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Do the Wright
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By PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS
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A Short History of Progress Some wicked men are rich,
Bad times elicit great art. From Tu Fu to Thomas Mann,
from Solon to Solzhenitsyn, the maxim holds true enough. During a previous imperial
catastrophe in Now on another ill-advised but altogether much more dangerous and destructive bender, in which it is also deaf to reason, the Land of the Brave ought to be producing an American Voltaire or Swift. But it has dismissed higher education on the whole as unproductive, made the term "intellectual" a pejorative (the post being easily filled by Bill O'Reilly and similarly loud-mouthed, empty-headed vulgarians), and ensured itself the posthumous title "Those Who Refused To Learn From The Lessons of History," since such lessons are difficult to absorb when most high schools have redefined history as America since 1776. Little wonder the only household name to observe
impertinently that the emperor is naked is Michael Moore, stand-up
philosopher, auteur, actor, author and a man who would find one of Norman
Mailer's shoes spacious enough to screen a feature documentary in, and house
a library, too. The Palme D'Or was surely What the United States needs at this moment, in fact, is Ronald Wright, but he's ours. Besides, Wright's definition of history makes the span of years between now and Thomas Jefferson amount to the twitch of a second hand on the timepiece that one feels certain dangles from a gold chain in his waistcoat pocket. For Wright, novelist, historian, scientist, essayist, inveterate traveller and my favourite travel writer bar none, feels like an Immortal based in the late 19th century. His is one of the last truly expansive and comprehensively erudite minds I am aware of, and while he is very much a part of his own time, so much of his intellect inhabits an often very, very distant past that his prose frequently takes on an aura of the classical. I find myself reading his books with the kind of reverence normally reserved for those of writers a millennium or more dead. Perhaps this practice was just as well, because A Short History of Progress — doubling as this fall's Massey Lectures — is the most important use of printed word and post-consumer recycled fibres I have seen since Jérôme Deshusses's Délivrez Prométhée, 25 years ago. Unlike the Swiss-French philosopher, whose ecologically themed critique of humanity was, to say the least, leadenly pessimistic and at times downright misanthropic, Wright's observations of past civilizations and predictions for our own fate drawn from them are guardedly optimistic. But don't break out the balloons yet. I have an aversion to pundits who tell us to read this or
that book, but I will make an exception here. I don't care if you have never
read and will never read any kind of book at all, but you must read this one.
If you can't read, pay someone to read it to you. Admittedly, I do have a
vested interest in your reading it — as do our six billion fellow earthlings,
not to mention an awful lot of flora and fauna. If each citizen were given a
copy by The book takes as its epigraph some lines from Ovid's Amores that conclude: "Clever human nature, victim of your inventions,/ disastrously creative,/ why cordon cities with towered walls?/ Why arm for war?" The book's subtext, skillfully alluded to, is the world's
biggest current human problem: It is tempting to see this book prefigured by all of his
previous work, from the shimmering insights of Time Among the Maya, a touching portrait of an all-but-lost
civilization, through the grim indictment of European colonists and their
genocide in the Americas of Stolen
Continents, right up to the initially playful and charming, then suddenly
profound and chilling Wellesian dystopia of A Scientific Romance. But I doubt if anyone could carry this
weight so long and remain as cheerful as Wright invariably seems. The
appalling series of barbaric acts following Sept.11, 2001, seems to have
threaded these pearls into their necklace. After all, it was, as Wright begins with a classic work of
art, a phoenix that rose from the ashes of “illness, poverty, and suicidal
despair”: Paul Gauguin’s vast and breathtaking canvas, the title of which is
written “boldly on the image.” It is “three childlike questions, simple yet
profound D'ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons
nous?Ö Where do we come from? What are we? Where are
we going?" The author tells us it is this last question that he intends
to answer, adding slyly that, despite its prophetic nature, he believes it
can be answered by answering the other two questions first. "If we see
clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behaviour
that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what
we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here." Unlike the
reader, Wright knew when he wrote that what the conclusions were, knew what
we are and what we have done. And what we are likely to do. Were he just
another New Age Jeremiah saying "woe unto us," it would be easy (and
comforting) to dismiss the following pages as paranoid fantasy. But Wright is
a Cambridge-educated scientist, and his synthesis of human achievement
assembles the leading edges in numerous disciplines, all backed up by hard
(at times adamantine) facts. In
summarizing our humble and hirsute origins in earth's zoo, he manages to make
those embarrassing relatives, the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, seem ..... well, human. Citing
the New Yorker cartoon that has a spruced-up Neanderthal in suit, tie and
fedora passing unnoticed on a As a species,
one of our most worrying traits is an ability to achieve absolutely nothing
for dozens of millennia at a stretch. Progress out of the numerous and
lengthy Stone Ages was not swift, and "prehistory, like history, tells
us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many
ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide." Here Wright
introduces his major theme, the "progress trap." Our perfection of
hunting skills resulted in a drastic decrease, and in some cases extinction,
of the animals we hunted. We clambered out of this trap by the invention of
farming, which led to "our greatest experiment: worldwide civilization."
