A Short History of Progress

“Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes.”

In this passage humans are positioned as both part of the animal kingdom and unique within it. As much as we are citizens of the earth, we are also its stewards. This passage communicates a central warning of Wright’s text. Without learning form history, we are doomed to repeat it. If society collapses today, it may be the end of the human race.

“Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology—a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become a ‘myth’ in the anthropological sense […] Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patters that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations […] They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.”

Defining myth as a narrative that orients and helps to define a culture, Wright shows how the Victorian ideal of progress can be read as myth. This exposes the reader to the idea that the concept of historical progress is a fabrication. Though modern culture lives within this fabrication, it is no truer than stories of old. Reading progress as primarily a mythic structure instead of resting on its definition as an ideology also reminds the reader that there are other myths out there, other narratives by which societies can define and direct themselves.

“All cultures, past and present, are dynamic. Even the most slow-moving were, in the long run, works in progress.”

Though different in scale, all cultures progress along the same approximate trajectory. Since all cultures are works in progress, the histories of their collapse can teach us something about our own future. In understanding what ancient peoples did not see about their own resource use, we can come to better terms with our own habits of consumption. Furthermore, acknowledging all cultures as works in progress defeats a conception that Western cultures are somehow superior to indigenous ones.

“In the fates of such societies—once mighty, complex, and brilliant—lie the most instructive lessons for our own. Their ruins are shipwrecks that mark the shoals of progress. Or—to use a more modern analogy—they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong. In this book, I want to read some of these boxes in the hope that we can avoid repeating past mistakes, of flight plan, crew selection, and design.”

Wright’s concept of archaeology is that reading the past may help us to decode the future. In the metaphor of the airliner’s black box, he articulates how ancient civilizations leave a material record of what caused their collapse, which current-day scientists can decode. His extended metaphor on the selection of “flight plan, crew selection, and design” indicts political policy, leadership, and economic/governmental models as important determinative factors in our communal history.

“If it turns out that the Neanderthals disappeared because they were an evolutionary dead end, we can merely shrug and blame natural selection for their fate. But if they were in fact a variant or race of modern man, then we must admit to ourselves that their death may have been the first genocide. Or, worse, not the first—merely the first of which evidence survives. It may follow from this that we are descended from a million years of ruthless victories, genetically predisposed by the sins of our fathers to do likewise again and again. As the anthropologist Milford Wolpoff has written on this period: ‘You can’t imagine one human population replacing another except through violence.’”

Prior to this passage Wright has “sketched” (24) a picture of warfare between the first anatomically modern humans and Neanderthal groups that he himself mentions may not have “any truth to it” (24). While we do know these two groups were in evolutionary competition, we are not certain whether this conflict was a structured antagonism or a gradual assimilation. Later, Wright also argues that this conflict “parked innovations” in tool and art use. These are both possibilities, but not the only theories regarding the historical facts. The section is an example of how Wright uses historical analysis and his skill as a storyteller to create specific narratives out of unknown historical events.

“The modern human animal—our physical being— is a generalist… Our specialization is our brain. The flexibility of the brain’s interaction with nature, through culture, has been the key to our success. Cultures can adapt far more quickly than genes to new threats and needs.”

Wright Proposes a Darwinian model of the brain. The brain produces language and culture, which are the key adaptations that have given humanity its success over other predators and the environment. This is a common, albeit somewhat simplified, way of looking at culture within an evolutionary paradigm. Wright straddles a scientific argument and the common sense notion of human mental capacity above other species in this passage.

“We have already caused so many extinctions that our dominion over the earth will appear in the fossil record like the impact of an asteroid. So far, we are only a small asteroid compared with the one that clobbered the dinosaurs. But if the extinctions continue much longer, or if we unleash weapons of mass destruction—I mean the real ones kept in stockpiles by the great powers—then the next layer of fossils will indeed show a major hiatus in this planet’s life.”

This passage frames a relatively recent concept in geology and philosophy, the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the period of time in which the human activity is visible in the geological record. Hypothetical archaeologists of the future would be able to detect human presence through unnatural extinctions, depositions, mines, and terraforming. Wright paraphrases this concept to emphasize human fragility; there have been other great extinctions on Earth, and humanity is not impervious to a similar fate.

