A progress trap is a technology or idea that produces an impressive outcome at first but it can lead to an impossible, deadly end. People experiment with progressions that are lethal but potentially self destructing; this is as a result of specialization of the human brain. The atomic bomb is the most severe of these “progress traps” according to Ronald Wright, and it’s capable of wiping out the entire human species. In spite of this, in the past, simpler progressions have destroyed and seduced societies. Progressions in hunting, farming and worldwide civilization are “progress traps” that make humans a susceptible species.
According to Ronald Wright, the first progress trap is the perfection of hunting. For instance during the Upper Paleolithic, Cro-Magnons created sharper, longer-ranged, lighter and lethal weapons. These lead to extinctions of the woolly rhino and mammoth from Asia and Europe, the giant tortoise, giant sloth and other marsupials from Australia and the giant bison, camel, horse, giant sloth and mammoth from the Americas. The industrial slaughter sites that human had were capable of hunting and killing a hundred thousand horses or a thousand mammoths. In the long run, humans effectively depleted their food supply even though the perfection of hunting brought short term prosperity. During the Mesolithic era, humans became dangerously marginal as a result of bankrupting the land, when “carvings and sculpture became rare”. Human walked into their first progress trap as they drove species after species to extinction. Luckily, human were carries into another age of prosperity by the unconscious of farming.
Invention of farming was the second progress trap. Flora growth was influenced by humans by sowing the most easily reaped plumpest seeds and plants, during the era of the Neolithic. The spread of plant domestication was faster across every continent except the Antarctica. During this era, human beings survived on crop domestication only. However, most farmers focused on quantity at the expense of quality, more food for more people but little nourishment or better lives. Eventually humans became dependant on farming making then susceptible because of natural disasters such as blight and drought could instigate mass starvation.
Worldwide civilization as referred to by Ronald Wright is the final progress trap. Just as early humans repeatedly eliminated rival humans over thirty thousand years ago, the Europeans overran the world. The civilized world of the United State, white man’s burden of the British and the civilizing mission of the French are the euphemisms that commence with the exterminating and uprooting of the country’s first inhabitants. According to Ronald Wright, all of us are riding on worldwide civilization and few would get off alive. The great civilization experiment has trapped humans to a point where a future nuclear war could create a major destruction in this planet’s life.
New ways to exploit human and natural resource to tip the balance between nature and culture gave rise to civilization. People feed on their surrounding until it cannot support them no more, thriving only while they grow. People fall victim to their own success when the ecology can no longer expand.
The main difference between real progress and trap progress is trap progress eventually has a deadly ending. Real change happen organically and they do not have repercussions’
Civilization as a pyramid scheme
According to Ronald Wright, the outward and visible sign of a human social pyramid can be represented by pyramid of stone or brick, which may take the shape of office towers, tombs or colossal statues. In turn, the human pyramid is carried by a less visible natural pyramid, the food chain and all other resources in the surrounding ecology are often referred to natural capital. Civilization behave like pyramid sales schemes thriving only while they grow as shown by the careers of Rome and the Maya. Wealth is gathered at the center from an increasing periphery, which may be the leading edge of a trading and political empire or a colonization of nature through intensified use of resources. When such civilization has reached maximum demand on the ecology, it is unstable at its peak. At this stage, it has no room left for expansion or raise production or absorb the shock of natural fluctuations unless a new source of wealth or energy appears. The only way forward is to keep soaking new loans from humanity and nature. Once erosion, famine, crop failure starts kicking in, the social contract breaks down. Stoically suffering of people is inevitable but sooner or later the ruler’s relationship with heaven is exposed as a delusion. Then the barbarians welcomed, the statues are destroyed, the temples are looted and the emperor’s naked remnant is last seen escaping through fortress window. For instance, the prime cause of the political upheavals of the French, Russian and Mexican revolutions was the exhaustion of social, not natural, capital. Although land misuse and hunger were also important in these upheavals. As a result of these societies reorganizing, the business of civilization not only continued but expanded. During a true collapse in a society, very large numbers of people die or scatter. It takes centuries to recover, for it requires the regeneration of natural capital, as water, wood and topsoil slowly rebuilding.
The turning point between fall and rise is a matter of scale of demand exceeding natural limits. Hunters and gatherers of the nomadic bands could live in the floodplains and Near Eastern marshes for the foreseeable future. Their numbers in a particular area was down to the abundance of prey and vegetation and therefore their impact was minimal. Then slowly they commenced to plant and reap. They did this for a long time bring stability to food supply and surplus. The land the once roamed and hunted became vast wheat fields. They were kept busy with monuments and public works at slow times in the year. This marked the end of the Garden of Eden and the beginning of our world.
