A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Author:Ronald Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: HIS000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

I: Gauguin’s Questions

1. Unable to afford real canvas, Gauguin painted his masterpiece on a length of jute sacking.

2. Quoted in Gavan Daws, A Dream of Islands (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1980).

3. Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (London: C. A. Watts, 1968), p. 9ff.

4. Ibid.

5. Not only religious ones. Victorian archaeology defined technical advance in terms of metals, but the Classical world had drawn the opposite conclusion, seeing only a slide into cheapness and corruptibility — from an age of gold to one of bronze and lastly iron.

6. Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance In the Americas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 5.

7. American Cold Warriors of the last century used to threaten to “bomb the Soviets back into the Stone Age.” Whether the Russians uttered the same threat, I don’t know. But it was certainly a credible one. Even if a nuclear “exchange” (as the euphemism went) failed to extinguish all higher forms of life, it would have ended civilization worldwide. No crops worth eating would grow in a nuclear winter.

8. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

9. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711; Thomas Henry Huxley, On Elementary Instruction in Physiology, 1877.

10. Quoted in Robert J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 79.

11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.

12. Ibid., As You Like It, act 4, scene 1.

13. Quoted in Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 1962), p. 19.

14. Newton, basing his calculations on the speed at which a mass of iron cools down, had already suspected that the earth was at least 50,000 years old, and the eighteenthcentury French thinkers Benoit de Maillet and George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon opted for far greater estimates, but their calculations gained little acceptance. See Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 93–121.

15. The physicist Lord Kelvin fought a rearguard action on the grounds that the sun could not be old enough for Darwin’s time scale, but this was widely doubted and eventually disproved.

16. His words were not transcribed at the time. Accounts of what was said differ somewhat but agree on the gist.

17. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, p. 204.

18. H. G. Wells et al., The Science of Life, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1929), pp. 422–23. His co-author Julian Huxley was a grandson of Darwin’s champion, Thomas Huxley.

19. Northrop Frye, “Humanities in a New World” in Three Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 23. Some experts see speech as quite a recent phenomenon, but I think it much more likely to have had a very long development, gaining complexity in step with the brain. Many of the differences between ape and human brains are in regions that govern aspects of speech. See chapter 2, note 11, below.

20. Rosny was born in Brussels in 1856, worked as journalist in England, and moved in 1886 to Paris, where he became president of the Académie Goncourt.

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