A Short History of Eternity? A Review

The evolution of life in our small portion of eternity has been a miserable failure! That is my dismal conclusion after reading Ronald Wright’s two recent books, A Short History of Progress and What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order.

The first book was originally published in 2004 based on Wright’s CBC Massey Lectures. There Wright repeats the generally accepted theory that all our humanoid upright land animals originated in equatorial Africa. The follow up about America was published more recently.

The first book traces the usual theory of the migrations of our early Stone Age forbears from central Africa, including the passage to America by way of the “land bridge” to Alaska before the end of the ice ages, though updated with current archaeology. He does suggest, however, that some of the migrations, perhaps to Central and South America were accomplished by sea around the Pacific Rim, either north and east or south and east, as was the later Polynesian migration to Easter Island.

In Wright’s discussion of human progress over its countless millennia, the evolutionary theory is simply a given, as it is with me, and his ridicule of religious creationism of one kind or another is stinging. He believes the agricultural revolution caused a more significant leap of change in the human condition than our 18^th Century industrial revolution. With that move to farming and settlement our Stone Age nomadic forbears slowly switched from those wandering ways of hunting and gathering in smaller numbers, allowing exhausted environments to renew themselves, to become farmers and multiply, and eventually to urbanise, civilize and destroy the very surroundings that sustained our kind, as well as our co-inhabitants.

Wright’s devastating analysis of the history of European conquest of South America and European destruction of native civilizations post-Columbus in the first lecture series becomes an even greater guilt trip for us European descendants in the northern part of the hemisphere in the follow-up book. Here, Wright points out that in 1500, just after Columbus first accidentally bumped into the West Indies on his search for the East Indies, world population was some 400 million humans. Nearly one quarter of them lived in the Americas, most in the Aztec and Inca empires, after more than 15,000 years of isolated, independent development.

Contrary to U. S. mythology, the eastern seaboard of our own continent was not vacant or unsettled land for boatloads of Europeans to occupy on arrival. The book goes to great length to give chapter and verse showing that the area consisted of long settled farms and towns from Hochelaga on the St. Lawrence to the Deep South. Wright quotes historian, Patricia Limerich, who wrote: “There is no clearer fact in American history than the fact of conquest. In North America just as in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, Europeans invaded a land fully occupied by natives.”

One example after another of European cruelty and untrustworthiness in dealings with native groups pervade the first part of What is America? Wright does allow, however, that native people were not pacifists either. At page 67 he says, “Like Europe, America had been bloodied for centuries by war among its nations. Neither race had a monopoly on violence or on virtue.” He then goes on to describe how faith and profit jump in together from the beginning of European settlement to become the American Way and to forge the foundation of the American Dream. It is that dream of the City on the Hill, preached more lately by President Ronald Reagan and even alluded to by Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. I suggest it is a dream that can be conjured up by every American for his own dream of a personal Utopia of a white supremacy heaven, of a liberally free and licentious Woodstock, or of the free, equal, tolerant, colour blind society of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Though Wright says there is much to admire in the Protestant challenge to the old world order, in America “fanaticism and intolerance soon spring up like weeds in the Lord’s garden.”

Wright goes on to describe many instances of injustice, lies and deceit in America’s dealings with native nations and the land itself as the country’s expansion proceeds ever westward and beyond. Expansion was seen by the soon dominant and generally white new American as his duty, to carry the “white man’s burden” or his “manifest destiny” as one of “God’s chosen people”.

In essence, Wright’s short history reports that America’s expansionism made it the 20^th century’s dominant global empire. As he describes, “the American Dream has Americanized the world with its myth that everyone will be able to live like Americans if they think like Americans. No matter where they are and how downtrodden they may be, if they convert to the faith of market fundamentalism they will become consumers of goods and enjoyers of democracy. This is the Big Lie of our times.” From my personal observation that dream is meeting opposition around the world in the 21^st century and is beginning to fracture even in the American homeland.

Throughout both “short histories” Wright provides a prodigious amount of energy and astute observations. From them he has gleaned the real impact of the rise of our species and the consequences of the development of our civilizations and the clashes between them on the earth itself and all its organic populations. However, the author is perhaps excessively pessimistic in his outlook for the short term. I see this combined work as a short history of a much longer time. It is a work of history in the tradition of the dystopian novels like 1984 published by George Orwell in 1949; The Children of Men, by mystery writer P. D. James in 1992; Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood in 2003, as well as Wright’s own book of fiction in the same vein. The first “short history” emphasizes human failure to deal with global warming, the second with increasing human populations and their struggles over resources. The religious dimensions and the cruelty, venality and corruption of our kind to each other and the earth as highlighted in these books do not present a pretty picture. Each book closes with a ray of hope indicating that we still have a short window of opportunity to change our ways and preserve our planetary sustenance, restrain our greed and live peaceably together with less. I get the feeling Ronald Wright is sceptical about the prospect that we will grasp the opportunity.

When I consider the generally dismal record of our species, I suspect that we are not alone in writing similar records. Perhaps the seeds of extinction are built into the very process of natural selection from which evolutionary success is derived as Darwin describes. As Darwin wrote in the last chapter of his Origin of Species,

"Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, show that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct."

Of course he holds forth more hope for the "larger and more dominant groups within each class" but that may just mean that the greater will be their fall.

Bill,

July 23, 2009, 5:45 PM

PS: For those wishing to know more about Ronald Wright, please search Google for a Wikipedia reference or Wright's own website.