A Short History of Progress

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Progress Trap as a Unanimous Cultural Pattern

The concept of the progress trap, first mentioned in Chapter 1, is the overarching theme of Wright’s text. Wright argues that “all cultures, past and present, are dynamic. Even the most slow-moving were, in the long run, works in progress” (8). Progress innately leads to development and expansion, and the progress trap, as he writes, is a “devil [that] lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and recklessness, between need and greed” (8). Put more succinctly, the progress trap is a cultural adaptation that causes excessive collection of resource wealth, leading first to luxury and then inevitable collapse due to overtaxed ecosystems. It is “an internal logic [of progress] that can lead beyond reason into catastrophe” (5).

Wright uses the concept of the progress trap to suggest that paying attention to the courses of cultural expansion, shortage, and decline will allow us to make better decisions on present-day resource use. As he writes, “we should be alarmed by the predictability of our mistakes but encouraged that this very fact makes them useful” (8). We all live, in short, in a progress trap. It is the progress trap which makes histories “short” in the first place, cutting off cultures just as they reach their peak due to the unsustainability of their economic climbs. The progress trap shows us how the failures of societies are written into their very successes.

Social Stratification as a By-product of Urban Civilization

Anthropological theory consistently attributes the origin of the first urban centres to the development of agriculture. As people began to sow and reap seeds, they were required to cease their nomadic habits and settle in one place, thereby developing the first towns and hamlets that became, over time, the great cities of the ancient world.

As an anthropologist, Wright is aware of this dynamic. He also argues that the development of agricultural surplus, as well as the innate confines of the urban space, lead not only to bigger cities and higher populations, but the development of social hierarchies. As he writes, “sometimes the trouble […] lies in social structure, in the way people tend to behave when squeezed together in urban civilizations, where power and wealth rise upward and the many are ruled by the few” (56).

This is certainly not a new anthropological idea, though Wright does more closely link the development of elites to the decline of civilizations than some other theorists. This linkage is argued most clearly in Chapter 4, “Pyramid Schemes,” when Wright outlines how both social and agricultural pyramids arise from the building (and ultimately crumbling) blocks of nature. However, it is not only empires that organize themselves in social hierarchies that inevitably cause their falls. Even the people of Easter Island, a single, disconnected landmass floating in the ocean, developed their maoi as a system of cultural elitism.

The Innate Barbarism of Humanity

Throughout Chapters 1 and 2, Wright covers the known history of early human evolution. As he does, he formulates an argument about human nature: that we are essentially biped apes running “twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago” (35). Throughout Chapter 2, Wright uses an explanation of early hominid evolution and the potentially violent extinction of Neanderthals to prove this argument. This history also becomes his text’s first example of how human violence and greed may be bred in the bone—something we are evolved to carry out.

There is not an archaeological consensus on whether homo sapiens were responsible for Neanderthal extinction, but one must admit that there is great evidence of later war and genocide in the historical record. The consistent histories of war across the span of human existence reminds us, again, that human civilization is not a story of linear progress, but the same follies and frailties repeating themselves again and again. As Wright says it, “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” (34).

Human barbarity does not only manifest itself in outright violence towards other communities, but the relentless grasping at power that typifies all developed societies, with their economically entrenched structures of elites and serfs. In his continued evidence of historical power struggles, Wright reminds that none of us are moral creatures, and we are all predisposed to take as much as we can. In this interpretation of history, Wright is highly skeptical of the moral credulity of modern civilizations, their advancement over those of the ancients, and the long-term survivability of the human species.