Customer Reviews

Short History Of Progress

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

The Massey Lectures series always yields solid academic scholarship and head food of the most rich type. And the lady in the Squamish bookstore assured me that this "was the must-read book of the year." After reading this flawed, but good (not wonderful) book, I got the same feeling as when I was sold the overpriced French Medoc... I opened it with nervousness and with a thrill of a new adventure in taste -- when consumed, though good, I realised that I could have done just as well with a good Burgundy.

Wright promises a lot, but although the prose are generally very good, they boil down often to deterministic truisms, with a few trite comments thrown in to boot.

1) Underdevelopment of central, interesting ideas. His idea of elites adherence to methods obsolete and destructive, even though the signs of decline are all around, is interesting in that it is not (usually) couched in traditional neo-marxian explanations. This idea needs to be more fully explored -- how is it that drivers of SUVs, and George Bush's energy policy, are unwilling to modify their behaviour when the outcome is so destructive to the environment? But the Wright offers no explanation.

2) Wright talks of "progress traps" and how Rome and Babylon fell as a result of entrenched, successful cultural practises that built empires then lead to their eventual destruction; the very success of a method (in the case of ancient Babylonians their wet agriculture lead to increased food yeilds, cities and wealth, but also, eventually salination and death of the soil --- and eventually death of the culture).

Wright asserts that in every case progress begets eventual destruction. This is of course deterministic as Wright would probably agree since any successful culture and empire eventually crumbles. But short of finding a time eternal culture I really do not know if Wright is saying anything meaningful -- merely stating a truism.

3) Which of course leads to another implication --- also an idea that Wright tries to develop -- that progress is never a prophylactic against eventual demise. Again I am not sure this is really saying anything meaningful. It does however have a harmful implication in that Wright cannot see any hope in technology saving the world (in fact it will kill us he argues).

Such books are the stuff that led JM Keynes to say "in the long run we are all dead." The real question is what can man and women do in the here and now that can make a difference? Wright prose is great for the mind, but short of comforting those with excessive nihilist tendencies, this book offers really nothing of note in original ideas.

Moreover the ending of the book begins to wander and Wright puts in a few atavistic attacks on the nature of capitalism with an equally naive statement about the moral neutrality of socialism... and some rather annoying notions of the life affirming nature of the nobel savage (ZZZzzz...!). Such trite comments detract from very serious ideas he has to say.

I am a person who likes pondering the great ponderables, nihilistic or otherwise, but I am sure that after reading this book, although it was an intellectual comfort on a cold Canadian winter, there was not the promised expression of new ideas. Although the writing is good, the theses, ideas, and presentation are old hat...

Having said that it is a good read and I would strongly reccomend this book to any thinking person. I would rate it as one of the top 10 reads of the year and it is slim enough to knock off on a ferry trip back and forth to Vancouver Island (which I did whilst on vacation).

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...

It is hard to imagine a more compelling and sobering 'short history' of civilization. Wright has managed to deliver a collection of lectures/chapters that form an argument for change - immediate, fundamental and expansive - unlike any I have read before. By recounting and extrapolating from embarrassing histories of excess, short-sightedness and single-mindedness, Wright puts our current situations into a larger and longer context, going beyond what environmentalists and socialists have argued for much more than the past 50 years. In short, he suggests that "our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance."

This is, in a sense, a book about the 'what not to do' lessons of the past 10,000 years. It is as much proscriptive as it is prescriptive yet at no point does Wright come across as preachy or imploring (not that both haven't been or won't be necessary). Rather, he makes a thoroughly compelling argument for the "long-term thinking" that is so obviously needed - and soon - if we are to survive as a species and as a planet.

Since finishing the book this morning I have noticed two things: I have begun to think more long-term about the things I do and the choices I make; and I have been making a mental list of the people that I want to read this book. Leaders in business and politics leap to mind, but failing that, I hope that you will. I don't think that you'll regret it.

