A Short History of Progress

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Tools and Weapons

Among other professional skills, Wright is an archaeologist. As such, he understands how to interpret the material record of a culture as information about its identity. Throughout the text, the tool record of each individual culture is used to describe its level of advancement and overall goals. Held together, the development of tools and weapons shows how technological progress unfolds across time.

Tools are the way we exceed our natural limitations to harness the world around us. They are therefore innately tied to human excess, which can be our downfall. Wright implores us to “Take weapons for example. Ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the making of bangs: from the firecracker to the cannon, from the petard to the high explosive shell” (5). Eventually, this human focus on the development of weaponry would transcend gunpowder and become the world-destroying atom bomb. Wright mentions his terror of this weapon several times in the text, citing it as the most dangerous weapon on Earth, “obviously deadlier than the small bangs in millions of engines” (56). The atom bomb is Wright’s version of Frankenstein’s monster, the terrible creature brought about by unchecked scientific progress.

The “rebellion of tools” is not, however, limited to weapons: “Even very simple technology has enormous consequences. Basic clothing and built shelter, for example, opened up every climate from the tropics to the tundra” (13). While Wright surely understands humans will never stop innovating, he urges humanity to appreciate how the tools we create lead us to unknown consequences.

The Fallen Airliner’s Black Box

Wright often uses different locomotives and vehicles as metaphors for civilization. In Chapter 1, Wright describes civilizations as ships on which the fate of humanity is sailing (8). In Chapter 5, he returns to this class of metaphor when he asks, “How has our runaway train […] been able to keep gathering speed?” (109).

Perhaps the most effective vehicle metaphor Wright uses for civilization is the fallen airliner. Written in 2004, this image will certainly remind his American audience of the terror attacks of 2001, but is also used to offer a symbol of Wright’s theoretical model. The fallen airliner’s black box, which records how and why the plane failed, represents the ability of archaeology to record the collapses of past civilizations.

A Short History of Progress argues that “in the fates of […] societies—once mighty, complex, and brilliant—lie the most instructive lessons for our own [time… these civilizations are] fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong. In this book, I want to read some of these boxes in the hope that we can avoid repeating past mistakes, of flight plan, crew selection, and design.” (8)

Wright repeats this metaphor in Chapter 3, noting that “the wrecks of our failed experiments lie in deserts and jungles like fallen airliners whose flight recorders can tell us what went wrong. Archaeology is perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead, because it provides deep reading of the direction and momentum of our course through time” (56). Poising himself as an investigator of the crashes of the past, Wright argues we must look to ancient cultures to learn of our own future.

Gauguin’s Questions

Gauguin is a French symbolist painter introduced at the outset of Chapter 1. His “questions” come after the death of his daughter, in the form of the title of one of his most famous paintings. These questions, asked in the depths of despair, are D'où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?)

Wright sees these three questions as the crucial questions of modern society, mysteries that only analysis of our history can answer. It is no mistake, Wright implies, that Gauguin travelled to the tropics to encounter “primordial man” (1). The tools of history, anthropology, and archaeology reveal to us who we are and where we come from. With these answers, we can know where we are going.

To answer Gauguin’s questions sufficiently requires a sweeping look at human history. By the end of this history, Wright has answered all of Gauguin’s questions with almost as much despair as Gauguin possessed when he asked them.