A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright

The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes.

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking," Albert Einstein wrote, "and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes."

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.

"Man," wrote the great anthropologist and writer Loren Eiseley, "is himself a flame. He has burned through the animal world and appropriated its vast stores of protein for his own.""

At the gates of the Colosseum and the concentration camp, we have no choice but to abandon hope that civilization is, in itself, a guarantor of moral progress.

But it is evidence of a familiar cultural pattern: leisure born of a food surplus.

As we domesticated plants, the plants domesticated us. Without us, they die; and without them, so do we. There is no escape from agriculture except into mass starvation, and it has often led there anyway, with drought and blight.

Antiquity, he wrote, "hath a certaine resemblance with eternity. [It] is a sweet food of the mind."'

carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash.... Do we have to repeat the experiment on [a] grand scale? ... Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?"

This compelling parallelism of ideas, processes, and forms tells us something important: that given certain broad conditions, human societies everywhere will move towards greater size, complexity, and environmental demand.

sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory.