As the heirs of modernity we look out towards the capitalistic culture that we are immersed in and we see a society that has plucked the fruits of nature and turned her into mere mechanized means of production. Nature has become merely the raw material upon which “civilization” is built. In his book, “A Short History of Progress”, Ronald Wright examines our own cultural outlook towards nature and compares it to the ancient civilizations of the past. He gives us a chilling outlook of how a society’s relationship to nature has often led to its downfall.
The human drive to be “future eaters” is nothing new to modernity. In fact, human beings have been gorging themselves on the fruits of the earth ever since we first stumbled out of our caves tens of thousands of years ago. From the very beginning, the thing that allowed the earliest humans t o survive was their ability to completely suck a region dry of resource value and then move on. However, then, unlike now, the area would have a chance to regenerate and regrow before a second wave of human nomads would return. Today, however, the entire planet is under a constant stress never before seen in the history of human civilization.
To bring this point home, Wright brings alive the (not as ancient as you’d think) inhabitants of Easter Island. We can and must learn a lot from this microcosm of human civilization. If you don’t know the story of Easter Island, it’s worth your time to investigate. In short, Easter Island, as it’s come to be known, was once a lush, fertile place, flowing with natural resources. The inhabitants of the island were not “barbarians”. The culture that sprung up there was ordered, civilized, and resource rich. In fact, so rich, they could never imagine a day where they’d be without.
The people of Easter Island were also a devout religious folk, as human beings tend to be. They believed strongly in a pantheon of gods that would one day deliver them salvation. And so, the people of Easter Island began to construct massive structures to their gods: huge statues that required a massive load on the local environment to construct and to move.
Today, Easter Island is a barren wasteland. The inhabitants had become so certain of their environmental security they literally built statues until there was nothing left. They were also well aware of the danger before it arrived, and yet they continued. As Wright puts it, when the last tree was fallen, the guy who chopped it down knew it was the last one left, and yet chopped it anyway.
It might be easy to see our public religion as being far more sophisticated than those obsessed with “mythical” gods, but we must pause and examine some of the chilling similarities. While our idols may not be massive structures of the faces of gods, we continue to plunder the natural order in order to satiate our own thirst for bigger and better and more and more.
That latest technological device came from somewhere. The materials that made it originally came without exception from nature. For everything that each of us own, a tree had to be chopped down, a river diverged, or a hole drilled in the ground. As Marx puts it, the market system we live in alienates us from the means by which things are produced. We quickly forget that each “thing” we buy, mediated through the market, was once a part of a fragile ecological system.
The question now is if we will stop before “we fell the final tree” in our quest to placate our modern gods — the technological, progressivist, consumerist gods of pleasure and excess. In fact, the gods of our society are even more demanding than those on Easter Island. We have an entire planet to plunder, not just a tiny little island.
We are not confronting a new age in human nature. In fact, we are exactly the same as the human beings who walked this earth 8,000 years ago. Except we have become too good at what we do. We have become too good at conquering and using nature. While the inhabitants of Easter Island had only an island to take care of, we have an entire planet. The stakes have never been greater, and we must learn the lessons of the past, or we will sadly suffer the very same consequences.
I wrote this after reading “A Short History of Progress” by Ronald Wright. Ronald Wright places our current situation in the context of the greater history of the planet. Has our civilization really progressed as much as we often like to think? The answer might surprise you. As Ronald Wright looks through human civilizations throughout history, we find some shocking and chilling similarities.
