Just Finished Reading: A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (FP: 2004)

It seems that the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. Comparing crashed civilisations to crashed aircraft and their ruins to black box flight recorders (a truly brilliant metaphor I thought) the author builds his case with hard hitting point after hard hitting point. The case is that humanity is, seemingly and predictably, dumb as a box of rocks. Time and again civilisations get to a point where their growth begins to destroy their very foundations, where over farming, over grazing or other resource depletions undermine the progress that enabled them to get so far which, again inevitably, causing the whole thing to crash and burn. What’s worse of course is not only that previous civilisations have done the same thing – often in plain sight of the present top dog – but that the civilisation in question (Easter Island being a PRIME example) knows exactly when the last tree is felled or the last mine is tapped out or the last wild creature is killed and DOES IT ANYWAY fully aware of the consequences!

It’s not hard to see more than echoes of these dead, indeed often long dead, civilisations in our own with it profligate use of resources and its incessant mortgaging of all of our futures. We know exactly what will happen when we run out of oil and yet we expend a great deal of effort pumping the last barrel out of the last oil well and BURN it. We know exactly what will happen when we hunt the last ‘X’ to extinction to grind a bone into powder to ‘ensure’ an erection in old men who should know better. We know exactly what will happen when we pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm it enough so there’s no stopping it…. And yet we DO IT ANYWAY. The evidence is there to learn from. The smoking guns are still smoking in the jungles and deserts of the world often created by the very civilisations whose ruins sit surrounded by their own devastation. If you’ve ever wondered how the earliest civilisations managed to grow so powerful in a desert then you need to understand that the desert only came AFTER the civilisation and before they reached that point the Fertile Crescent was actually fertile and didn’t look like some post apocalyptical world (which is exactly what it is).

After a mere 132 pages you are left with the inescapable conclusion that we MUST learn this time before our civilisation falls too. Previous civilisations failed and somehow we managed to go on. But today our civilisation is global in reach and its fall will affect everyone. With its interweaved economic structure the crash will be HARD and many, many people will die in the crash itself and the inevitable fighting that will follow it as the survivors battle over the scraps. As the author sagely notes ‘we are running 21st century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more’. It’s of little surprise therefore that we act as we do both individually and collectively. But we do have a choice, we might still be essentially stone age humans barely out of the trees but we’re SMART apes. We can still learn from past mistakes and choose not to make them again. Hopefully with books like this we might actually have a chance. Short, punchy and damned impressive. Read it and at least you’ll be able to see us going to hell in a handcart rather than wondering what the hell is happening!