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Publication
House of Anansi Press (2004), Paperback, 208 pages
Description
"A Short History of Progress is nothing less than a concise history of the world since Neanderthal times, elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, and stunningly clear in its warning to us now. Wright shows how human beings have a way of walking into "progress traps," beginning with the worldwide slaughter of big game in the Stone Age. The same pattern of overconsumption then took a new from, as many of the world's most creative civilizations - Mesopotamia, the Maya, the Roman Empire - fell victim to their own success."--BOOK JACKET.
Media reviews
Montreal Gazette
...a brief, trenchant essay.
National Post
What really needs some psychological excavation is Ronald Wright's mind, which carries a set of inflated, emotionally based moralistic assumptions derived from the structure of his primitive ignorance about markets and economics.
Maclean's
...an elegant and learned discussion
... the most important use of printed word and post-consumer recycled fibres I have seen since Jérôme Deshusses's Délivrez Prométhée, 25 years ago.... You feel you've read volumes, though, not just because of the density of Wright's thoughts, but due to the crushing weight of the burden they
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carry. In prose that is balefully evocative and irreducibly precise... Show Less
Skeptic
...remarkably gifted wordsmith whose talent makes turgid facts not only digestible, but also generates a hunger for more... A Short History of Progress is an important, well-crafted book, however, I can't promise that it will change your life.
The Times
...an eminently readable account...written with an incredible lightness of touch that belies the very serious issues.
User reviews
LibraryThing member kukulaj
Wright takes a long view of human history, starting from the Old Paleolithic. He presents a picture of escalating boom and bust cycles. Agriculture took off because the hunters got too good at hunting and killed off so much prey that farming was the only alternative left.
He discusses Easter Island
Wright doesn't give us much of an idea about how to steer, either. Sure, switch from short term thinking to long term thinking. That sounds like a very good direction in which to steer, but it doesn't touch the how.
My own idea these days is to promote diversity in thinking. Culture may well evolve by an evolutionary mechanism. But evolution requires diversity. It's not just that we need to figure out how to cultivate long term vision, but just what sort of crystal ball might prove sufficiently accurate is another space we need to explore. Science itself seems to get more and more blindered, e.g. as reseach gets more expensive and funding sources more scarce.
I've been reading for many years by now folks like Archdruid John Michael Greer, Dmitri Orlov, Morris Berman, John Michael Greer, etc. So I didn't need to be sold on the idea that we are marching out over thinning ice. Still, I found Wright's anthropological perspective to be usefully illuminating.
He discusses Easter Island
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and Sumer, that collapsed to effective extinction, Mayan and Roman civilization that left peripheral groups to survive though to today, and Egypt and China that have survived for millennia. He doesn't go deeply into our situation today, with peak oil, climate change, etc. He shows us a pattern that repeats with variations through history. Our present situation fits the general pattern well enough. But which variation? Can we steer ourselves at least away from the track of extinction? Unlike the cases of Easter Island and Sumer, our culture is global. If our culture goes extinct, will any humans survive? Wright doesn't give us much of an idea about how to steer, either. Sure, switch from short term thinking to long term thinking. That sounds like a very good direction in which to steer, but it doesn't touch the how.
My own idea these days is to promote diversity in thinking. Culture may well evolve by an evolutionary mechanism. But evolution requires diversity. It's not just that we need to figure out how to cultivate long term vision, but just what sort of crystal ball might prove sufficiently accurate is another space we need to explore. Science itself seems to get more and more blindered, e.g. as reseach gets more expensive and funding sources more scarce.
I've been reading for many years by now folks like Archdruid John Michael Greer, Dmitri Orlov, Morris Berman, John Michael Greer, etc. So I didn't need to be sold on the idea that we are marching out over thinning ice. Still, I found Wright's anthropological perspective to be usefully illuminating.
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LibraryThing member wandering_star
This was originally a series of lectures, asking whether civilisation is a "progress trap" (ie something which looks positive but contains within it the seeds of its own destruction).
To address this question, Wright looks at a number of previous civilisations - Easter Island and Sumer, which
The story of Easter Island is familiar, but still incredible, and Wright tells it well, wondering what was in the mind of the person who "felled the last tree". Sumer failed because over-irrigation led to salinity (and even today, half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline). The reasons for the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires are still disputed by scholars: Wright argues that in both cases, it was over-cultivation leading to agrarian failure. He expands on this to say that as societies or civilisations develop, the population grows to the maximum possible that resources allow, and also that society becomes increasingly stratified, putting power in the hands of the few - who are insulated from the effects of the environmental degradation which the civilisation is causing. This second point was new to me, but it certainly sounds familiar.
