A Short History of Progress (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE FRENCH PAINTER and writer Paul Gauguin - by most accounts mad, bad, and dangerous to know - suffered acutely from cosmological vertigo induced by..." (more)
Key Phrases: final century, scientific romance, Easter Island, New World, Old Stone Age (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (March 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786715472
• ISBN-13: 978-0786715473
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #87,684 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding piece of work: eloquent and persuasive, May 20, 2005

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading!, November 15, 2005

By	B. Stein (Adelaide Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, Entertaining, Well Written and Flawed, May 25, 2005

By	R. J Szasz "Rod Szasz" (Tokyo, Japan Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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).