“The Old Stone Age is a deep abyss of time—more than 99.5 per cent of our existence […] But measured as subjective human experience—as a sum of individual lives—more people have lived a civilized life than any other […] Archaeologists generally agree that the first civilizations were those of Sumer—in Southern Mesopotamia, or what is now Iraq—and Egypt, both emerging about 3000 BC. By 1000 BC, civilization ringed the world.”

Humanity’s emergence out of deep, unrecorded time is incredibly recent, even if we only use the appearance of anatomically modern humans as our outward bracket. Yet, since it is all of our recorded history, it is the only life we know, and we have a tendency to believe it is natural, sustainable, and will last forever. In fact, as evidence from Mesopotamia shows, it has only lasted a few thousand years. 

“The moral values attached to civilization are specious: too often used to justify attacking and dominating other, less powerful, societies. In their imperial heyday, the French had their ‘civilizing mission’ and the British their ‘white man’s burden’—the bearing of which was eased by automatic weapons […] Nowadays, Washington claims to lead and safeguard ‘the civilized world,’ a tradition in American rhetoric that began with the uprooting and exterminating of that country’s first inhabitants […] At the gates of the Colosseum and the concentration camp, we have no choice but to abandon hope that civilization is, in itself, a guarantor of moral progress.”

Wright’s litany of war crimes and colonial genocides reminds that we must not equate civilizational and technological advancement with moral progress. While there have been progressions in the legal protections of people and the limits to war in recent centuries, we may argue these are only flimsy membranes against a much deeper human nature that is defined by destruction and greed. Wright reminds that cultural rhetoric such as the white man’s burden or the more recent concept of American freedom are incredibly important tools—technologies in their own right—for justifying atrocity.

“Among the things we need to know about ourselves is that the Upper Paleolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all you can kill wildlife barbecue. The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game.”

Humanity’s first “progress trap” was the perfection of paleolithic hunting techniques—primarily in the use of projectile spears and cliff-runs. The important aspect of the progress trap shown here is that the very means of excess predict their own ends: excess meat sets off a chain reaction that leads to meat shortage.

“The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway […] The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ‘ideological pathology,’ as some anthropologists call it […] The one innovation of this end-period was to turn the use of obsidian (a razor-keen volcanic glass) from toolmaking to weapons. Daggers and spearheads became the commonest artefacts on the island.”

Describing the fall of Easter Island’s civilization due to reckless pursuit of cult image creation, Wright introduces the concept of an “ideological pathology,” a cultural or individual perspective that leads to negative effects on that culture. He also harkens back to the symbolisms of both weaponry and the airliner’s black box, remarking that the material record of the island shifted towards weaponry. This indicates how archaeology, the examination of the material record, can help determine the course of cultural progress and decline. It also evokes the human barbarity lurking just under the surface of surplus.

“By 2500 BC, the days of collective landholding and corporation were gone; the fields now belonged to lords and great families. The Sumerian populace became serfs and sharecroppers, and beneath them was a permanent underclass of slaves—a feature of Western civilization that would last until the nineteenth century after Christ.”

In the pages preceding this passage, Wright described the development of Sumerian civilization in the land of Mesopotamia since 6000 BC, starting as a cluster of small agrarian villages and becoming one of the great city-states of the Old World. Within a few thousand years, this growth also brought with it some of the first evidence of a very familiar social hierarchy. Remarking on the consistency of this societal differentiation up until even the modern day, Wright reminds how central it is to the human pursuit of “progress.”

“Violence is as old as man, but civilizations commit to it with a deliberation that lends it special horror. In the Death Pit of Ur we can glimpse all the mass graves to come, down through 5,000 years to Bosnia and Rwanda and full circle to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein who, like the ancient kings of the land, had his name stamped on the bricks used to rebuild their monuments.”

