Wright's moral: progress is 'robbing the future to pay the present'

Inspired by the existentialist musings of the grief-stricken painter Paul Gauguin, Ronald Wright, the author of the book A Short History of Progress, tackles ten-thousand years of human history in an attempt to discover where humanity’s current course is headed. Beautifully written and undeniably compelling, A Short History of Progress begins with Gauguin’s three simple questions – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? – and ends with a dire warning: “now is our last chance to get the future right”.

Wright addresses Gauguin’s first two questions regarding the origins of humanity with a brief anthropological lesson, detailing with skill and ease the often confusing timeline of early humankind. Wright’s primary interest, however, lies in answering Gauguin’s third question – where are we going? He suggests that although we cannot clearly foresee humanity’s future, we can surmise its course by looking at the past. Turning once more to history, Wright discovers alarmingly similar patterns across space and time, predictable like the lines of a sine curve – rising and falling, sharp peaks and deep valleys, plotting the swell and ruin of civilisation.

At the heart of these patterns, proposes Wright, lies progress. The conceptualisation of progress as a natural law is a recent construct – a Victorian ideal with which our current civilisation is still very much enthralled. Progress is a subversive ideology, not always consciously recognised, but present throughout human history. Humanity lusts, it desires. By its very nature it seeks to have more, be more, do more, and progress offers that opportunity. It is seductive and alluring, whispering in honeyed tones promises of bigger, better and unlimited yields. But, progress is a myth, and it is flawed. It offers up promises it cannot keep, leaving humanity vulnerable. Progress is important, but in excess it can be dangerous, a sentiment illustrated by Wright’s thoughts on weaponry: “ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder there has been great progress in the making of bangs…but when the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress”.

The real danger in progress, argues Wright, is the false sense of security it offers – a trap luring the unsuspecting to their ruin; a boulder that, once rolling, is impossible to control. He suggests that hunting within the Palaeolithic era, the perfection of which “spelled out the end of hunting”, was one such trap “bankrupting the land with our moveable feasts”. Agriculture, the innovation of the Neolithic era, was another progress trap, Wright tells us, an accidental discovery that stimulated unprecedented population and ultimately cultivated the rise of our current civilisation.

This brings us to another important idea, one to which Wright often refers back, and that is the notion of pyramid schemes. As wealth accumulates, social divisions harden and hierarchies form, civilisations, he insists, become pyramid schemes growing fat and bloated at the expense of the base – the poor and the land – “robbing the future to pay the present”. The imminent problem, argues Wright, is that continuous misuse of the land and funnelling of resources away from the base and up the pyramid only serves to erode its foundations, leaving it weak and unstable, precarious and prone to collapse.

Two further trends are clearly displayed in A Short History of Progress. The first, illustrated nicely by his brief explorations of the histories of the early civilizations of Easter Island, Sumer, Ancient Rome and the Mayan Empire is the fact that human societies, despite their location in time and space, will move toward “greater size, complexity and environmental demand” before ultimately succumbing to ecological malaise. The second and perhaps the most worrisome trend of the two highlighted by Wright, is the seemingly inherent inability and/or unwillingness of humanity to learn from past mistakes. Hindsight, Wright argues, is a marvellous advantage and yet humanity continually fails to take to heart the hard learned lessons of all who came before – our civilisation is no different.

In fact, Wright argues that our society, which has coalesced into an all-consuming, global entity, may be at greater risk than previous ones. Driven by our blind faith in science, technology and innovation we are progressing ever rapidly, a notion wonderfully emphasised with Wright’s comment: “we are logging everywhere, fishing everywhere, irrigating everywhere, building everywhere, and not a corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste”. And this time there are no other infant civilisations waiting in the wings to step in when we inevitably fail, as Wright notes: “there is now only one big civilisation, feeding on the whole planet’s capital”. In other words, unless we change our ways immediately, humanity may be doomed.

I found A Short History of Progress a wonderfully crafted piece of work – both humorous and sobering. To tackle ten-thousand years of human history in a mere 132 pages is a feat, but to have done so with such insight and thought is remarkable. For those unfamiliar with the ideas posed in Wright`s book, A Short History of Progress proves a wonderful springboard for further inquiry – it is short, easy to read, and packed full of resources – as Wright does a wonderful job at amalgamating the various threads and nuances of many contemporary concerns into one solid, condensed volume.

That said, I feel A Short History of Progress, is not without its flaws. In particular I take two issues with Wright`s work. The first is his tone in the final chapter. It seems entirely too pessimistic and apocalyptic to suggest that the failure of this civilisation spells disaster for all of humanity. Though I agree that humanity has a great deal invested in our current civilisation, both humankind and our planet are resilient - surely sections of both would manage to survive and again thrive one day.

Secondly, I feel the book’s closure is unrewarding. From the outset Wright makes it clear that human civilisation has an inherent ability to put on blinders, ignore the past, and ruin every good thing and advantage that it has. He spends the majority of the book emphasising this point with carefully laid out examples of past human arrogance. Then, in the final chapter, he drives home the point that our civilisation is running full-steam towards the edge of a cliff, like a heard of mammoths being chased by our Palaeolithic ancestors, and to this he throws in the culmination of his work, the anticipated dénouement: we need to change. His words are simple and true, but unbelievably obvious. Perhaps I was expecting too much, maybe it is out of the scope of this work, but in his advice to change our ways he offers no suggestions for how we should go about it, beyond the simple cessation of our destructive tendencies – idealistic and hopeful, but not very helpful.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, despite its flaws A Short History of Progress was provocative, superbly written and a pure joy to read.