Essentially a transcript of a 5 part lecture series that aired on CBC radio, "A Short History of Progress" urges humanity to undertake a course of action it seems singularly unwilling to do: learn from experience. Ronald Wright examines the strategies humans have adopted since our hunter gatherer days to the present and argues that we seem to be consistently making the same mistakes. That mistake isn't, as some reviewers of this book on this site have claimed, the pursuit and utilization of technology or progress in any general sense, but our unwillingness to adapt our behavior and life strategies to the demands of the present, and not assume that what has worked for us in the past will invariably continue to do so in the future. The Progress Trap he speaks of is our incomprehensible faith in pursuing a life style that our environmental conditions no longer permit. By noting that past societies, even when they recognized that their economic and agricultural strategies no longer served their needs, indeed, were already injurious to their societies, nevertheless continued to pursue them in the face of societal collapse is not gloom and doom for it's own sake. It is an attempt to alert us to a chilling pattern in our behavior as a species, and, being in the fortunate position of being able to reflect on our past errors, have us change them. The argument that our present civilization bears no resemblance to these past societies overlooks that fact that we, like those civilizations before us, are in the process of exhausting and depleting the soil on which we grow our food. Crop failures due to climactic variations will have the same effect now as they did then. And the very thing that supposedly sets our present civilization apart, our exploitation of non-renewable resources, quite sensibly cannot sustain a economy dependent upon infinite growth. What the author is calling for is a reevaluation of our society in light of the actual facts of our economy and environment. It is a call for sanity.

The other major criticism of the work, that it is insufficiently comprehensive, also misses the mark. As I stated, it is essentially a transcription of 5 one hour lectures (indeed, the CDs are available for purchase as well) and intended as a primer on the author's central thesis and intended for consumption by the general public. It is called "A Short History" for a reason.

Highly Recommended

Wright does an excellent job of putting the problem of civilizations in the context of anthropology, archeology, ecology, resources and economics, and in a simple narrative. I highly recommend this as a book to read and reflect upon, pointedly because this is one of the things that has prevented previous civilizations from reading the writing on the wall. In fact, as Wright notes, the pattern has been to do the opposite and hasten the downfall. For example, in the Mayan centers of Mesoamerica when population outstripped carrying capacity, the leaders, who were priest-kings, started throwing more resources into monument building. This is very revealing, showing how the power elite may be the least rational group at the finale, the most addicted to the idea of progress and glory, the least capable of pulling back from the brink. They were too addicted to their own status to do what was best for all.

Wright begins with questions -- always an admirable idea in a conversation that begs for mass participation from all sectors of society and all nations -- from a Gauguin painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? and proposes that by answering the first two, we will be able to gain insight into the critical last one. Here is where I think Wright does us justice. He does not give us solutions, which most reviews note as a negative, but this could be a positive. Again, this is not a problem -- "Will our civilization survive or self-destruct?" -- that someone else is going to be able to answer for us. Nor should we want them to. Part of the issue comes down to just this point. Inside we are thinking, Isn't this someone else's area of expertise, you know the people who write The State of the World series, or some U.N. staffers or...? The problem is this is too all inclusive to be answered by any one group, too important not to be engaged by us all. Here's what I propose: Let's take Wright's excellent research and attempt at synthesis and put ourselves on the hot seat. If YOU were put in charge of giving us a better chance of not swerving left at the big dog-leg right in the road ahead, what would you do? What kind of initiatives would you start now? What kinds of forums would you convoke? Most of all, what would be your fundamental assumptions and strategy? Each of us would feel overwhelmed at such a prospect ("What me? For goodnesssakes I'm a tax accountant!"). But it reminds me of what an excellent job some of our least heralded elected officials have done -- the Harry Truman effect. We have more capability than we think, especially in a crisis. And that is just what each of the failed civilizations (Sumerian, Roman, Mayan and the Easter Islanders) failed to do; they failed to call on the resources in the hearts and minds of the populace. And I am not being sentimental here. You may feel now that your leaders can't be trusted in regular situations; what about when we hit the iceberg? Yes, Wright seems to be hinting: even less then.

