A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright

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.

"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."'

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.

This idea serves as the underlying premise for the book: moral, responsible progress is healthy, unethical, reckless destruction under the guise of "progress" may end the great human experiment.

What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.

If it turns out that the Neanderthals disappeared because they were an evolutionary dead end, we can merely shrug and blame natural selection for their fate. But if they were in fact a variant or race of modern man, then we must admit to ourselves that their death may have been the first genocide. Or, worse, not the first - merely the first of which evidence survives. It may follow from this that we are descended from a million years of ruthless victories, genetically predisposed by the sins of our fathers to do likewise again and again. As the anthropologist Milford Wolpoff has written on this period: "You can't imagine one human population replacing another except through violence.""

Our specialization is the brain. The flexibility of the brain's interactions with nature, through culture, has been the key to our success. Cultures can adapt far more quickly than genes to new threats and needs.

Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making.

Geologically speaking, 3 million years is only a wink, one minute of earth's day. But in human terms, the Old Stone Age is a deep abyss of time - more than 99.5 per cent of our existence - from which we crawled into the soft beds of civilization only yesterday. Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, is between ten and twenty times older than the oldest civilization. But measured as subjective human experience - as a sum of individual lives - more people have lived a civilized life than any other.' Civilization does not run deep in time, but it runs wide, for it is both the cause and the effect of a population boom that has yet to level off.

To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.

John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan, who scoffed at conservation and told them it was "still morning in America."" Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers.