A Short History of Progress. Ronald Wright. 2004
I first ran across this little gem while listening to some Podcasts from Ideas. It is exactly what it says it is and it relates the recurring way that the human race has fouled its own nest from the pre-historic genocide practiced on the Neanderthals to the probable garden of Eden to Easter Island to the Aztecs to the present. In each case, we humans have destroyed the society that we have built by damaging the environment on which it was built. I won’t rehearse it all here but several examples will serve.
The inhabitants of the Easter Islands chose to worship their gods by building huge stone monuments in their image. To do this required a great deal of wood so they cut down trees – the same trees they used to build the boats which they used to catch their food after they had eaten all the animals on the islands. Finally, they had cut down all the trees on the islands and were unable to travel far enough to get wood elsewhere because their last boats were rotting. Wright asks us to imagine what it must have been like to knowingly cut down that last tree – and I think we should hold that thought in our heads today as we continue to consume the fossil fuels that will doom us.
They still carried on carving their stony gods, only, without wood they had to leave them in the quarry. Also, without wood, they could not fish. They could not farm because, having cut down all the trees, the topsoil was eroded away by rain. So, they starved to death.
By the way, if you think that this was a one time only event, the same thing (most likely) happened to the Greenland colony of Vikings in the late Middle Ages.
Wright remarks, in passing, on the extinctions of many of the larger mammals by human hunting parties, a hobby that we are happily pursuing by other means today (we can’t even use the excuse that we are hungry).
While the fall of the Roman Empire is enormously more complex than the fall of, say, Babylon, the same rule of thumb applies. The Romans destroyed agriculture by wiping out the family farms and replacing them with Latifundia (giant farms tended by slaves), eliminated a limited democracy by handing power over to warlords and institutionalized poverty by allowing a few people to accumulate unimaginable wealth. They spent enormous sums that they often did not have on the defense of the Empire while most of the people within it lived in poverty. Rome did not fall too soon.
Wright’s message is that there is a pattern to human history, even when it becomes more and more complex; that we can see ourselves in the Easter Island tale and in Rome, if we look carefully enough. And that is not a comforting message – but it is an apt warning.
Wright leaves out one of the greatest collapses of all, and, until recently, one of the most mysterious. About 1200BC the eastern Mediterranean was surrounded by a group of advanced civilizations that shared trade with each other, communicated well with each other, and, yes, fought the occasional war with each other. On the whole they achieved the closest thing to globalism that would come around again for a very long time. And then, just when everything was going fine, they all, or mostly all, collapsed. The only clear survivor was the Egyptians. The Achaeans (the Bronze Age Greeks who conquered Troy), the Hittites, the wealthy islanders of Cyprus, and the Assyrians (as well as lots of others) all went down and the fall was so complete that besides leaving extensive ruins and little else, it signaled the end of the Bronze Age.
Why did they fall? No one knows for sure. It was long thought that they were taken out by the “Sea Peoples,” but no one knows who they were or where they came from and only the Egyptians seem to have fought them off, according to their own records. So the question remains, why did a highly civilized, wealthy, sophisticated mutually supportive group of communities turn overnight into smoking ruins? The answer is partially provided by Eric H. Cline in his book 1177 BC: The Year that Civilization Collapsed. In a nutshell, it was no one thing that brought it all down, but a series of body blows, any one or two of which it could have shrugged off. There was drought, probably caused by a change in climate, there were signs of a plague in most of the city ruins. There was an uprising of the poor because wealth distribution was not effective and there was a small, very wealthy, upper class, spending conspicuously. Then the Sea People showed up. The entire structure collapsed under all of these problems arriving at almost the same time. A lot of this sounds drearily familiar.
As Wright quotes the adage: “Each time that history repeats itself, the price goes up.”
So, if you don’t mind a bit of a scary read, A Short History of Progress is a really good introduction to how we better start getting our act together.
