A Short History of Progress Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

A Short History of Progress Book

No hope, just an awareness of what's being done now and what's been done in the past, is what Ronald Wright will permit in A Short History of Progress, his grim, ammoniacal Massey Lectures, the 43rd in the series. In five lucid, meticulously documented essays, Wright traces the rise and plummet of four regional civilizations--those of Sumer, Rome, Easter Island, and the Maya--and judges that most, perhaps all, of humanity is making and will continue to make mistakes equally disastrous as theirs. He gives general reasons first for not reckoning we'll pull back from the brink. Important among them is an anthropological observation. As individuals, we live long lives. We evolve more slowly than we should, given our lack of vision and our aggressive, selfish nature. We seem to lack the collective wisdom and the insight into cause and effect to realize the limits to what Wright calls the "experiment" of civilization. What Wright calls natural "subsidies" underwrite civilizations' successes. The squandering of those gifts presages inevitable failure, but with careful, canny stewardship, a civilization can manage to muddle through eons. Wright cites Egypt's submission to the limits set by the Nile's annual floods and China's windblown "lump-sum deposit" of topsoil, used for hillside paddies instead of being put to the plough. Wright observes with unrelenting eloquence that our planetary civilization lives precariously, far beyond its means. "Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes," he acknowledges, neither claiming nor wanting to be a prophet. We certainly have the tools for change and remediation; we also know what our ancestors did wrong and what happened to them. We're faced, our author observes, with two choices: either do nothing--what he calls "one of the biggest mistakes"--or try to effect "the transition from short-term to long-term thinking." His evidence suggests we're taking the first alternative, which will include a swift, final ride into the dark future on the runaway train of progress. Wright's account tempts one to bet on the rats and roaches. --Ted WhittakerRead More

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  • Product Description

    Albert Einstein called progress 'the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal', and in this timely book Ronald Wright shows how the twentieth century's runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology have placed a murderous burden on the planet. Asking where this growth lead, whether it can be consolidated or sustained and what kind of world the present bequeathing to the future, he argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilisation, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

  • 1841957119
  • 9781841957111
  • Ronald Wright
  • 1 September 2005
  • Canongate Books Ltd
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 211
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