Pollyanna...wanna whack her?

I bought a book at Costco yesterday called A Short History of Progess, by Ronald Wright. There were several works of fiction beckoning on the heaping tables: the last chapter of Stephen King's Dark Tower saga, I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, a few others--but they were all in hardcover, something reserved in my universe for reference works and Harry Potter.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a disturbing trend in the bookstores lately: a disquieting absence of 'mass-market' paperbacks. Best-selling authors do, of course, still release their works in mass-market editions...eventually. I figure The Da Vinci Code will be available in paperback sometime around the Last Trump. Until then, the best we plebes can hope for is 'trade paperback'--priced mid-way between outrageous and a king's ransom. And the rapid rise in the loonie against the Yankee greenback hasn't been reflected in book pricing...there's still often a 30% difference in the Canadian and American price.)
Anyway...
I just finished this book, and what a read. No kidding, it's short: 132 pages, with a further 54 pages of illuminating endnotes. (I hate endnotes, especially ones as important as these: the reader needs to keep track of where he is on two fronts at any given time. Footnotes would have been far preferable.
Anyway...
You may sense a reluctance to get down to brass tacks, as it were, concerning what this book is about and what I've learned from it. That's because pieces of it are still reverberating through my head at every keystroke. Quite frankly, this is a depressing and terrifying experience, the kind of thing to foist on anybody who's feeling smug and self-satisfied.
There are a couple of books on the best-seller lists of late that do what A Short History... does, but none so succintly. This book examines various civilizations, from ancient Sumeria through Rome to Easter Island, with pitstops in Peru and material on the Mayans. It compares and contrasts these failed civilizations to our own. The thrust of its argument is that our own global culture, held as the absolute apogee of human achievement, differs from any extinct civilization you can name only in scale. It goes further, and suggests that we are right at this moment running flat-out towards a brick wall, the same brick wall we've been periodically smashing our societies against for millennia.
I've read this sort of thing before: it's a common theme both in dystopian science fiction and current non-fiction. This latest entry doesn't really bother with offering solutions--there have been enough other books published that are full of them--but as a call to action, it's unsurpassed.
Recently, there has been some backlash against the very idea of global warming. The case against global warming is laid out in Michael Crichton's latest thriller, State of Fear. A minority of scientists question the validity of the whole concept; a slightly larger minority accepts that the world is warming but asserts that human activity has little or nothing to do with it. These scientists are the sort the Bush administration is likely to have on staff.
(Then again, maybe not. On the matter of the environment, Bush might be hitching his country to the same wagon as his idol,. Ronald Reagan. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior once told Congress not to bother with the environment because "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." And Bush has certainly surrounded himself with like-minded people.)
The issue of climate change is neatly side-stepped in Wright's work, because we're doing a bang-up job of destroying ourselves on so many other fronts. Fossil fuel consumption is growing at an ever-increasing rate that is simply not sustainable; we're using up precious topsoil ; with ubiquitous antibiotics, we're encouraging super-resistant bugs; we're polluting earth, air, and water; there remains a nuclear threat we'd rather not acknowledge.
In fact, we'd rather not acknowledge any of these things. Our solution to these problems, whenever they do enter our minds, is to do everything we've been doing so far...only more of it. In this we mirror practically every other failed civilization. Easter Island carved its most ambitious statues AFTER it lost the ability to erect them; the Mayans likewise built their most grandiose monuments just before their world collapsed. It's hard not to see parallels in the modern world...more productivity equals more money equals, well, what exactly? The three richest people in the world (all American) were, at the conclusion of the last century, richer collectively than the poorest FORTY-EIGHT COUNTRIES. And today, you could take half that wealth away--leaving them still unimaginably rich-- spend it carefully, and feed, clothe, and sanitize those forty-eight countries. Is that not obscene?
This doom and gloom, I'm sad to say, resonates with me and always has. I love individual people and regard many of them as very intelligent; but when you coalesce people into cultures, countries, and creeds, to me, it's as if they all start each day with a big bowl of stupid. As a friend of mine so often laments, the stupid people are winning.
Pray God it's not too late.