Violence is a trademark of human existence, and the coercive use of violence by ruling classes to subjugate or expand is endlessly historically iterated. Through analysis of the developments of wealth in tandem with the developments of military power and ritual slaughter, Wright welds human histories of violence to the history of civilization itself. Violence is, in short, a technology: a tool for empire building.

“In my dystopian novel, A Scientific Romance, a character calls civilization ‘a pyramid scheme,’ and a few years later I used the phrase for the title of an article that became the seed of this book. A pyramid of stone or brick, which may also take the shape of colossal statues, tombs, or office towers, is the outward and visible sign of a human social pyramid. And the human pyramid is in turn carried by a less visible natural pyramid—the food chain and all other resources in the surrounding ecology, often termed ‘natural capital’.”

Wright uses the symbol of the pyramid to extensive effect. First, he unites the pyramid both to the maoi of Easter Island and their prestige display, and to the modern skyscrapers that decorate our own modern cities and show off their wealth. Second, the pyramid is the structural symbol of both social hierarchies and agricultural models. Both these systems subjugate an extensive lower class, be they people or landscapes, and use them as resources to feed the elites at the top.

“On a typical second century day, the sun would rise on Han China, pass over the Buddhist stupas of Marion India, glare down on the brick ruins of the Indus and Euphrates valleys, and take more than two hours to traverse the Roman lake of the Mediterranean. By the time it was noon at Gibraltar, worshippers would be greeting the dawn from the tops of pyramids in highland Mexico, the Guatemalan jungle, and the irrigated valleys of Peru. Only as the sun moved west across the Pacific would it shine on no cities or stone temples, but even here the planting and building had already begun—from Fiji to the Marquesas, the first Polynesian stepping stones across the ocean hemisphere.”

Wright displays a sweeping knowledge of the history of ancient civilizations, and a rare depiction of several ancient cultures in historical context with each other. Perhaps more stirring is his situation of this coverage of ancient societies within the metaphor of a sunrise. The metaphor allows us to see all these great civilizations, now shining in the sun, as locked into an inevitable scheme of rise and fall. Just as surely as the sun will come up in the morning, it will set in the evening, and these civilizations with it will fall into shadow. Wright as such reminds us of his central thesis: the inevitable progress and collapse of all the Earth’s great cultures.

“The unsavory truth is that until the mid-nineteenth century, most cities were death traps, seething with disease, vermin, and parasites. Average life expectancy in ancient Rome was only nineteen or twenty years—much lower than at Neolithic Çatal Hüyük, but slightly better than in Britain’s black country, evoked so vividly by Dickens, where the average fell to seventeen or eighteen.”

There are many similarities between ancient civilizations and modern ones. These include trajectories of public land into private hands, obscene wealth differentiation, and ecological unsustainability. One difference between the ancient and modern world is the survivability of the city, as this passage attests. Though still formulated on the same basic system of agriculture, industrial advances allow our human way of life to be more survivable today than in the Old World. Of course, this also puts us at increased risk of overpopulation. 

“The pre-Classic Maya (along with the Olmecs) were the first people in the world to develop full positional numerals with the concept of zero […] Mesoamerica was only one of three or four places to invent writing, which the Maya developed into a phonetic as well as glyphic system […] Using their advanced arithmetic in a calendar known as the Long Count, the Maya charted the mystery of time […] the most accurate astronomy until Europe’s Renaissance.”

We tend to think of Mesoamerican civilization as a primitive culture, or one shrouded in the mystery of modern temple ruins buried in deep rainforest. In their own time, however, the Maya were a highly advanced farming people—the sizes of their cities rivalled those of Rome, and their powers of calculation were the best in the world. Wright reminds us to look beyond our contemporary cultural projections when examining the cultures of the past. This will help to dissolve our idea of history’s linear progress, and our cultural exemption from the risk of extinction.

“The ornate Maya city of Copan, which stands in a Honduran valley surrounded by steep hills, fell into a common trap—one that is costing millions of acres around the world today. The city began as a small village on good bottom land beside a river, a rational and harmless settlement pattern at first. But as it grew, it paved over more and more of its best land. Farmers were driven up onto fragile hillside soils whose anchoring timber had been cleared. As the city died, so much salt washed down that whole houses and streets were buried.”

