A Short History of Progress

"Wright is a very thoughtful writer and this is a very interesting and analytical book – it’s not at all a piece of tub thumping. He’s examining the myth of progress. I don’t mean myth in the sense that it’s a lie, I mean in the sense of the guiding story that our civilisation lives by. Wright says that all civilisations live by myths, that we all have stories that we believe in about the way the world is. One of our myths is the idea of progress – that things always get better and that we are moving in a step-by-step evolutionary process towards a better life. In some ways that is true. We can look back over the last hundred years in the western world and see that medicine, science and technology have got better and we have more democracy. So we can look at these and say progress is real. But if you look at the big sweep of human civilisation over the last 10,000 or 15,000 years, then progress is a lot more bumpy. It goes up and down. The really interesting thing about Wright’s book is his examination of why what we regard as progress happened in the first place. He finds that more often than not it’s an accident, and what we regard as a deliberate step forward to a new and better form of society is often actually something that’s done in order to make up for a mistake that happened before. “If you look at the big sweep of human civilisation over the last 10,000 or 15,000 years, then progress is a lot more bumpy. It goes up and down.” He sees progress as a series of traps which, far from improving life for everybody, just force us into this machine – this strange civilisation which goes faster and faster. And as it does so, it eats up all its own natural resources, creates a society which grips its citizens tighter and tighter, and needs more and more economic growth until at a certain stage it all collapses and the process begins again. Wright effectively turns the story of progress on its head. For example, he takes a good look at agriculture. He says that humans develop advanced technologies which give them more capabilities. These capabilities are then used to expand their ability to control and kill things. Then they find they’re in a trap, and they have to find new technologies to get themselves out of it. For example, he looks at Paleolithic hunting. He demolishes the idea that there was a pre-civilisation hunter-gatherer paradise that we should return to. He says that in the Paleolithic period, hunter gatherers began to develop much more effective tools such as spears and bows and arrows, and became much better at hunting. If you look at the paleontological evidence, you find enormous hunting sites where thousands of animals are killed in one go with this new technology. Humans then begin to spread to all continents on earth, and they take this sophisticated hunting technology with them. As a result, you have a mass extinction of animals. Humans get so good at hunting the large fauna that they end up creating a new problem for themselves to solve – they haven’t got enough food left to hunt. They have expanded their number to a point where they have got a lot of mouths to feed, but because they have been so good at hunting there’s not enough left to feed them with. It’s at this point that agriculture begins to develop. Wright presents the development of agriculture not as a leap which we made because it leads to a better life, but as a necessity that we had to adopt because we got too good at hunting and gathering. It’s fascinating to read the US geneticist Spencer Wells’s book Pandora ’ s Seed in tandem with Wright. Wells produces evidence from archaeology and paleontology that shows that when you move from hunter gathering to agriculture, human welfare goes right down – life expectancy falls and human health as measured by the size of skeletons goes down. “Humans get so good at hunting that they end up creating a new problem for themselves to solve – they haven’t got enough food left to hunt.” This completely destroys the idea that agriculture was developed because it was a better system. It was developed because man became too good at hunter gathering. Then of course we developed agriculture and got good at that too. As a result, the population increased and we have to create more food to sort that problem out. Maybe that’s just what humans do. The good thing about Wright’s book is that it’s not political in that sense. He’s not saying: Look at these bad things and let’s do good things instead. He’s just saying that this seems to be the way human evolution works. Wright uses the phrase “the progress trap” throughout the book. Every new technology we develop creates a problem, and we have to develop a new technology to solve the problem caused by the previous one. But every step takes us further into a more complex, hierarchical and destructive civilisation."