A slow death by progress
TheStar.com - A slow death by progress
If our global civilization dies, what's left to replace it?
Aug. 6, 2006. 10:08 AM
RONALD WRIGHT
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
The following was to be the keynote address by Ronald Wright to the Couchiching Conference this Thursday. Wright, the author of the bestselling book A Short History of Progress, had to withdraw from the conference at the last minute for personal reasons. The theme of this year's conference is "Wedded to Progress: For Better, For Worse." For more information, visit http://www.couch.ca.
For at least 60,000 years — ever since religious belief first shows itself in the burial rites of Neanderthal Man and the great cave paintings of the Old Stone Age — human societies have probed the mystery of existence with mythology and art. Then, a few centuries ago, the Enlightenment accompanied the rise of modern science and the world quickly became a lonely place, for Man deposed the gods and put himself in charge. And as industry began to remake both nature and society, Western civilization became conscious, for the first time ever, of runaway change, and therefore self-conscious about its destiny.
Literature on this theme is usually called "utopian" or "dystopian," depending on whether it pictures the best, or the worst, of all possible worlds: a future we think we might want, or one we know we don't want. For our purposes here, I'm defining "civilization" in an anthropological way — to mean complex societies with large populations based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings. When moral weight is attached to it, "civilization" can become a dangerous word. The notion that civilized people not only smell better but behave better than "savages" doesn't stand up well to scrutiny: The biggest and most notorious incidents of human sacrifice — the public killings of ancient Rome, the bonfires of the Spanish Inquisition, the Aztec heart-extractions, the Nazi death camps — were all the work of highly civilized folk. So-called savages have done no worse.
Almost everyone on Earth today is civilized in the technical sense: enjoying the fruits, and bearing the consequences, of an experiment that began when farming first arose in several key areas of the world — the Near East, the Americas, and Asia — soon after the end of the last Ice Age. This discovery is what archaeologists call the Neolithic or Farming Revolution. With it began a population boom that has yet to level off.
By about 5,000 years ago, farming had led to the first big towns and cities; to specialists and priesthoods; to kingdoms, empires, and theocracies; to the rule of the many by the few. For those at the top it brought wonderful things: most of art, literature, music, and science. For the masses it brought monotony and toil.
A span of five millennia may seem long enough to declare the experiment of civilization an unqualified success. But its entire run is barely one-fifth of one per cent of the human career on Earth. Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens — people with the same physical and mental abilities as us — has existed between 10 and 20 times longer than its oldest civilization. The settled, urban life we regard today as normal is not the life that made us; not the life by which we evolved.
For me, the greatest mystery of what we call the "ancient world" is how recent it really is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only 70 lifetimes of 70 years have been lived end-to-end since civilization began. Yet civilization has displaced almost all other ways of living, often forcibly. There is now no viable alternative, no blank on the map, no going back without catastrophe. As we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below.
We look at the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Mesopotamian ziggurats, or the colossal stone heads of Olmec Mexico, and such ruins seem of vast antiquity, proud markers of the human permanence on Earth.
Or we can draw a different lesson from them. In Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, the abandoned monuments stand as proof that, like individuals, civilizations are mortal: They are born, they flourish, and they die.
Except ours. Ours, we like to believe, is different, the beneficiary of all the rest. The sunny afternoon in which we thrive will stretch ahead forever, its permanence underwritten by scientific progress. Indeed, with the Industrial Revolution arose the very idea of progress, as defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968: "the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind... that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement."
Anyone who looks over the events of the past 100 years with a clear eye will, I think, have to concede that progress, like most things in life, comes in two kinds: good and bad. The invention of Viagra was good, it seems to me, not for any personal reason but because it softened the market in rhino horn, seal penises, and other supposedly aphrodisiac bits of wildlife.
The invention of nuclear weapons (a brilliant feat technically) was the worst kind of progress, because it may yet kill us all. Most inventions fall somewhere in between, and whether their effects are ultimately good or bad is often a matter of scale. And of time: What strikes me most strongly, when I look at the wake of the human voyage, is the runaway progression of change — or, to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years. From the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000 years.
In my book A Short History of Progress, I coined the term "progress trap" for a seductive trail of successes that leads to a catastrophic end. The first of these, I argue, was the overkill of big game late in the Old Stone Age.
