A Short History of Progress

The concept of the progress trap, first mentioned in Chapter 1, is the overarching theme of Wright’s text. Wright argues that “all cultures, past and present, are dynamic. Even the most slow-moving were, in the long run, works in progress” (8). Progress innately leads to development and expansion, and the progress trap, as he writes, is a “devil [that] lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and recklessness, between need and greed” (8). Put more succinctly, the progress trap is a cultural adaptation that causes excessive collection of resource wealth, leading first to luxury and then inevitable collapse due to overtaxed ecosystems. It is “an internal logic [of progress] that can lead beyond reason into catastrophe” (5).

Wright uses the concept of the progress trap to suggest that paying attention to the courses of cultural expansion, shortage, and decline will allow us to make better decisions on present-day resource use. As he writes, “we should be alarmed by the predictability of our mistakes but encouraged that this very fact makes them useful” (8). We all live, in short, in a progress trap. It is the progress trap which makes histories “short” in the first place, cutting off cultures just as they reach their peak due to the unsustainability of their economic climbs.