As this practice continued there was a cost attached to it. So gradually a debt to nature accrued, it was barely noticed let alone understood. Trees decreased and receded, the uncovered land became susceptible to flood and drought, fields that were irrigated transformed to sour. The desert become a reality out of their own making
These cycles were regional in the past, for instance, as Maya rose in Central America, Rome fell in the Mediterranean and so forth. The overall experiment kept going but the setbacks were local. In modern society we have one big civilization; we are consuming so much from the earth at alarming rate that we can observe the exhaustion of natural capital within our lifetimes. We are cutting down forest for timber and large scale crop farming, we are irrigating and fishing everywhere and depleting all the natural resource in this planet.
Victorian ideal progress
According to pollard (1969), Victorian ideal of progress is 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. The very appearance on earth of creatures who can frame such a thought suggests that progress is a law of nature: the ape is subtler than the ox, human beings are cleverest of all and the mammal is faster than the reptile. Human progress is measured by our technological culture by technology. The club is superior to the fist, the arrow is superior to the club, and the bullet is superior to the arrow. The idea of material progress is a very recent one as noted by Pollard; it has only been significant in the last three hundred years coinciding closely with the rise of industry and science and the corresponding decline of traditional beliefs. Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology. Therefore progress has become a myth in the anthropological sense. An arrangement of the past whether imagined or real in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspiration is what is referred to as myth. Myths are the maps by which culture navigate through time. Progress can lead beyond reason to catastrophe because of its internal logic. A seductive trail of success may end in trap.
For instance, ever since gunpowder was invented by Chinese, there has been great progress in the making of explosives: from the firecracker to the cannon, from the petard to the high explosive shell. The atomic was the peak of this progress and it blowup the whole world. we have made rather too much progress. According to Ronald Wright (2004), Several of the scientists who created the atomic bomb recognized that this weapon can destroy the entire planet in the 1940s, telling politicians and others that the new weapons had to be destroyed. Albert Eistein wrote that the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes. “if mankind does not put an end to war , war will put an end to mankind, ” words of President Kennedy. Weaponry is an area where progress has been realized in the modern society.
World’s weather has been unusually stable since the end of the last Ice Age according to studies of ancient climate. Farming couldn’t be invented earlier even if we would try. Now it’s evident that civilization itself is destabilizing the long run of good weather in which it has grown. Today the world is faced with the issue of global warming because of the continuous encroachment by human beings to the natural resources such as forests, water catchment areas, and wild reserves. This is as a result of increased population of the world and need to produce more in order to feed the over growing population. The impact of global warming is here with us and recently the devastating hurricane Irma and Maria that destroyed properties and life along the Caribbean and some parts of North America was as a result of global warming. The fires that destroyed forest, life and properties in California is also as a result of adverse weather condition. The ocean level is rising due to increased temperature in the Antarctic. This is alarming because more land is being consumed by the ocean.
The introduction of chemical pesticides and antibiotics for animal treatment also causes threat to both land and humans. Chemical pesticide can temper with the soil PH in the long run rendering the soil useless. Also, if this chemicals and antibiotics find their way to human bodies they can cause deadly diseases in the long run such as cancer which is already consuming a larger population of the world. The chemicals when they find their way to the ocean can also destroy the aquatic life which also is a source of food for human beings. Our own waste is the most immediate threat to humanity. Pollution is a problem of scale like most problems with technology. The biosphere might have been able to tolerate coal and oil if they were burnt gradually.
We already are experiencing extinction of some animal species due to adverse climate change and human activities. Game meat is still being consumed in some parts of the world and also some parts of wild animals are used medicinal purposes making them vulnerable. These animals are important in the ecology and their extinction may mean imbalanced ecology.
The three richest people in the world have a net worth equal to the poorest 48 countries according to United Nations figures. According to Ronald Wright, the greatest power that has ever existed is planning to spend $60-billion on a new arms race, a sum that could provide the world with safe drinking water and leave $20-billion in change. The typical response of the mighty is to go on building higher pyramids while the storm clouds gather, like those long-dead Maya kings.
Earth is full of dead cities. Civilizations, like individuals, are born, flourish and die. Except ours, we believe, is different, the beneficiary of all the rest. The sunny afternoon in which we thrive will stretch ahead forever (Wright, 2004). In this belief, we carry on our lives against the evidence of time.
References
Ronald Wright. (2004). A short history of progress. Canada: House of Anansi Press.