Ancient hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made real progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 — by driving a whole herd over a cliff — had made too much. By about 10,000 years ago, most people on Earth had ruined hunting as their main way of life. Some escaped from that trap by the discovery of farming, only to repeat the pattern of overconsumption on a grander scale, as many of the world's most creative civilizations wore out their welcome from nature and collapsed.
The Sumerians of early Iraq, arguably the world's first full-blown civilization, had developed large-scale irrigation by 3000 BC. For several centuries all went well — the Sumerian people and their dozen cities grew as the agricultural base expanded, as canals and ditches led more and more water to the thirsty land.
But what the Sumerians didn't know is that groundwater nearly always holds some mineral salts, and these become concentrated over time by irrigation: the water evaporates; the salt stays behind in the land. By 2000 BC, Sumerian scribes were writing that the fields had "turned white"; the very thing that had built their society turned their farms into saltpan, leaving the mud-brick ruins of their cities standing in a wasteland of their making.
The same problem afflicted many other parts of the world, and is still degrading arid regions of North America, Asia, Argentina, and Australia to this day. Farming also tends to wear out land by deforestation, erosion, and nutrient loss — troubles that beset the Greeks, Romans, Maya, and many more.
Urbanization is another common trap. A small village on good bottomland beside a river begins as a rational and seemingly harmless settlement pattern. But as the village grows into a town and then a city, the best land disappears beneath buildings, and farmers are driven onto marginal soils.
Some ancient peoples, among them the Maya, made this elementary mistake; others, such as the Incas and Egyptians, were more farsighted. Modern societies, especially in North America, and now Asia, are behaving like the Maya, allowing Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Shanghai to turn cropland into industrial parks, suburbs and shopping malls.
Societies often make things worse than they need to be by falling victim to what anthropologists call "ideological pathologies" — self-destructive delusions, usually religious in nature. The mini-civilization of Easter Island, for instance, eventually wrecked its whole ecology for the sake of its statue cult. The last tree came down to put up the last colossus. The bare earth then washed or blew away, leaving hunger, war, and death.
Our present faith in an ill-defined material progress and our capitulation to the market forces that claim to drive it (the very forces that turn fields into parking lots and forests into paper towels) may not seem religious, but is hardly less dangerous or delusional. When, how, and above all why did we start believing that the stock market must run the world?
In the past, the cycles of rise and fall were regional. As Babylon died, Rome grew; as Rome fell, the Maya rose; and so on. Setbacks were local; the experiment of civilization carried on elsewhere. But when one region, Europe, came to dominate the rest of the world, and — strengthened by the wealth and food staples of the civilizations it conquered — to industrialize, the graph of human impact shot skywards.
In 1492, when Columbus sailed, there were about 400 million people on this planet. It had taken us all of our existence to reach that number. But since 1492 — a matter of only seven lifespans of 70 years — that total has multiplied by 16 times.
The bets our ancestors unwittingly placed when they invented civilization now rest on a single high-stakes throw. We have in effect one big civilization, feeding on the whole world at such a rate that we can observe the exhaustion of natural capital within our own lifetimes, whether it be the loss of wildlife, clean water, coral reefs, rainforests, or topsoil. We are cutting old-growth trees everywhere, we are irrigating everywhere, we are mining and fishing everywhere. And no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. As each year goes by, the world loses an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl, while 70 million extra human mouths must be fed.
Some years ago, I called civilizations "pyramid schemes," partly because they build pyramids (costly but unproductive projects that may take the form of colossal statues, extravagant tombs, sumptuous temples, office towers, or missile shields) but mainly because civilizations often behave like "pyramid" sales schemes: thriving only while they expand, paying the present by stealing from the future, collapsing suddenly in political and environmental bankruptcy.
The creation of imaginary worlds to comment upon the real one has long taproots in mythology. The tales of Icarus, Prometheus and Pandora illustrate the risks of being too clever by half, a theme also known to Genesis. Perhaps the most insightful ancient story of this kind — particularly as it comes from a civilization that had suffered collapse — is the "Rebellion of the Tools" in the Maya creation epic, the Popol Vuh, where human beings are overthrown by their farm and household implements:
"And all [those things] began to speak... `You... shall feel our strength. We shall grind and tear your flesh to pieces,' said their grinding stones... At the same time, their griddles and pots spoke: `Pain and suffering you have caused us... you burned us as if we felt no pain. Now you shall feel it, we shall burn you.'"
