‘Progress: a History of Humanity’s Worst Idea’ by Samuel Miller McDonald

In recent weeks I have been reading books which focus on the economic transformation brought about since about 1750 and the benefits it has brought to mankind. Steven Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’ and Daniel Susskind’s ‘Growth: A Reckoning’ are both very eloquent, optimistic analyses which celebrate recent human progress and criticise those who denigrate the practical consequences of enlightenment thinking. Pinker is baffled by the presence of so much pessimism, while Susskind is especially critical of those who argue for ‘de-growth’ as part of a radical environmental manifesto. This book serves as a magnificent, if I fear, ultimately flawed, rebuttal to these views. Without mentioning these or any other contemporary liberal intellectuals by name, Simon Miller McDonald seeks to dispute all their major claims.

Rather than trying to find fault with the figures that demonstrate trends such as increasing life expectancy, improved educational outcomes, lower levels of violent crime, the spread of liberal democracy, increased living standards, fewer wars etc etc, (because to do so would be a fool’s errand), he switches perspective and argues that these ‘achievements’ such as they are have been accomplished at huge expense to human and non-human life. He is of the view that we are fast heading towards a wholly self-inflicted sixth extinction and that this consideration really needs to outweigh all others when discussing the current advanced stage of human development. Why celebrate longer lives if they are of limited quality and are the product of systems which are destroying the ecosystems on which we rely for our survival? ‘Vast death is already enveloping the world like a fetid fog’ in McDonald’s estimation.

There are sections, particularly towards the end of the book when he focuses on how ‘progress’ might be stopped, which seemed to me to go beyond overstatement and to be rather hysterical. But earlier the analysis is I think highly original and thought-provoking. It is reasoned and reasonably nuanced, essentially re-framing the past five thousand years of human history (ie; since the agricultural revolution) as profoundly damaging and flawed. At base he is correct when he states that the more powerful members of our species have been busy indulging their capacity for asymmetric 'energy capture’, taking out much more than they have put back in, and that this is both at the expense of natural resources (what he terms ‘concrete energy capture’) and fellow human beings (via ‘abstract energy capture). Our societies have become incorrigibly ‘parasitic’ and this is both immoral and unsustainable in the long-term. The notion of ‘progress’ which fuels all the narratives we use to justify our cations and comfort ourselves is thus very flawed.

The problem with the analysis is that it is as one-sided as those who fail to see the negative as well as the positive when thinking about what can, in truth, genuinely be described as ‘progress’. Samuel Miller McDonald finds it hard to accept that anything has been improving at all, as is demonstrated by this passage about the Nineteenth Century that literally had me choking on my breakfast when I first read it:

The age appeared to promise history’s most rapid advancement in technology and social change, ushering in rapid urbanisation, social movements, and the invention of electric batteries, typewriters, cameras, telephones, telegraphs, elevators, escalators, automobiles, electric light, locomotives, matches, microphones, revolvers, antiseptics, pasteurisation, machine guns, plastic, movies, toilet paper, contact lenses, vacuum cleaners, and zip fasteners, to name a few. As steam engines, fuelled by coal and wood, and then internal combustion engines fuelled by petroleum, came to augment nearly every aspect of material society, from transportation and construction to agriculture and manufacturing, the appearance of progress suddenly accelerated….. But was such frantic tinkering truly progress, truly moving the world in a superior direction?

He thinks not. It is a hard argument to sustain, as are the pleas he makes at the end of his book for us to take a collective leap of blind(ish) faith and re-instate the ‘commensalistic and mutualistic’ values that supposedly characterised the hunter-gatherer societies that proliferated prior to the agricultural revolution. Hobbes, he argues, was simply wrong to state that these were characterised by lives that were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Far from it apparently.

Ultimately I found this book to be eye-opening, erudite, highly original, really interesting, but unpersuasive. Progress is not a myth and not a mere narrative. It is very real. Of course there is much to regret, both historically and today. But given the choice I, like I suspect at least 95% of people, would far prefer to be alive now than at any other time in history, and believe that further progress can and will be brought about thanks to human ingenuity. Arguing that humanity now sits ‘alone in a once diverse world’ and ‘is a grotesque, bloated ape seated on a throne of corpses’ is overstating the case more than just a tad.