I don't know enough about the decline of the Roman or Maya empires to judge how convincing Wright's argument is, but he writes acerbically and covers a wide range of ground. As well as the overarching argument, the book is full of thought-provoking facts. I'll note three here.
- The thick skull of Neanderthal man may not have been a sign of low intelligence, but of better adaptation to cold weather - but when Europe began to warm, the more versatile homo sapiens suddenly had the benefit.
- The division of pre-history into stone, bronze and iron age is not appropriate as a marker of the development of non-European cultures: the highly developed Maya civilisation made little use of metal, and sub-Saharan Africa had developed ironworking as early as China (around 500 BC) but never developed to the same extent apart from that.
- The "self-governing democracies" of native Americans inspired the Founding Fathers, in their social equality, free debate, rule of consensus, and the ability of dissenters to leave the rest of their nation and found an independent group. In 1775 James Adair wrote of the Cherokees that "Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty!". But these societies were the result of the mass deaths by smallpox that happened in the 1500s. Before that, societies were larger, more structured and hierarchical.
To address this question, Wright looks at a number of previous civilisations - Easter Island and Sumer, which
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fairly obviously drove themselves out of existence; the Roman and Maya empires, which flourished for a long time but eventually collapsed; and two which do not seem to have gone through the same cycle, Egypt and China (although he spends less time on these, arguing that they have survived, at least in some form, because of unusually high soil fertility). The story of Easter Island is familiar, but still incredible, and Wright tells it well, wondering what was in the mind of the person who "felled the last tree". Sumer failed because over-irrigation led to salinity (and even today, half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline). The reasons for the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires are still disputed by scholars: Wright argues that in both cases, it was over-cultivation leading to agrarian failure. He expands on this to say that as societies or civilisations develop, the population grows to the maximum possible that resources allow, and also that society becomes increasingly stratified, putting power in the hands of the few - who are insulated from the effects of the environmental degradation which the civilisation is causing. This second point was new to me, but it certainly sounds familiar.
I don't know enough about the decline of the Roman or Maya empires to judge how convincing Wright's argument is, but he writes acerbically and covers a wide range of ground. As well as the overarching argument, the book is full of thought-provoking facts. I'll note three here.
- The thick skull of Neanderthal man may not have been a sign of low intelligence, but of better adaptation to cold weather - but when Europe began to warm, the more versatile homo sapiens suddenly had the benefit.
- The division of pre-history into stone, bronze and iron age is not appropriate as a marker of the development of non-European cultures: the highly developed Maya civilisation made little use of metal, and sub-Saharan Africa had developed ironworking as early as China (around 500 BC) but never developed to the same extent apart from that.
- The "self-governing democracies" of native Americans inspired the Founding Fathers, in their social equality, free debate, rule of consensus, and the ability of dissenters to leave the rest of their nation and found an independent group. In 1775 James Adair wrote of the Cherokees that "Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty!". But these societies were the result of the mass deaths by smallpox that happened in the 1500s. Before that, societies were larger, more structured and hierarchical.
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LibraryThing member redcedar
the massey lecture series (sponsored by cbc radio) has produced a number of slim after-the-fact volumes of note, and this is definitely an interesting addition to the collection. really, this is a short version of jared diamond’s recent book collapse and the five essays within explore the
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collapse of civilizations historically (easter island, rome etc) and the very real possibility that the western empire could also be on the verge of collapse for similar reasons (environmental, political excesses). i don’t really agree with all of his conclusions - particularly that our society has a possibility of reversing the collapse scenario we currently find outselves in - but i think wright does a good job of summing up in an accessible 136 pages the crux of the arguments for potential collapse and change. Show Less
LibraryThing member StephenBarkley
Most of us take civilization for granted—Ronald Wright does not.
For Wright, civilization is a relatively recent experiment with devastating consequences in many of its forms. He centres his talks on four main societies that all self-destructed:
1. Sumer
2. Rome
3. Maya
4. Easter Island
Societies
This is a stern warning to us since Western society is following all the societies that crashed before it. As the cynical graffiti says, "Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up" (107).
Wright's argument is solid, although his cavalier throw-away statements towards Judaism and Christianity are irritating. Take this example in his discussion about ancient Sumer:
"Legends we know from the Hebrew Bible—the Garden of Eden, the Flood—appear in Gilgamesh in earlier forms, along with other tales deemed too racy, perhaps, for inclusion in the Pentateuch" (65).
