I’ve just finished reading An Illustrated Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, which comes from Canada's famous Massey Lectures series. Wright is one Canada’s finer intellectual lights, with a background in archaeology, history, and comparative culture.

In the book, Wright uses all of these to examine human progress throughout history (up until the present) and to question whether it is a good or a bad thing. And of course, the answer must be “both.” There are positive aspects, and we’ve gained much through progress – better health, more leisure, more safety (in many places).
In the book however, Wright expresses a great deal of pessimism, as well. As he says, we went from the invention of gunpowder to the building of cannons, then to shells and bombs, and ultimately nuclear weapons, and as he says, “we have made rather too much progress.” He goes on to describe what he calls “progress traps” in other areas, as well – agriculture, medicine and more – in which we move from cleverness that last step to far into recklessness. In a classic example, he points out that Paleolithic hunters who learned to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress; when they figured out how to drive them over cliffs (such as at Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump Canada), and kill 200 at once, “they lived high for a while, and then starved.”

The book is really a pretty easy read, a straightforward conservationist plea for moderation and care in the use of the world’s resources. But Wright is a better writer than most, and in presenting his argument, he takes on a wonderful and whirlwind tour of the history of civilization on every continent.

He is a wealth of information on the Amerindian cultures of Central and South America, (Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents), which he compares to Greco-Roman civilization, and shows us what was happening during the heights of those at the same time in Peru and Mexico.

Human ingenuity, he asserts, is universal, but so is the human tendency to go too far, as Wright shows us on Easter Island, in the ancient land of Sumer, Rome and its American contemporary, the Mayan civilization. In all of these, he shows what went right, and then what – with too much progress – ultimately went wrong. All too often, as he points out, we simply wind up cashing “in all [our] natural capital.”

Maybe we humans simply lack the ability to foresee long-range consequences. Wright suggests that this might be in part due to the fact that elites in large-scale societies continue to prosper long after the environment and the common people begin to suffer. And since they have the power, and the vested interest in retaining both it and the status quo, it’s hard to stop the decline.

Wright also suggest, towards the end of the book, that the reason our own civilization has managed to continue its unabated profligacy is because it was able to loot the natural and human capital of two huge “unknown” continents, North and South America. He suggests, however, that unless we get to Mars and find there a civilization a la H.G. Wells, we’re out of places and peoples to plunder.

Wright ends the book with difficult predictions and not a lot of hope. He suggest that the economic interdependence of our current global marketplace means that collapse, if and when it comes again, will be global. Every kind of ideology – political or religious – will simply speed the collapse up, as it so often has in the past. Only “moderation and the precautionary principle” can save us.

I wonder, can we all chip in and send a copy to Washington and Ottawa – and perhaps London, Paris, Berlin, Beijing…

For what it's worth ... I have Barrack Obama as a MySpace friend and sent him the link to this post.

I've read the book, too, and it does end without offering a lot to feel hopeful about. If we had some mechanism to shift people off the idea that having more children than they or the world can afford is both a right and a duty, we might have a chance. But in the countries that can least afford to provide for children, it's easy to see why they think having lots of children is their best chance for their own physical and cultural survival in the short term. It's easy to see why they might not feel any obligation to look past that short term.
And overly-procreative poor people aren't the only problem. The chief beneficiaries of the US/global economy are utterly dependent on an endless supply of labourers so desperate that they'll do any nasty job for bare subsistence.
Maybe the answer is a nice steady, slow, inexorable plague that reduces the world's population most where it is most egregiously over-populated but gives us time to bury the dead sanitarily. With one or two billion people on earth, there might be an abundance of everything for everyone.
Wow! Finally a happy thought! I'll end on it.