01.04.07 kulturnatib

The future of progress

Our family had a get together during the holidays. My brother's son was home for Christmas, from work in Manila as a computer programmer for a Singapore based company doing much work for the Hong Kong government.

Typical or even expected of such workers in what is seen as a cutting-edge industry he was brimming with confidence in the future of technology; that technology shall solve the problems we are facing today as spelled out, he said, in a book he had recently finished reading.

At this, my friend who is visiting and I exchanged knowing glances. Her siblings are also into computer science, though perhaps not as sold as my nephew seemingly is into the “high technology has all the answers” mantra.

More than perhaps her siblings and almost certainly my nephew, we both have deep skepticism for the ideology of high technology, though we both certainly are intermediate-level computer users who depend on such use for our daily life and, with a well appreciated sense of irony, in the development and even the propagation of our skepticism.

More than the direct use of computers, though, we rely on the written word, hard copy as it were, in books, magazines, journals and assorted publications; one such material she has gifted me with.

Written by Ronald Wright, 'A Short History of Progress,' is a slim volume that presents the case for a second and careful look at 'progress' being traps instead of triumphs, as seen in archaeological records past civilizations have left for us in their ruins, magnificent though we think of them and rightly so.

The title of the first chapter, 'Gauguin's Questions,' immediately grabbed my attention, as an artist who consider Gauguin among my favorites. These questions are contained in one of Gauguin's largest, most enigmatic works done in an outpouring of grief at the news of the death of his favorite daughter and following long and hopeless bouts with illness, poverty and suicidal despair.

Where do we come from, what are we and where are we going are the three questions, the most prominent text, in French, in this mural. It is the last question that Wright seeks to answer in this book and to make the case for a cautionary approach to the promises – temptations, more like – of high technology as the engine of 'progress.'

Anthropology has practically answered the first two questions, writes Wright who is also a historian. We are the remote descendants of apes who lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. What differentiates us from modern apes, our kin and not ancestors, is that over the last 3 million years we have been shaped more by culture than nature to the point of causing so many extinctions that the fossil record of our dominion is like the impact of a small asteroid.

Though not uniform across the globe, our current civilization is the history of the overcoming of 'progress traps.' The first of these traps was the perfection of hunting some 3 millions years ago that saw that spectacular mass slaughter and extinction of the big mammals; mammoths, wooly rhinos, giant wombats and other marsupials, giant tortoise, giant bison, even horses from across the Americas.

The escape from that trap led to farming which, in turn, has led to industrialization and to the greatest and most precarious experiment of all – worldwide civilization.

While there are still differing cultures and political systems in the economic level there is only one big civilization feeding on the whole planet's natural capital.

There is no corner of the biosphere that escapes our hemorrhage of pollution and waste. Such interdependence means that a collapse of civilization, if and when it happens again will, this time, be global. Think climate change.

The book, gloomy as it is, strikes a hopeful note. There is no other future but now. And now is the time to act on sharing resources, cutting down on pollution and waste, dispensing basic health care and birth control, setting economic limits in line with natural ones, and instituting policies that favor caution, conservation and social justice. There won't be another chance.