CityReads│How to Escape the Progress Traps?

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How to Escape the Progress Traps?

In A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright makes a very strong case that we need to modify our society to live within the natural limits of our planet. Now. Or face collapse.

Ronald Wright,2004. A Short history of progress, House of Anansi Press.

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Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The 20th century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water--the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the 21st century are: where will this growth lead? And what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age, can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome . Ronald Wright makes a very strong case that we need to modify our society to live within the natural limits of our planet. Now. Or face collapse.

A documentary, Surviving Progress, was made based on A Short History of Progress.

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Gauguin’s questions  

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A Short History of Progress starts with Gauguin’s questions: “D’Où Venons Nous?Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?” Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The whole book is going to address the third question.

It may seem unanswerable. Who can foretell the human course through time? But the author thinks we can answer it, in broad strokes, by answering the other two questions first. If we see clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behavior that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here.

At a practical level, anthropology has answered the first two: we now know that we are the remote descendants of apes who lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. Modern apes, which are also descended from the same original stock, are kin, not ancestors. Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making.

The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic era, lasted from the appearance of toolmaking hominids, nearly 3 million years ago, until the melting of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago.

Geologically speaking, 3 million years is only a wink, one minute of earth’s day. But in human terms, the Old Stone Age is a deep abyss of time — more than 99.5 per cent of our existence.

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From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.

From the discovery of agriculture grew our experiment of civilization. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.2 per cent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone.

What is the progress trap?

The flexibility of the brain’s interactions with nature, through culture, has been the key to our success. There is still a risk. As cultures grow more elaborate, and technologies more powerful, they themselves may become ponderous specializations —vulnerable and, in extreme cases, deadly. The atomic bomb, a logical progression from the arrow and the bullet, became the first technology to threaten our whole species with extinction. It is a“progress trap.”

Most people in the Western cultural tradition still believe in the Victorian ideal of progress, a belief succinctly defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968 as “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind … that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement”, which suggests that progress is a law of nature.

The idea of material progress is a very recent one — “significant only in the past three hundred years or so” — coinciding closely with the rise of science and industry and the corresponding decline of traditional beliefs. We no longer give much thought to moral progress except to assume that it goes hand in hand with the material.

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology — a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become “myth” in the anthropological sense. In both its capitalist and communist versions, the great promise of modernity was progress without limit and without end.

The myth of progress has sometimes served us well — those of us seated at the best tables, anyway — and may continue to do so. But I shall argue in this book that it has also become dangerous. Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of successes may end in a trap. For example, weapons technology was merely the first area of human progress to reach an impasse by threatening to destroy the planet on which it developed.

But the progress traps are not limited to weapon technologies. We are busy unleashing other powerful forces — cybernetics, biotechnology , nanotechnology. Technology is addictive . Material progress creates problems that are — or seem to be — soluble only by further progress

While progress strong enough to destroy the world is indeed modern, the progress trap has plagued us since the Stone Age. This devil lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and recklessness, between need and greed. Much simpler technologies have also seduced and ruined societies in the past, even back in the Stone Age.

Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies – once mighty, complex, and brilliant – lie the most instructive lessons...they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong.

This book reads some of these boxes, including Easter Island, Sumer, Rome and Maya, in the hope that we can avoid repeating past mistakes. Of course, our civilization’s particulars differ from those of previous ones. But not as much as we like to think.

The lesson in the past is this: that the health of land and water – and of woods, which are the keepers of water – can be the only lasting basis for any civilization’s survival and success.

Where are we going: how can we escape the progress trap?

The price of progress trap does indeed go up. The twentieth century would slaughter more than 100 million in its wars — twice the entire population of the Roman Empire.

Marx called capitalism,“a machine for demolishing limits.” Both communism and capitalism are materialist Utopias offering rival versions of an earthly paradise. In practice, communism was no easier on the natural environment. But at least it proposed a sharing of the goods. Capitalism insists that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.

We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet’s natural capital. We’re logging everywhere, fishing everywhere, irrigating everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 per cent of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980s, we’d reached 100 per cent; and in 1999, we were at 125 per cent. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear — they mark the road to bankruptcy.

Our civilization, which subsumes most of its predecessors, is a great ship steaming at speed into the future. It travels faster, further, and more laden than any before. We may not be able to foresee every reef and hazard, but by reading her compass bearing and headway, by understanding her design, her safety record, and the abilities of her crew, we can, I think, plot a wise course between the narrows and bergs looming ahead.

The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now. The reform that is needed is simply the transtion from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle. Now is our last chance to get the future right. 

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