Are we there yet? A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
English-born Canadian author Ronald Wright’s weeklong series of Massey Lectures in 2004 comprise the basis for A Short History of Progress, a well-written work of 130 pages, an additional 50 pages of endnotes, and ten pages of bibliography.
Wright’s book begins with an examination of Paul Gauguin’s art: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’” These are questions that pundits, philosophers, worried parents and millions of drunken college students around campfires late at night have considered through the ages. Surely, each of us have asked ourselves these very questions this at least once while watching the evening news, passing the 100th beggar that day, or choking on smog. <!-- pagebreak -->
A Short History of Progress asks us to do what we have been advised to do for centuries—learn from the past, and ensure a better future by not repeating the same mistakes. Personally, I despair daily that so few have taken this advice to heart. Ancient ruins that dot every corner of our world are “shipwrecks that mark the shoals of progress,” and the patterns of decline are alarmingly similar.
Wright does touch on different measures of progress (technological, material, moral) but only manages to skim the surface. Perhaps he could have posed the question asked each election year by pollsters: “Are you better off now than you were a year ago?” The book fails to examine how we can better address solutions to ensure that we have a roof over our head, enough food, clean drinking water, peace, and a good education for our kids. Instead, Wright focuses on “the runaway progression of change” and the “collapsing of time”—and the fact that the world we enter at birth is vastly different than the one we leave.
According to Wright, all the big changes since humans left caves have been cultural, not physical. We are “running 21stcentury software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago. Most people, throughout most of time, have lived on the edge of hunger—and much of the world still does.” Annually, the US and the EU each spend over USD 1 billion paying farmers not to grow crops, and another billion dollars each year buying up ‘surplus’ crops in order to keep prices artificially high. Now, multinational companies are copyrighting staple crops.
G.K. Chesterton observed: “Man is an exception, whatever else he is […] If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.’’ Progress has not been made in distribution, infrastructure, transport—or in political will. Regardless of ‘progress’ in irrigation, hybrid crops and other technological ‘fixes,’ humans still can’t feed themselves and continue to fall into ‘progress traps.’ For example, when the ancients in the Fertile Crescent discovered irrigation, they then fell into the salination trap and their lands lay barren for centuries. If we want to reduce our environmental impact and not go the way of the Sumerian, Roman and Maya empires, we must reform society.
Unlike the grim Wright, I believe we can say no to GMOs and nuclear power, and that we can re-embrace renewable energy sources, reusable bottles and organic farming.
