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Book: A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
In this, the age of Globalization, it is hard to ignore the effects our civilized society has on its surrounding environment. Any fool could point in a thousand directions and say what isn’t supposed to be there, but Ronald Wright takes it several steps further and explains how our expansion and wrangling of the Earth will eventually turn on us in his "A Short History of Progress".
Through retrospect- comparing our civilization to fallen empires of past- Wright conjures an all-but-unbelievable imagining of the future failure of our culture. Civilizations, he says, have repeatedly run into “progress traps”, that is to say that a culture has over-stepped its plausible boundaries through progression; Whether economically- by becoming so massive it loses centralized control such as Rome, or even agriculturally- by sucking the life out of usable land and soil and turning it to dust such as Mesopotamia.
While Wright has an easy time stating such truisms- that progress has never saved any empire from demise- he lays no groundwork for any sort of redirection. The book is nihilistic rather than pessimistic, and fails to suggest any course of constructive action. This is the same problem I had with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.
However, there is hope in Wright’s opus on impending doom. It’s thinkers like he and Quinn that help shed light on the negative effects on individualism, and though a lot of his theories could be seen as old hat, Wright has helped to bring them to a wider audience by explaining them in plain English.
Read this book. That way, when the blooming flower of our civilization becomes too large for its stem and collapses- taking with it some 95% of the population- you can justly say “I knew, and I didn't tell you so”.
3.5/5