He's half right—the Garden of Eden and the Flood do exist in earlier literary form in Gilgamesh. He wildly misunderstands the nature of the Pentateuch, though. Those ancient stories were rewritten as a polemic against the surrounding nation's polytheistic milieu.
(Also, if Wright thinks Gilgamesh contains stories too racy for the Pentateuch, then he clearly hasn't read the Pentateuch!)
Despite these minor irritations, A Short History of Progress is a highly readable ecological treatise. It deserves a wide reading today.
For Wright, civilization is a relatively recent experiment with devastating consequences in many of its forms. He centres his talks on four main societies that all self-destructed:
1. Sumer
2. Rome
3. Maya
4. Easter Island
Societies
Show More
destroy themselves when they (seemingly inevitably) overuse their environmental assets. The societies which didn't self-destruct (Egypt and China) only remained viable because of their special-case natural resources. China had an abnormal amount of topsoil which sustained their soil-degrading farming practices, while Egypt had the Nile which brought new resources from the South every season.This is a stern warning to us since Western society is following all the societies that crashed before it. As the cynical graffiti says, "Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up" (107).
Wright's argument is solid, although his cavalier throw-away statements towards Judaism and Christianity are irritating. Take this example in his discussion about ancient Sumer:
"Legends we know from the Hebrew Bible—the Garden of Eden, the Flood—appear in Gilgamesh in earlier forms, along with other tales deemed too racy, perhaps, for inclusion in the Pentateuch" (65).
He's half right—the Garden of Eden and the Flood do exist in earlier literary form in Gilgamesh. He wildly misunderstands the nature of the Pentateuch, though. Those ancient stories were rewritten as a polemic against the surrounding nation's polytheistic milieu.
(Also, if Wright thinks Gilgamesh contains stories too racy for the Pentateuch, then he clearly hasn't read the Pentateuch!)
Despite these minor irritations, A Short History of Progress is a highly readable ecological treatise. It deserves a wide reading today.
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LibraryThing member joeteo1
An thought provoking description of the challenges facing our civilization and the lessons we should lean from fallen civilizations before us. Other authors have covered these topics with greater scholarship and detail in an equally accessible manner (Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" is a good
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example). Wright has a much more "preachier" tone than other authors. I think this is because he genuinely believes that our society is on the brink of a precipice and the urgency he writes with in this book is warranted. What the book lacks, however, is solutions. Progress can be easily critiqued but what are the alternatives? Do we become Luddites and shun all technology? Do we need to somehow unlearn the skills that have brought us so close to destruction? Wright is silent on these hard issues. In the end the book feels merely like the scholarly equivalent of standing on a street corner wearing a sandwich board saying "The End is Nigh". Show Less
LibraryThing member rakerman
Great ideas, well-presented. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for another angle.
LibraryThing member Meggo
Based on Wright's presentation at the 2004 Massey Lectures, this book scared the willies out of me. The author writes convincingly of 'progress traps' - where technology has progressed to such a point that it is almost impossible to go back. For example, agriculture is one such trap - to abandon
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large scale agriculture and return to hunting and gathering would lead to a much, much smaller population base. Nuclear weapons are another such progress trap. Written using examples of where it went wrong, such as the Roman Empire, Easter Island and Sumer, it seems clear what we should not do. Which is just what we're doing. A quick read, I found the illustrations or quotes in the book a little disruptive to the flow, but they added value so I am not complaining too loudly. Show Less
LibraryThing member TomMcGreevy
absolutely brilliant and completely credible. A truly deserving member of the Massey Lectures Series.
LibraryThing member dinu
A nice book with a good topic and well written but a little short given the subject and unfortunately the organization of the appendix is abysmal. In my opinion Jared Diamond's Colapse was much better on the scientific aspects and much more thorough.
LibraryThing member laVermeer
As the blurb on the cover says, you must read this book. It is crucial that we understand what we face in terms of environmental limitations, so that we can make the right choices NOW to prevent one final catastrophe. "Now is our last chance to get the future right", indeed, and this book suggests
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a path to getting the future right. Highly recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member Mandarinate
A concise account of environmental collapse from overconsumption, but the ideas are not original. (The examples in the book have been researched and described by previous authors.)
