A Short History of Progress - Softcover

Wright, Ronald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786715472 ISBN 13: 9780786715473

Publisher: CARROLL & GRAF, 2005

Synopsis

A brilliant, sobering, highly readable, and utterly fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid
Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up. We live at a time of runaway growth in human numbers, consumption, and technology. The great question we now face is how, and whether, this can go on. Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament, though new in scale, is as old as humankind.
A Short History of Progress is nothing less than a concise history of the world since Neanderthal times, elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, and stunningly clear in its warming to us now. Wright shows how human beings have a way of walking into "progress traps," beginning with the worldwide slaughter of big game in the Stone Age. The same pattern of overconsumption then took a new form as many of the world's most creative civilizations--Mesopotamia, the Maya, the Roman Empire--fell victim to their own success.

Only by understanding our pattern of progress and disaster, Wright contends, can we hope to change our ways and ensure that civilization has a longterm future.
"[Ronald Wright] is an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures."--Jan Morris
"A wise, timely, and brilliant book."--Toronto Globe and Mail

About this title

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

About the Author

Ronald Wright is an award-winning novelist, historian, and essayist. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Award for Fiction and was a Sunday Times, Globe and Mail, and New York Times book of the year. Ronald Wright lives in British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: CARROLL & GRAF
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786715472
• ISBN 13: 9780786715473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224