A Short History Of Progress by Wright Ronald

Author:Wright, Ronald [Wright, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-08-30T18:00:00+00:00

THE REBELLION OF THE TOOLS

I HAVE A WEAKNESS for cynical graffiti. One relevant to the hazards of progress is this: “Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.” The collapse of the first civilization on earth, the Sumerian, affected only half a million people. The fall of Rome affected tens of millions. If ours were to fail, it would, of course, bring catastrophe on billions.

So far we’ve looked at four ancient societies — Sumer, Rome, the Maya, Easter Island — which, in roughly a thousand years each, wore out their welcome from nature and collapsed. I’ve also mentioned two exceptions, Egypt and China, who achieved a run of 3,000 years or more.

Joseph Tainter, in his book on past collapses, nicknames three kinds of trouble the Runaway Train, the Dinosaur, and the House of Cards. These usually act together.1 The Sumerians’ irrigation was certainly a runaway train, a disastrous course from which they could not deviate; the rulers’ failure to tackle the problem qualifies them as dinosaurs, and the civilization’s swift and irreparable fall shows it to have been a house of cards.

Much the same can be said of the other failures. We are faced by something deeper than mistakes at any particular time or place. The invention of agriculture is itself 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. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. The economist Thomas Malthus explored the first dilemma, and thinkers from Christ to Marx have touched on the second. As the Chinese saying has it: “A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in.”

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

Yet despite the wreckage of past civilizations littering the earth, the overall experiment of civilization has continued to spread and grow.

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