LibraryThing member 77book
This enjoyable book, from the Massey Lectures series, is a wonderful easy to read summary of some aspects of our collective culture, history, and possible future. The author is a historian that has also written novels and this seems to be evident in his wording and phrasing as he does not seem to
The issues he discusses are well woven together with the theme of how cultures in the past have set themselves up to fail. The reasons for this he lays out succinctly, enabling him to point out the errors in dealing with coming failures. As evidenced in our past throughout all areas of our world, human nature and human wisdom have rarely come together to solve the problems our culture and civilization have created. It is unnerving to read these lectures originally given in 2004 on the CBC radio, and see how the same mistakes in the past are being repeated today. Many arguments used in the past to justify unsustainable practices in development and agriculture are still being used today.
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be didactic. The book starts with Paul Gauguin and three questions from one of his best paintings. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The first two questions are considered briefly and the third takes most of the text.The issues he discusses are well woven together with the theme of how cultures in the past have set themselves up to fail. The reasons for this he lays out succinctly, enabling him to point out the errors in dealing with coming failures. As evidenced in our past throughout all areas of our world, human nature and human wisdom have rarely come together to solve the problems our culture and civilization have created. It is unnerving to read these lectures originally given in 2004 on the CBC radio, and see how the same mistakes in the past are being repeated today. Many arguments used in the past to justify unsustainable practices in development and agriculture are still being used today.
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LibraryThing member wbell539
As I started reading this book I began to think that its author would be telling me nothing that I did not already know or suspect. I prepared myself to be bored and disappointed. Then I gradually realised that he might be trying to tell me that one of the most salient features of our treatment of
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the planet, yet one of the ones most of us fail to identify from prehistory onwords, is our wanton wastefulness and destructiveness, even of a very similar species. Until recently we have survived our own destructiveness; the earth has either absorbed the effects or provided us with new venues. But maybe we need to change our ways, no matter how much they are a part of our inherent nature. Show Less
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Short tract on the hazards of unlimited growth with limited resources, exploitation of the masses and nature, colonialism, monoculture, etc. Vivid preaching rhetoric, but unfortunately leaves no hints of real solutions except some fuzzy 'power to the masses' stuff, and an emphasis on 'long-term
Time to get to business.
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thinking'. All of which are sound ideas, but it's up to other people for their implementation.Time to get to business.
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LibraryThing member PastorBob
If people had listened to thinking this, we’d living in a civilization ravaged by polio and small pox.
This book aches with shallow thinking, and features the same old Rousseauian pseudo-historical fantasy of the noble savage being more free, and that a better humankind would be possible if we
Wright envisions a world where every possible development or invention has to meet his standards of forethought (and political bias) or else presumably be shut down. His uncritical and trendy defacement of the west and our technological advances will win over some undergraduates and the leftist zealots that run the CBC, but the thinking is based on shallow assumptions that come out of the whining of the 60′s and have no basis in fact.
Western culture and progress have lifted millions and generations out of desperate poverty, need and sickness. There’s more to do. There’s risks in going forward. But there are risks in standing still. Wright pretends he has a big perspective that allows him to see “the whole game” and that he is not distracted merely by “watching the ball.” He seems to think that those who’ve advanced technology have been short sighted or unaware in a way that he has avoided. But his pretension is false. His gross generalizations have the appearance of breadth of thought, but they’re actually means of avoiding the details. History runs like a greased pig through his book. His historical trivia is conjectural at best and smacks of a post-structuralist reading of ancient civilizations. His idea that America receives notions of liberty from the North American native community, for example, is just patently false – those ideas originate in Christian thought among Anabaptists in England and on the Continent in the 16th century. And Wright’s suggestion that their communities once had greater degrees of social order sounds quite like Rousseau and other statists who romanticize the noble savage and look in their innocence for some justification of the power structures they want to bring into being.
Indeed, Wright is driven not by history, not by facts, not by evidence, but by fantasy and fear: he’s been suckered by the utopian imaginations of statists; his quivering belly about the future in fact robs him of the future. He’s not thinking deeply and honestly about ‘what will happen next,’ he’s projecting his fears of success and political bias on the future and so comes up with the only answer he can – stop it all and roll us backwards. If Eden is lost, Wright would take us back there by force of government power. What else could possibly constitute “the tools and means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones”? Only international government power. Wright is a fascist, and probably has such romantic fantasies he doesn’t even recognize it in himself.
