A Short History Of Progress. Ronald Wright

       Contents

      I Gauguin’s Questions

      II The Great Experiment

      III Fools’ Paradise

      IV Pyramid Schemes

      V The Rebellion of the Tools

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       I

       GAUGUIN’S QUESTIONS

      THE FRENCH PAINTER and writer Paul Gauguin — by most accounts mad, bad, and dangerous to know — suffered acutely from cosmological vertigo induced by the work of Darwin and other Victorian scientists.

      In the 1890s, Gauguin ran away from Paris, family, and stockbroking career to paint (and bed) native girls in the tropics. Like many a troubled soul, he could not escape so easily from himself, despite great efforts to do so with the help of drink and opium. At the bottom of his disquiet lay a longing to find what he called the “savage” — primordial man (and woman), humanity in the raw, the elusive essence of our kind. This quest eventually drew him to Tahiti and other South Sea islands, where traces of a pre-contact world — an unfallen world, in his eyes — lingered beneath the cross and tricolore.

In 1897, a mail steamer docked at Tahiti bringing terrible news. Gauguin’s favourite child, Aline, had died suddenly from pneumonia. After months of illness, poverty, and suicidal despair, the artist harnessed his grief to produce a vast painting — more a mural in conception than a canvas1 — in which, like the Victorian age itself, he demanded new answers to the riddle of existence. He wrote the title boldly on the image: three childlike questions, simple yet profound. “D’Où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?” Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

The work is a sprawling panorama of enigmatic figures amid scenery that might be the groves of heathen Tahiti or an unruly Garden of Eden: worshippers or gods; cats, birds, a resting goat; a great idol with a serene expression and uplifted hands seeming to point at the beyond; a central figure plucking fruit; an Eve, the mother of mankind, who is not a voluptuous innocent like other women in Gauguin’s work but a withered hag with a piercing eye inspired by a Peruvian mummy. Another figure turns in amazement to a young human pair who, as the artist wrote, “dare to consider their destiny.”2

      Gauguin’s third question — Where are we going? — is what I want to address in this book. It may seem unanswerable. Who can foretell the human course through time? But I think 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 behaviour 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.

      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.

      And I believe we must do this without delay, because there are too many shipwrecks behind us. The vessel we are now aboard is not merely the biggest of all time; it is also the only one left. The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years. Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes.

Despite certain events of the twentieth century, 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.”3 The very appearance on earth of creatures who can frame such a thought suggests that progress is a law of nature: the mammal is swifter than the reptile, the ape subtler than the ox, and man the cleverest of all. Our technological culture measures human progress by technology: the club is better than the fist, the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow. We came to this belief for empirical reasons: because it delivered.

Pollard notes that the idea of material progress is a very recent one — “significant only in the past three hundred years or so”4 — coinciding closely with the rise of science and industry and the corresponding decline of traditional beliefs.5 We no longer give much thought to moral progress — a prime concern of earlier times — except to assume that it goes hand in hand with the material. Civilized people, we tend to think, not only smell better but behave better than barbarians or savages. This notion has trouble standing up in the court of history, and I shall return to it in the next chapter when considering what is meant by “civilization.”

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology — a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is