“It’s very vain to think books can ever change anything,” Ronald Wright said calmly during a conversation last Friday, just a few hours before he delivered the last of his five-part Massey Lecture, A Short History of Progress. “With Orwell’s 1984, we could see the character of oppression under totalitarianism. Orwell defined it in a way that a wide sector of the population can now recognize it.”
As the 2004 Massey Lecturer-a distinction he shares with speakers like Martin Luther King Jr., Doris Lessing, and John Ralston Saul who came before him-one of Wright’s aims from the start was to address the widest audience possible. The annual Massey Lecture is, after all, the most widely listened-to and publicized intellectual event of the year in Canada, with hundreds of people coming to see the cross-country lecture tour live, and thousands more listening to it on CBC. Wright obviously felt it was necessary to reach everybody.
“It made the book a much leaner animal than if I had written a purely non-fiction book,” he said. A Short History of Progress weighs in at a modest 132 pages, if one excludes the 54 pages of detailed endnotes. And yet reading it is to confront the overwhelming weight of civilization’s past mistakes. On a grand tour of historic iniquities, genocide, exploitation, and arrogance, Wright guides his readers gently but firmly through the wreckage of deep history, pointing here and there to the patterns of human folly along the way.
From the first page, Ronald Wright’s latest book trembles with anxiety about the health of our present age. A Short History of Progress’ subject is human history (ancient history at that), but its thesis is aimed unquestionably at the present. But references to contemporary events are conspicuously absent from the book. The result is a timeless work uncluttered by the partisan punditry that might have characterized it had he taken a different, more contemporary approach. Though he’s plumbing the past for the lessons of history, Wright is undeniably looking to the future.
“My intention was to try and recognize the patterns in the behaviours of human societies that persist through time,” said Wright, who is trained as an archaeologist. “I think they speak for themselves, so I didn’t feel that I had to keep underlining that this behaviour is still in evidence today. The way we behave as creatures transcends cultural differences, and differences of time and place. We essentially behave like ice age mammoth hunters, despite the changing specifics of technology, of what we eat, of how we live.”
Concise, urgent, and at times darkly prophetic, the message of A Short History of Progress is chillingly simple: Civilizations have almost always collapsed, so why should ours be any different? And this might be the good news-the bad news is that our civilization is more decadent than any other in human history, and our global interdependence would mean global collapse.
Discussing the responsibilities of the artist with Wright, I was reminded of the cantankerous German philosopher who wrote that “it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist…the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” In other words: engaged and timely art need not be a recipe for salvation, but art should illuminate and describe the anxiety and fear in which it is rooted.
A Short History of Progress is exactly that kind of art: timely, razor-sharp, grimly accurate. But to understand what this book is, it’s worth mentioning what it is not: it is not a dense history of civilization that buckles under the weight of its own words; nor does it prescribe a cure for the perennial misery of humankind. So much for “spotlighting alternatives.” A Short History of Progress is a small, elegant, and timely text that proceeds innocently with the broad-stroke, and almost childlike question: “Where are we going?”
If the past is any indicator, Wright suggests that we too will go the way of our predecessors, and perhaps sooner than we think. Examining the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Rome, Maya, and Easter Island, Wright describes how each society exhausted its “natural capital,” as he calls it, while lusting after the ideal of “progress,” That lust, he says, destroyed them.
That the song remains the same becomes painfully clear throughout the course of Wright’s argument. So much, in fact, that at times it appears that humans are plagued by a nature that is hopelessly-perhaps genetically-flawed. When pressed on this idea of what ails the human animal, Wright’s answer is only faintly optimistic.
“We are short sighted, and that’s our problem. That doesn’t matter so much when things move very slowly, but we live at a time when things are moving very fast, and our ability to foresee the consequences of our own actions is very limited. And the actions are so powerful, the consequences could be so dire, that somehow we’ve got to either find a way to see further ahead, or say ‘Look, we just can’t move this fast, because we’re driving beyond the limits of our vision.'”
When what persists in human nature seems almost interchangeable with “human error,” is it possible that we might have the foresight needed to change direction? It is this question that ultimately fuels Wright’s book, and it is this question that he insists remains unanswered.
“I’m not despairing. I don’t think it impossible to get out of this fix. But it’s going to be touch and go. The one advantage we have is in knowing that societies that have been careless have always hit the wall-they’ve used their natural capital and collapsed. Luckily, we know about them. So we should, if we’re really as intelligent as we think we are, be able to avoid repeating that pattern.”
Perhaps we ought to try and prove that he’s right.