All advances come with risk, and that means that those who are risk adverse, if given given the totalitarian power implied in this book, will persecute individual dissenters from their dogma (“the hard men and women of big oil and the far right”), and thereby trap human civilization where it is, or in a worsened limited state. In doing so, they will condemn millions of future human beings to poverty, suffering, and political imprisonment. I say the latter, because people who think like Wright are the despots and villains who rationalize the mistreatment of dissenters, because they won’t let the facts get in the way of their thinking. In the film based on the book, for example, David Suzuki is shown actually calling economics ‘insanity’. Of course no one in the production actually talks to articulate economists openly in order to try and understand their discipline; instead, because economic common sense disables his political agenda, he just ridicules it and pushes it aside. So also Wright. Wright is another prophet of doom that has set himself up for a lucrative university speaking tour. But he is a false prophet, and offers only ideas that will ultimately ruin the lives of millions of people, and sacrifice their freedom, all based on the fears he’s projected, and now sown.
This book aches with shallow thinking, and features the same old Rousseauian pseudo-historical fantasy of the noble savage being more free, and that a better humankind would be possible if we
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could just stop the people (read those who disagree) who ‘mess it up’. For Rousseau, the problem lay in the social orders of the family, the church, and the local community. For Wright, the problem is found among those who advance the economic strategies or technologies he doesn’t like. Like Rousseau and the socialists of the 19th century who drank down Rousseau’s ideas, Wright looks to the state, regulations, and the use of even international power to advance his agenda. We have a name for people who believe that the state should enforce their vision of society on others with global regulations and power. We call them tyrants.Wright envisions a world where every possible development or invention has to meet his standards of forethought (and political bias) or else presumably be shut down. His uncritical and trendy defacement of the west and our technological advances will win over some undergraduates and the leftist zealots that run the CBC, but the thinking is based on shallow assumptions that come out of the whining of the 60′s and have no basis in fact.
Western culture and progress have lifted millions and generations out of desperate poverty, need and sickness. There’s more to do. There’s risks in going forward. But there are risks in standing still. Wright pretends he has a big perspective that allows him to see “the whole game” and that he is not distracted merely by “watching the ball.” He seems to think that those who’ve advanced technology have been short sighted or unaware in a way that he has avoided. But his pretension is false. His gross generalizations have the appearance of breadth of thought, but they’re actually means of avoiding the details. History runs like a greased pig through his book. His historical trivia is conjectural at best and smacks of a post-structuralist reading of ancient civilizations. His idea that America receives notions of liberty from the North American native community, for example, is just patently false – those ideas originate in Christian thought among Anabaptists in England and on the Continent in the 16th century. And Wright’s suggestion that their communities once had greater degrees of social order sounds quite like Rousseau and other statists who romanticize the noble savage and look in their innocence for some justification of the power structures they want to bring into being.
Indeed, Wright is driven not by history, not by facts, not by evidence, but by fantasy and fear: he’s been suckered by the utopian imaginations of statists; his quivering belly about the future in fact robs him of the future. He’s not thinking deeply and honestly about ‘what will happen next,’ he’s projecting his fears of success and political bias on the future and so comes up with the only answer he can – stop it all and roll us backwards. If Eden is lost, Wright would take us back there by force of government power. What else could possibly constitute “the tools and means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones”? Only international government power. Wright is a fascist, and probably has such romantic fantasies he doesn’t even recognize it in himself.
All advances come with risk, and that means that those who are risk adverse, if given given the totalitarian power implied in this book, will persecute individual dissenters from their dogma (“the hard men and women of big oil and the far right”), and thereby trap human civilization where it is, or in a worsened limited state. In doing so, they will condemn millions of future human beings to poverty, suffering, and political imprisonment. I say the latter, because people who think like Wright are the despots and villains who rationalize the mistreatment of dissenters, because they won’t let the facts get in the way of their thinking. In the film based on the book, for example, David Suzuki is shown actually calling economics ‘insanity’. Of course no one in the production actually talks to articulate economists openly in order to try and understand their discipline; instead, because economic common sense disables his political agenda, he just ridicules it and pushes it aside. So also Wright. Wright is another prophet of doom that has set himself up for a lucrative university speaking tour. But he is a false prophet, and offers only ideas that will ultimately ruin the lives of millions of people, and sacrifice their freedom, all based on the fears he’s projected, and now sown.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Zare
Very interesting book. If you are interested in human society dynamics highly recommended.
Subjects
Awards
Independent Publisher Book Awards (Finalist — 2005)
Libris Award (Winner — 2005)
British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction (Shortlist — 2005)
Language
Original publication date
2004-10-23
Physical description
208 p.; 7.9 inches
ISBN
0887847064 / 9780887847066