loaded with sharp insights
Every year, Canadians eagerly huddle around their radios to listen to the Massey Lectures, broadcast by the CBC. For the 2004 season, Ronald Wright was the honored speaker. Read more
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The story so far
'At their Thanksgiving dinners, devout Americans thank their God for feeding them in a "wilderness". Read more
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One of the most important books of the 21st century
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Published 4 months ago by Simple User
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