a short history of progress

And now for something a little more serious.



I just finished reading the first of a large stack of books, sitting awaiting my attention, the CBC Massey Lecture Series book, A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. I'm a fan of the Massey Lectures as a series, having been introduced to it while in university. They're typically short in form (5 chapters long), pack a lot of punch and given that they're designed as a lecture (something that you'd listen to), they're often very readable. They're a great intellectual appetizer for reading about something you've never read about before. Wanna find out more? Here's a big bibliography of 500 page books you can read if you're really keen...

A Short History of Progess is exactly what its title says - Wright chronicles the history of civilizations and questions whether or not they've been a successful experiment. He asks "where are we going" based on "where have we come from." On the whole, he's not too sure about that, given some of the results. Or at least, he's not as optimistic as some would like.

A good review of the book can be found at the Quill and Quire website, no need for me to repeat a summary of it.

On the bottom of my big stack o' books is
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond -- a book with a somewhat similar theme and focus. And Diamond just released a new book, entitled
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. And on the weekend (the coincidences just keep coming here) a Vancouver Sun review of Collapse pointed out:

Is it symptomatic of our era that Collapse should appear barely a few months after Ronald Wright's radiant A Short History of Progress, this year's Massey Lectures on the same subject? It's impossible not to talk about Collapse without noting Wright's book. That two of the finest cultural thinkers of our era should devote themselves, almost simultaneously, to exploring why societies disintegrate is chilling news in itself.

From Brian Bett's review of Collapse in the Vancouver Sun, Saturday January 1, 2005.

Chilling indeed. The whole discussion of collapse of civilizations and decline of empire, and the examples cited by Wright in his book about civilizations without sufficient food supply disappearing very quickly reminded me of another article that I'd read a few months ago in Harpers by Richard Manning entitled "The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain back to Iraq." While Manning loses me in the last paragraph or two, it's another look at how feeding ourselves requires a ton of energy. Forget cars and trucks, how about the amount of fossil fuel required to fertilize modern crops?

Anyhow, some sobering thoughts as I walked through Safeway tonight picking out ingredients for dinner, thinking about generally removed I am from the production of the food I depend upon for survival...

Some good reading. Onto the next book in the stack.