A Short History of Progress

Previous civilizations have used advances in agricultural technique to increase yield and thereby hold off collapse. The industrial revolution is an example of such a technique and explains how “our runaway train [… of progress has] been able to keep gathering speed” (109).

We tend to think of the Industrial Revolution as a purely European contribution to the world, but this advance in human history was fueled by the Americas. Though we do not generally acknowledge it, the indigenous people of North and South America were farming peoples. Their products, such as maize and potatoes, were about twice as productive as European wheat and barley staples, doubling Europe’s resource yield when they began exporting these products home after colonization. Additionally, Europeans adopted the Inca’s use of guano fertilizer. Alongside foodstuffs, the mineral resources of the New World, especially the gold and silver of Aztecs, as well as the labor capital of human slavery, provided Europe the funds to jumpstart the Industrial Revolution.

Before European contact, the indigenous of North America lived in chiefdoms with established social hierarchies. After contact, the decrease in population [due to warfare and disease] allowed democratic societies to blossom, which inspired the American Revolution. In the final analysis, “our age [of liberty] was [both monetarily and ideologically] bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet” (117).

Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation epic, contains a story of tools rebelling against their masters. Stories similar to this “first explicit warning of the threat in the machine” (118) became common after the Industrial Revolution, when human technology began to advance at a faster rate. “Scientific Romances,” the first science fiction texts, such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wells’s Time Machine, began to emerge: stories articulating human fears of technology too great to control. As the first global economy took form, thinkers became aware of how automation, industrial economy, the arms race, and ecological abuse would damage society. The Victorian Age led to a century of World Wars, genocides, and atomic weapons, showing their fears were correct. The Victorian Scientific Romances evolved into two groups: mainstream science fiction and social satires. Both these genres have always had a tendency of being prophetic.

Today, due to the globalization of the world economy, social collapse will impact the entire human population. Experts predict imminent famine, warfare, and ecological disaster. While sceptics “point to earlier disasters that weren’t born out” (126), these disasters were only narrowly sidestepped (as in the case of nuclear war) or temporarily postponed (as in the case of the food shortage), and not solved. In fact, they remain possibilities.

The War on Terror that began in 2001 was a diversion of our focus from greater to lesser problems. Though catastrophic, terrorism causes exponentially fewer deaths than hunger or contaminated water. After WWII, governments committed to instituting democratically managed forms of capitalism to curb the poverty and destitution that are the building blocks of fanaticism. Today, these same governments engage in complete free-market forms of economy that leave the lower class of even developed nations more helpless than ever, and at the same time they destroy what remains of the Earth’s natural habitats. In the United States, religion has penetrated politics, recalling divine kings of old. In short “our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance” (129). More bluntly, we live inside a “suicide machine” (131) that will kill us all if we don’t set it right. This does not require the complete overhaul of our economic systems, but it does require us to move from short term to long-term thinking in how we manage society. Though we have the tools and the means to do so, we must also make the decision.