For those who have read the previous chapters, this description of the agricultural decline of a Mayan city is familiar. The cultures of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece suffered the same fates due to similar processes of soil erosion, also clearcutting trees that provided anchoring timber with their roots. In mentioning the millions of acres lost today, Wright connects these processes to modern agricultural issues, warning of similar imminent collapse. The passage’s final image, that of the city of Copan being buried in a deluge of its own making, is a poignant symbol that operates on both a literal and figurative level. 

“In a century and a half, Copan’s population had shot up from about 5000 to 28,000 […] Copan’s fivefold surge in just a century and a half is exactly the same rate of increase as the modern world’s leap from about 1.2 billion in 1850 to 6 billion in 2000. As the crisis gathered, the response of the rulers was not to seek a new course […] they dug in their heels […] their solution was higher pyramids […] more power to the kings […] the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.”

Wright’s text is littered with comparisons of past cultures and their problems to the issues of today. Among them, these statistics on the collapse of a prominent Mayan city seem the most eerie, due primarily to the perfect analogy of the ratios. Identifying Mayan leadership through terms familiar today, Wright further suggests that contemporary leaders must acknowledge climatological and wealth disparity issues if they wish to avoid the same fate.

“Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee—or watch out for—long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid.”

At the outset of Chapter 5 Wright surveys the argument he has made so far. Upward mobility at the expense of environmental balance unanimously precipitates cultural collapse. This may be a result of evolutionary adaptation towards surplus or may simply be greed. Wright seems to suggest that in reality it is a mix of both, walking the line between a deterministic and non-deterministic view of human progress. Whatever the reader believes, they must by this point in the text acknowledge the trend. 

“The numbers (insofar as they can be estimated) break down as follows: a world population of about 200 million at Rome’s height, in the second century AD; about 400 million by 1500, when Europe reached the Americas; one billion people by 1825, at the start of the Coal Age; 2 billion by 1925, when the Oil Age gets under way; and 6 billion by the year 2000. Even more startling than the growth is the acceleration. Adding 200 million after Rome took 13 centuries; adding the last 200 million took only three years.”

At the start of the chapter, Wright notes “each time history repeats   itself, the price goes up” (107). The Earth’s populations rise exponentially. At the same time as these increasing billions of mouths put more load on our limited resources, the collapse they may cause will affect more lives. In a sense, the stakes of societal progress have become more dire even as their likelihood increases. These two mutually accelerating factors make full or partial societal and ecological collapse not only dire, but (arguably) imminent.

“The Aztec and Inca treasures were only a down payment on all the gold and silver that would flow across the Atlantic for centuries. Karl Marx was among the first economists to see that, financially, the Industrial Revolution begins with Atahaulpa’s gold. The New World’s widowed acres—and above all its crops—would prove far more valuable than its metal in the long run. At their Thanksgiving dinners, devout Americans thank their God for feeding them in a ‘wilderness.’ They then devour a huge meal of turkey, maize, beans, squash, pumpkin and potatoes. All these foods had been developed over thousands of years by New World civilizations.”

The agriculture of the American first-nations peoples provided Europe and its colonial project with more surplus than it could possibly extract from its own continent. This took form both as the vast mineral resources of the New World, drawn from mines worked by indigenous slaves that survived colonial wars and pestilence, as well as the crops inherited by the Europeans after most of these indigenous farming populations were wiped out. These funds allowed the cultural advances of Europe that we now see as so indicative of Western culture, including the Industrial Revolution and foundational American rituals such as Thanksgiving. This new interpretation of the history of colonialism reminds how important the base of indigenous agriculture and economy was to the advanced world culture that we enjoy today. 

“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense. Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it.”

Wright reframes the modern history of liberty and democracy of the West. To do so he references Francis Fukuyama’s famous argument that the development of Western liberal democracy represented the “end of history:” the natural end of human political development and the peak of human liberty in government. This reading of history has since been problematized by evidence of continued global human rights abuse under democratic systems, as well as Wright’s argument here—that this style of government was only made possible through the destruction of other civilizations and the theft of their resources.