As the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier pointed out, this was perhaps our first explicit warning of the threat in the machine.
Such warnings became common in the 19th century when, for the first time ever, wrenching technical and social change could be felt within a single lifetime. In 1800 the cities had been small, the air and water relatively clean — which is to say the water was more likely to give you cholera than cancer. The sound of machinery was almost unknown. Nothing moved faster than by wind or limb. A person from Shakespeare's day, from 1600, transported to 1800 could have made his way around quite easily.
The facts really don't seem to matter anymore. How else can we explain the re-elections of Tony Blair and George Bush?
But by 1900, there were motorcars on the streets, and electric trains beneath them; movies were flickering on screens; and Albert Einstein was writing his Special Theory of Relativity.
Early in the 19th century, Mary Shelley pondered the new science with her Frankenstein. And Charles Dickens gave the social costs of industry a scalding and prescient critique in his novel Hard Times, asking whether "the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist" and foreseeing the new religion of the bottom line: "Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death," Dickens wrote in 1854, "was to be a bargain across a counter."
In his 1872 novel Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere), Samuel Butler created a remote civilization beyond the mountains of New Zealand that had industrialized long before Europe, but where the side effects of progress sparked a Luddite revolution.
The great danger, wrote an Erewhonian radical, was not so much the existing machines as the speed at which they were evolving: If not stopped in time, they might develop language, reproduce themselves, and subjugate mankind.
Butler was sending up Darwinism here, but the anxieties stirred by the panting monsters of the Steam Age were real enough. Years before he became Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: "The mystery of mysteries," he wrote in 1844, "is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation."
The faster the hands began to move on the clock of progress, the more writers and thinkers began to ask themselves Paul Gauguin's question: Where are we going? If so much was happening so quickly before their eyes, what might happen in the future? Butler, H.G. Wells, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, and many others developed a new literary form that could present their imaginings to a broad reading public: a blend of fantasy, satire, and allegory that became known as the "scientific romance."
In The Time Machine of 1895, Wells sent a traveller to a distant future where the human race has split into two species. The Eloi, a sybaritic upper class, live brainlessly on the industrial toil of the underground subhuman Morlocks, never guessing that the latter — seemingly their slaves — are in fact raising them for meat.
In his novel, News from Nowhere, William Morris dreamt up a post-industrial New Age — a utopia of honest workmanship, good design, and free love — from which he attacked the first great wave of globalization, the World Market ruled by the steamship, the telegraph, and the British:
"[A]rtificial necessaries... became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance... with the real necessaries which supported life...
"To this `cheapening of production,' as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, his most elementary comfort and bare health... His life, in short, did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of `cheap production' of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all... The whole community was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, the World-Market."
The 1890s. Or the 1990s? While we may learn from the past, we don't seem to learn much. That last generation before World War I — the time of the young Einstein and of Joseph Conrad's terrorism novel, The Secret Agent — was in many ways a time like ours: an old century grown tired; a new century in which moralities and certainties were withering, mad bombers were lurking in the shadows, while industrialists declaimed from their mansions that unfettered industry would bring a glittering future to all.
The dystopian writers sensed that change was running out of control and began to fear that, with the might of industry, mankind had found the means to suicide. They saw jingoistic nation-states equipped with high explosives and steel warships; they saw social exploitation and vast urban slums; chemically contaminated air and water, and civilization conferred on so-called savages through the barrels of machine-guns.
What if those guns were turned not on Zulus or Sioux Indians but on other white men? What if the pollution and degradation of the slums caused degeneration of the human race? What, exactly, was the point of all this economic output and activity if, for so many people, it meant deracination, misery, and filth?
By the end of The Time Machine, Wells's Traveller sees "in the growing pile of civilization, only a foolish heaping that must inevitably... destroy its makers in the end."
Many say that we stand here, a century later, to prove those gloomy Victorians wrong. But do we? The dystopian writers may have been wrong on the details they imagined for the 20th century, but they were right to foresee trouble. Just ahead lay the Great War and 12 million dead, the Russian Revolution, the Great Slump — leading to Hitler, the death camps, the Second War with 50 million dead, the atom bomb. And these in turn to the Cold War, the greatest squandering of human and natural wealth in history. To say nothing of the Korean War, the near-fatal Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda. Even the most pessimistic Victorian might have been surprised to learn that the 20th century would slaughter more than 100 million people in its wars — about half the entire population of the world in Roman times.
