Nature and Inequality, Ur and Us

A Too Much review of
A Short History of Progress
By Ronald Wright
Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005.

By Sam Pizzigati

October 3, 2005

Mother Nature, as Hurricane Katrina has recently reminded us all, can pack a devastating wallop. Nature's fury can trump, even nearly destroy, a fabled showpiece of our urban civilization.

Will our future bring more sudden New Orleans-style disasters? Should we now be shaking in our boots? Could our civilization itself be at risk?

Archaeologist and historical philosopher Ronald Wright completed his new book, A Short History of Progress, well before Katrina's winds started roaring. But his new work eerily anticipates Katrina. Wright asks the big questions — about nature, about civilization, about tomorrow — that Katrina raises.

For answers, Wright gazes into no crystal ball. He looks, instead, to the past, to the archaeological record, “perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead, because it provides a deep reading of the direction and momentum of our course through time.”

In this past, Wright sees nature repeatedly wreaking havoc and civilizations repeatedly collapsing. But he sees something else as well. He sees inequality.

These three phenomena — environmental degradation, collapsing civilizations, and deep-seated economic inequality — have always, Wright notes, gone hand in hand. Together, they have shaped our “10,000-year experiment of the settled life.”

A Short History of Progress traces human history back to the earliest years of this experiment, to the initial “towns and villages that sprang up in a dozen farming heartlands around the world after the last ice age.” These early outposts of civilization more or less continued the egalitarianism of the hunter-gatherer societies that had preceded them.

In these early towns and villages, most everyone “worked at similar tasks and had a comparable standard of living.” Those farmers who did amass more wealth than their counterparts usually felt a social “obligation to share” their good fortune with the less blessed.

But that sense of obligation, over time, would wane. Significant differences in wealth and power began to appear. These inequalities, observes Wright, appeared first “in the Neolithic villages of the Middle East,” in what would become humanity's first grand civilization, the Sumerian empire centered around the ancient cities of Ur and Uruk.

Wright finds in this Sumerian empire the first evidence of a pattern that has echoed again and again throughout our history as a species. Civilizations, he writes, have a habit of walking into “progress traps.”

“A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea,” Wright explains, “but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea.”

Settlements, in other words, can grow to the point where they begin exhausting their natural resources, their woods, water, and topsoil.

These settlements eventually find themselves with“no room left to raise production or absorb the shock of natural fluctuations.” To shoulder on, they keep trying to wring “new loans from nature and humanity.”

But nature, in the end, always forecloses, with “with erosion, crop failure, famine, disease.”

This scenario unfolded millennia ago in Sumeria, on the land that today makes up much of Iraq. The Sumerians stripped away their woods, left their floodplain vulnerable to “inundations much fiercer and more deadly than they would otherwise have been.”

The land would, over time, turn salty and begin “to turn against the tillers.” The result: an almost total collapse of Sumerian civilization. A few of Sumer's great cities “struggled on as villages, but most were utterly abandoned.”

Why didn't the Sumerians see what was coming? Wright finds in Sumeria, and in all collapsed civilizations, “an upward concentration of wealth” and a corresponding “mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness.”

“The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo,” he writes.“They continue to prosper long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.”

The general populace in collapsing civilizations, notes Wright, “may suffer stoically for a while, but sooner or later the ruler's relationship with heaven is exposed as a delusion or a lie.”

At that point, Wright adds, “the temples are looted, the statues thrown down, the barbarians welcomed, and the emperor's naked rump is last seen fleeing through a palace window.”

The recovery from these disasters “requires the regeneration of natural capital” — of lands and water — and that can takes centuries, or even longer. Indeed, the old lands that hosted the Sumerians have never recovered. Half of Iraq's irrigated land remains saline, “sour and barren.”

The Sumerians of 4,000 years ago would recognize the desert that is Iraq today. The desert where Ur and Uruk stood “is a desert of their making.”

Wright's Short History of Progress briskly walks us through this sequence of wealth concentration and environmental degradation, on grand scale and in miniature. His pages turn seamlessly from the great Maya of Central America to the isolated Easter Islanders of the South Seas.

This sequence, Wright warns, continues to play out today. Our contemporary capitalism, he notes, “lures us onward,” constantly “insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant.”

This refusal to share has stopped “progress” dead in its tracks. We have indeed grown our economies. But we have failed to create better lives for all the people in them.

How bad has our failure been? Since Queen Victoria's death over a century ago, Wright notes, the world's population has multiplied four-fold and the world's economic output by 40 times.

If, over the course of this century-plus, the global gap between rich and poor had merely remained at late Victorian proportions, all human beings today “would be ten times better off” now than they were then, since economic growth has surpassed population growth by ten times since Queen Victoria died.

But the gap between rich and poor has widened, not shrunk, over the past century. Today, the number of people living in abject poverty worldwide actually tops the total number of people alive back over a bit over a century ago, in the final days of Queen Victoria's reign.

The silver lining in all this? Wright does see one. We have a “great advantage” over previous civilizations that have collapsed. We know their story. We know, thanks to the lessons their stories teach, that we need to “set economic limits and live within natural ones.”

Knowledge, of course, does not automatically translate into desirable action. We have, says Wright, allowed our recent and current political leaders to undo the promising limits on wealth concentration set in place in the mid-20th century.

This “revolt against redistribution” — a revolt that has dominated the global economic scene since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — “is killing civilization from ghetto to rainforest.”

Yet we still do have time to tack a different course. Storm winds as strong as Katrina's will surely blow again. But if we humans flatten our social pyramids, as Ronald Wright so wisely advises, these winds need never blow us away.

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the weekly online newsletter on income and wealth inequality. To receive Too Much in your email box every Monday, just sign up here for a free subscription.