A Short History Of Progress. Ronald Wright
not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. As I’ve written elsewhere: “Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations…. Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.”6
The myth of progress has sometimes served us well — those of us seated at the best tables, anyway — and may continue to do so. But I shall argue in this book that it has also become dangerous. Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of successes may end in a trap.
Take weapons, for example. Ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the making of bangs: from the firecracker to the cannon, from the petard to the high explosive shell. And just when high explosives were reaching a state of perfection, progress found the infinitely bigger bang in the atom. But when the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress.
Several of the scientists who created the atomic bomb recognized this in the 1940s, telling politicians and others that the new weapons had to be destroyed. “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,” Albert Einstein wrote, “and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” And a few years later, President Kennedy said, “If mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind.”
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, the shadow of too much progress in weaponry— of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and vaporized Pacific islands — had already fallen over the world. It has now darkened our lives for about sixty years, and so much has been said on the subject that I needn’t add more.7My point here is that weapons technology was merely the first area of human progress to reach an impasse by threatening to destroy the planet on which it developed.
At the time, this progress trap was seen as an aberration. In all other fields, including those of nuclear power and chemical pesticides, the general faith in progress was largely unshaken. Advertisements of the 1950s showed a smiling “Mrs. 1970,” who, having bought the right brand of vacuum cleaner, was enjoying the future in advance. Each year’s motor car looked different from the previous year’s (especially if it wasn’t). “Bigger! Wider! Longer!” sang the girls in a jingle, automakers being keen, then as now, to sell bigger as better. And peasants were freed from vermin with generous dustings of DDT in what became known as the Third World — that unravelling tapestry of non-Western cultures seen as a relic of “backwardness” torn between the superpowers. In both its capitalist and communist versions, the great promise of modernity was progress without limit and without end.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led many to conclude that there was really only one way of progress after all. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama, a former U.S. State Department official, declared that capitalism and democracy were the “end” of history — not only its destination but its goal.8 Doubters pointed out that capitalism and democracy are not necessarily bedfellows, citing Nazi Germany, modern China, and the worldwide archipelago of sweatshop tyrannies. Yet Fukuyama’s naive triumphalism strengthened a belief, mainly on the political right, that those who have not chosen the true way forward should be made to do so for their own good — by force, if necessary. In this respect, and in the self-interest it obscures, the current ideology of progress resembles the missionary projects of past empires, whether seventh-century Islam, sixteenth-century Spain, or nineteenth-century Britain.
Since the Cold War ended, we have held the nuclear genie at bay but have not begun to stuff it back in its bottle. Yet we are busy unleashing other powerful forces — cybernetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology — that we hope will be good tools, but whose consequences we cannot foresee.
The most immediate threat, however, may be nothing more glamorous than our own waste. Like most problems with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The biosphere might have been able to tolerate our dirty old friends coal and oil if we’d burned them gradually. But how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so frenzied that the dark side of this planet glows like a fanned ember in the night of space?
Alexander Pope said, rather snobbishly, that a little learning is a dangerous thing; Thomas Huxley later asked, “Where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”9 Technology is addictive. Material progress creates problems that are — or seem to be — soluble only by further progress. Again, the devil here is in the scale: a good bang can be useful; a better bang can end the world.
So far I have spoken of such problems as if they were purely modern, arising from industrial technologies. But while progress strong enough to destroy the world is indeed modern, the devil of scale who transforms benefits into traps has plagued us since the Stone Age. This devil lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and recklessness, between need and greed.
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 — by driving a whole herd over a cliff — had made too much. They lived high for a while, then starved.
Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies — once mighty, complex, and brilliant — lie the most instructive lessons for our own. Their ruins are shipwrecks that mark the shoals of progress. Or — to use a more modern analogy — they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong. In this book, I want to read some of these boxes in the hope that we can avoid repeating past mistakes, of flight plan, crew selection, and design. Of course, our civilization’s particulars differ from those of previous ones. But not as much as we like to think. All cultures, past and present, are dynamic. Even the most slow-moving were, in the long run, works in progress. While the facts of each case differ, the patterns through time are alarmingly — and encouragingly — similar. We should be alarmed by the predictability of our mistakes but encouraged that this very fact makes them useful for understanding what we face today.
Like Gauguin, we often prefer to think of the deep past as innocent and unspoiled, a time of ease and simple plenty before a fall from paradise. The words “Eden” and “Paradise” feature prominently in the titles of popular books on anthropology and history. For some, Eden was the pre-agricultural world, the age of hunting and gathering; for others, it was the pre-Columbian world, the Americas before the white man; and for many, it was the pre-industrial world, the long stillness before the machine. Certainly there have been good and bad times to be alive. But the truth is that human beings drove themselves out of Eden, and they have done it again and again by fouling their own nests. If we want to live in an earthly paradise, it is up to us to shape it, share it, and look after it.
In pondering his first question — Where do we come from? — Gauguin might have agreed with G. K. Chesterton, who remarked, “Man is an exception, whatever else he is.… If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.”10 We now know much more about that 5-million-year process of an ape going off its head, so it is hard, today, to recapture the shock felt around the world when the implications of evolutionary theory first became clear.
Writing in 1600, Shakespeare had Hamlet exclaim, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!… in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”11 His audience would have shared Hamlet’s mix of wonder, scorn, and irony at human nature. But very few, if any, would have doubted that they were made as the Bible told: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
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