Lest the reader sigh with pride at his ancestors' plucky, relentless
ingenuity, Wright adds: "Could civilization itself be another and much
greater trap?" Ever mindful
of the canvas upon which we all daub our lives — time — Wright periodically
creates a perspective that acts like a billiard rack, fencing in the bubbles
of fancy we may have set loose: "The Old Stone Age began 3 million years
ago ..... and ended only 12,000 years ago ..... in
human terms [it] is a deep abyss of time — more than 99.5 per cent of our
existence — from which we crawled into the soft beds of civilization only
yesterday." Yet more
people have lived a civilized life than any other sort. "Civilization
does not run deep in time, but it runs wide, for it is both the cause and the
effect of a population boom that has yet to level off," Wright says.
Perhaps to remind the reader that he is using "civilization" in its
formal, scientific sense, Wright tells us bluntly that civilized man has
always believed himself to be better than the "savage," but
"the moral values attached to civilization are specious: too often used
to justify attacking and dominating other, less powerful, societies. .....
Nowadays, The narrative
pace is breathless. Wright's urgency pulls like an ocean tide. He next tells
us that if the Old Stone Age seems impossibly far off, it is only six times
further back than the year 1 AD, and "the big changes since we left the
cave have all been cultural, not physical. A long-lived species like ours
can't evolve significantly over so short an interval. This means that while
culture and technology are cumulative, innate intelligence is not." He
notes that a Paleolithic child beamed down into the 21st century would have
an even chance at earning a degree in astrophysics: "We are running
twenty-first century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or
more. This may explain a lot of what we see in the news." Something
ought to explain it. Later on,
Wright suggests that a police report on Homo Sapiens would characterize him
as a serial killer, violent, self-destructive, very dangerous and not
especially intelligent. As the book moves through detailed studies of past
civilizations that civilized themselves back to savagery with puzzling
deliberation, and often through ideological pathologies that possessed them
with the ferocity of demons, the far horizon becomes steadily clearer.
"I have seen the future," as Leonard Cohen sings, "it is
murder." And there are now six billion suspects on our little planet. While the
cowboys of untrammeled capitalism, with their "free trade" rodeo,
are chastised for the irresponsibility of their rapacious greed, and while
Karl Marx is credited with much of the wisdom and scientific common sense
that could have stopped us talking to our pockets and started us listening to
the planet's myriad complaints before it was too late to reform, Wright is
not offering a socialist utopia, or indeed any kind of political solution. We
may well be forced to eat the rich (and anyone else weak and nutritious
enough to hunt down easily), but when we come to this pass, rich and poor
will be in the same boat. What Ronald
Wright is offering here are the facts about our future as a species. To say they are grim is an understatement as
ludicrous as to dismiss them as alarmist. They cannot be dismissed. And they
must be acted upon by each of us. The transmutation of our southern neighbour
from easygoing cowpoke to trigger-happy, militarized survivalist is not
entirely unexpected, yet it is also a symptom of its own causes. Like a dog
chasing its tail, it will only break the narrowing cycle when it bites
itself. In the meantime, as Wright points out, it leads the world in
destroying the environment through waste, greed and folly, which means we
shall all suffer unless those we elect to lead reveal some leadership and
intervene with Washington, some of whose Christian fundamentalists have said
they believe Jesus will return before the planet dies, so it is sacrilegious
to tend to earth's needs. Christianity is, after all, a death cult. My children
will suffer, and their children will endure enormous hardships unless we act
now, Wright says. That's how bad it is. "Necessity is always the
tyrant's plea," as Should we fail, we can perhaps console ourselves that the terminally bad times ushered in at least ought to provoke some fine twilight art. I, for one, however, will try to remember and act upon Ronald Wright's parting words: "Now is our last chance to get the future right." Our last chance ..... |
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