Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress is an easy, informative, delightfully frightening read. The Ottawa Citizen states it well: "If you read one book about impending doom this year, make it this one." Like I said - delightfully frightening.
Wright's past books have focused on the Mayan Empire in Central America and early Western colonization of the New World. After providing some background on the emergence of the idea of progress in the West during the past three hundred years, the author argues that "progress" is a myth. And as a myth, it helps our culture navigate through time, sometimes serving us well, other times not so well. It is thus much more akin to an ideological or religious narrative than a scientific one.
What's interesting about the book is how the rise of a civilization created progress on numerous fronts (e.g., arts, architecture, agricultural productivity, weapons, roads, war-making, population growth, longevity, etc.), but has also led humanity into "progress traps," starting with the worldwide slaughter of big game in the Stone Age. Today's current challenge of a "runaway growth in human numbers, consumption, and technology" is not new. Our modern predicament, although different in details, is as old as humanity. The big change is "each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up."
Indeed, "hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes." Wright notes that "skeptics point out that earlier predictions of disaster have not been borne out." But some of our escapes, like from a nuclear holocaust, have been due more to luck than new judgments, a conversion to peaceful resolution of global conflicts, or sustained improvements in international relations. Food security issues are still a genuine threat as well. This problem has been sidestepped but not solved. And there is worry that a crisis has been only postponed by our highly energy- and chemical-dependent agriculture. We are facing what the author calls "the rebellion of the tools."
The logic and nature of our economic system creates obstacles to the spread of more environmentally-friendly lifestyles. The record of actually existing state socialist regimes has not been good, ecologically speaking. But the sheer dynamism of the global marketplace and its seemingly inherent need to grow are cause for concern. Is a "stationary capitalism" imaginable? "Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism." Marx, in fact, called capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits."
Ronald Wright traces the fall of creative civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, the Maya, and the Roman Empire to the same cause - falling victim to their own success by producing an ecological disaster. This pattern of over-consumption then unleashes famine, disease, and all the Malthusian woes that eventually bring consumption and population back into balance.
A Short History of Progress offers a concise history of the earth's peoples since Neanderthal times and is extremely clear about its warning. There is still time, but it's getting short. "The rise in population and pollution, the acceleration of technology, the concentration of wealth and power - all are runaway trains, and most are linked together . . . If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the principal of nature . . . None of this should surprise us after reading the flight recorders of crashed civilizations; our present behavior is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance. This is the dinosaur factor: hostility to change from vested interests, and social inertia at all societal levels." Civilizations are characterized by specialization and an elaborate and far-reaching trading system. They "often fall quite suddenly - the house of cards effect - because as they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations." Weapons of mass destruction only magnify these problems.
Wright contends that "the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine , , , Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution . . . Wealth is no shield from chaos, as the surprise from each haughty face that rolled from the guillotine made clear . . . The great advantage we have, our best chances for avoiding the fates of past societies is that we know about these societies . . . The 10,000 year old experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do now, or don't do now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle . . . Now is the last chance to get the future right."
What is the lesson for the domestic field of economic development? Economic development must increasingly meet a "triple bottom-line;" it must be viable in the marketplace, equitable in its benefits and opportunities, and environmentally compatible in its "ecological footprint."