A Short History of Progress |  | Author: Ronald Wright
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 23,473
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0786715472
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4409
EAN: 9780786715473
ASIN: 0786715472
Publication Date: March 10, 2005
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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
Product Description
Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up. The twentieth centurya time of unprecedented progresshas produced a tremendous strain on the very elements that comprise life itself: This raises the key question of the twenty-first century: How much longer can this go on? With wit and erudition, Ronald Wright lays out a-convincing case that history has always provided an answer, whether we care to notice or not. From Neanderthal man to the Sumerians to the Roman Empire, A Short History of Progress dissects the cyclical nature of humanitys development and demise, the 10,000-year old experiment that weve unleashed but have yet to control. It is Wrights contention that only by understanding and ultimately breaking from the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we avoid the onset of a new Dark Age. Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own end by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to initially advance. Wright's book is brilliant; a fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
 An outstanding piece of work: eloquent and persuasive May 20, 2005
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
26 out of 30 found this review helpful
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.
Essential reading! November 16, 2005
B. Stein (Adelaide Australia)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
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.
Short, yes, but quite powerful and compelling! December 11, 2004
RWO (Canada)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
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.
A Call For Sanity October 4, 2005
The Nightwriter
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
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
I never read a book twice, this one I did. April 1, 2005
----neal M. Shaw (Oakville, Ontario Canada)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
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