“Now is our last chance to get the future right.”
Urgent and succinct, this was the closer that Ronald Wright intoned without ceremony to a capacity crowd at the fifth and final installment of the 43rd annual Vincent Massey Lectures this Friday past.
Entitled “The Rebellion of the Tools”, Wright’s lecture was the last in his series A Short History of Progress, which traveled from Ottawa to Edmonton, Saskatoon to Halifax, before bringing its stirring critique of civilization home to U of T’s MacMillan Theatre.
The audience lapped up Wright’s wise words, clapping ebulliently when he strayed from his elegant text to take equally elegant jabs at Missile Defence, the regressive policies of Dubya et. al.., and the inherent contradictions of the Christian Right, referring to the latter as “Social Darwinists who don’t believe in Darwin.”
The tone of the evening was palpably sombre, however, and his lecture deftly called into question some of Western civilization’s most deeply held beliefs: progress, hope, market fundamentalism, democracy-all were approached with healthy and informed scepticism, as he charted the bleak roster of humanity’s “achievements,” and our hubristic destruction of the earth. One hopes that audience members thought seriously about this as they cruised home in their SUVs.
Wright’s Massey Lectures, also available as a book, will air on CBC’s Ideas this week.