One point: Wright's opinion that our knowledge of man's evolutionary path answers Gauguin's question #2 (What are we? We're apes!). I beg to differ. Jung warned fifty years ago that "What is commonly called 'self-knowledge' is a...very limited knowledge of what goes on in the human psyche." In other words, objective knowledge of evolution doesn't give us the on-board insight we need to confront a crisis. We've still got a big blank where the unconscious sits. Wright, like most writers on this topic, limits inquiry to the rational. We need to start making more rational decisions, or else evolution will simply decide "it was fun letting apes run the show for awhile", but now the gig is up. We've got to do better than that, folks. We are going to need all of our intuiton, our dreams and maybe a few things we won't know we've got until the time comes.

A last note. Wright also gives a small glimpse of two civilizations that didn't collapse, at least not completely. Egypt and China have kept the ball rolling for three thousand years, albeit with some major down turns. He does not dwell in this, but the sharp reader will see it as rich area for further exploration.

So, what, no answers? Depressing thoughts of losing the house, the car, the wife/hsuband and the world? Change the channel? Our descendants may wish we hadn't.

I took away three points:

1 - Human progress often allows us to overpopulate and outgrow our environment, with disastrous consequences.

2 - Civilization leads to social stratification, then rule of the many by the prosperous few.

3 - Prosperous leaders protect their positions, thus resist changes that might avoid overshoot.

I caught several veiled criticisms of Jared Diamond's books, but to this layman, Wright's message doesn't sound very different from that of the highly-publicized Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: We are headed for the next big cataclysm.

Let us hope that we can adapt and prove them wrong.

The word 'progress' is often used to imply a positive step forward. In this brilliant book Wright argues that progress often leads to "traps" with disastrous consequences for humanity and the planet (one need only look to the recently released 'Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report' to witness the negative impact we humans are having on the earth).

However, instead of whacking his readers across the shins with a litany of doom-and-gloom statistics, Wright calmly points us to past mistakes made by so-called 'civilized' peoples. The author provides his readers with the fascinating accounts of the Sumerians, Romans, Easter Islanders, and the Maya, peoples whose impact on the land was not only catastrophic for their environments, but also for themselves. That said, Wright's book is not entirely without hope, as evidently there were (and are) societies who lived in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Two examples are the Islamic civilization of Spain, and the Incas of Peru, both of which actually repaired eroded landscapes with terracing.

What I found most appealing about 'A Short History of Progress' was Wright's mastery of form-he is, without a doubt, a fantastic writer. Furthermore, not only is his book highly readable, but the author is obviously a tireless researcher. Surprisingly, when I neared the end of the book, instead of being overwhelmed by Wright's account, I found myself bolstered by the information.

As observed by Wright "The Myth of Progress has sometimes served us well-those of us seated at the best tables, anyway." Now is the time for humanity, as a collective group, to push our chairs away from our lush feast and prepare for our next meal-a meal that can be shared by all, and that doesn't do our planet such terrific damage.

As noted by Globe and Mail columnist Paul William Roberts: "I don't care if you have never read and will never read any kind of book at all, but you must read this one." I couldn't agree more.

This book steps up next to Ishmael as a book that causes an eye-opening and perhaps depressing reassessment of where we are the the world.

Ronald Wright has taken a comprehensive survey of archeological inforamtion and recorded history and created a cohesive explanation for the rise and fall of civilizations.

In short, it does not look good for us. Wright shows that we have shown a historical talent for self-destruction and that today's global civilization may be our last hurrah on the civilization train.

Previous civilizations that have outstripped their natural resources have collapsed, but there has always been a new civilization elsewhere to pick up the pieces. But, now that we have a global civilization a collapse would take down the whole world.

While I think this is an excellent book, and worth the five stars, it does miss on one point. There are no suggestions or prescriptions for how to address the problem. It seems that the problem Wright describes is created by the same forces that drive Adam Smith's invisible hand -- the quest of individuals to improve their position. While this individualism can drive economies to grow, Wright would argue that it can also drive civilizations to outstrip their resources -- "Surely MY SUV is not going to bring down civilization. Let someone else drive the Hybrid."

How do we change this behavior? The book does not have suggestions.

It is critical that the ideas on this book become part of the political debate in the world. If we continue to blindly ignore history's warnings, we are likely to see a collapse that would cut our 6-Billion population in half, or even lower.