An Illustrated Short History of Progress

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

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, c

This lecture is spectacular!! It is packed with historical reference and possible future analogies. I hate reading books twice and have only done so on a few occasions, through necessity. This book I had to read again, through desire. Thanks you Mr. Wright, this is fabulous.

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.