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A Short History of Progress: Ronald Wright

Header image: Gauguin (1897) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, “A Short History of Progress”

Part 1: Gaugin’s Questions where do we come from
  • 3:25 Gaugin – Tahiti; he could not escape himself
  • Huge painting; three questions
  • 7:40 Our technological culture measures human progress progress by technology;  “the club is better than the fist; the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow
  • 10:23 weapons

18:43

  • 27:00 the collapsing of time
    • Cultural change: For most of history; the world that people were born into was the same when they died
    • 30:00 putting out a rival’s fire in winter = death
    • 34:30 paleo-racism Cro-Magnon

42:48

  • 49:00 “tampering apes”
  • We cannot live without our cultures
Part 2: The great experiment
  • We know the first two
  • Shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture: experimental creatures of our own making
  • Economy; roughly a measurement of the human load on nature
  • 14:00 we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below