The Victorian scientific romances had two modern descendants: mainstream science fiction and profound social satire set in nightmare futures. The latter includes several of the past century's most important books: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and a number of post-nuclear wastelands, of which Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker has to be the masterpiece.
With the nuclear threat fading (maybe), modern apocalyptic novels have concentrated more on the whimpers than the bang at the world's end. There has been a revisiting of concerns first raised before Hiroshima, especially the unforeseen risks of new technologies, and how our species might conduct itself so that we do not breed, poison, and murder ourselves to extinction on the one hand, or abandon our humanity for antlike order on the other.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Brave New World was the good case Huxley made for the devil of order — a case harder to answer today than in 1932. Consider this homily delivered to the outsider called the "Savage" by the world ruler, extolling genetic selection, Pavlovian conditioning, and mind-numbing hedonism:
"A happy, hardworking, goods-consuming citizen [is] perfect... Otherwise the wheels stop turning... You're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant... that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always [the drug] soma... to make you patient and longsuffering... to give you a holiday from the facts."
In 1932, real soma hadn't been invented; now we have it in Prozac, Zoloft, and the like. The facts really don't seem to matter anymore. How else can we explain the re-elections of Tony Blair and George Bush? About half the adult population is now on antidepressants, and many of those who aren't still soak them up in drinking water from the Great Lakes and the Thames.
Meanwhile, the clanking monsters of Erewhon have taken subtler forms that threaten the entire biosphere: climate disruption, toxic waste, new pathogens, nanotechnology, genetic engineering.
One of the dangers of making up a nightmare future is how depressing it is when you get things right. About a dozen years ago I began work on my novel A Scientific Romance, a title I chose to acknowledge the Victorians, and because my theme was our culture's heady romance with science.
For satirical purposes I made what I thought were wild extrapolations from things in the news. I had a character die of mad cow disease, thinking that in the final draft I would probably have to kill her off with something less farfetched. By the time the book was published in 1997, dozens of people really had died of mad cow.
Other elements of the satire — climate change that turns wintry London into a tropical swamp, a race of genetically modified survivors, and a GM grass that doesn't need mowing because it has the self-limiting properties of pubic hair — no longer seem quite the funhouse mirrors they were when I began.
Just lately something more specific came to haunt me. In the jungly ruins of London, my protagonist finds a street blocked off and buildings fortified with concrete slabs. Here, he deduces, an embattled British government must have spent its final days in the 2030s. Only last year I read in the newspaper that the Blair government actually has plans to surround the Houses of Parliament with a 15-foot concrete wall and razor wire.
I don't want to be a prophet, and I certainly don't claim to be. It doesn't take Nostradamus to foresee that walls will go up in times of crisis — though the thickest walls are in the mind. A telling feature of the real mad cow disaster was how long the British government did nothing except hope for the best.
Hope may be a virtue, but it has its risks. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes; hope elects the politician with the fattest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a wild punt over prudent and predictable thrift. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism. And so we all conspire in the upward concentration of wealth that ensures there can never be enough to go around. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.
But the world has grown too small to forgive us any more big mistakes. The species that has lately brought the Earth atomic war and nuclear waste, DDT, thalidomide, mad cow disease, Chernobyl, and the Bhopal chemical spill must recognize itself for what it is: clever but seldom wise. Put baldly, we are not as smart as we think we are. If Homo sapiens is to survive the accumulating consequences of its half-evolved intelligence, it must become aware of its habitual shortcomings, like drivers who keep their speed within their skill.
Our greatest experiment — civilization itself — will succeed only if it can live on nature's terms, not Man's. To do this we must adopt principles in which the short term is trumped by the long; in which caution prevails over ingenuity; in which the absurd myth of endless growth is replaced by respect for natural limits; in which progress is steered by precautionary wisdom. This ideological shift is the most urgent task for science and society, for professors, politicians, priests, and writers.
What we humans — with our Easter Island-like faith in the bigger, the better, and the more complex — have naively called "progress" is now moving so quickly, and with such unforeseeable consequences, that its promises can no longer be taken at face value.
Instead of hoping for the best, we have to imagine the worst — and by doing so strive to forestall it.
August 6, 2006 at 05:06 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink
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