Progress by Samuel Miller McDonald review – humanity's greatest myth?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents' generation – and this in the world's richest society.
Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless 'pseudo-bread' – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.
What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The 'progress narratives' of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters. Even when protests have erupted, they have mostly sought modest tweaks rather than revolution. But progress, argues McDonald, is a false prophet. History hasn't followed a tidy upward arc. Moreover, what counts as progress has often produced huge collateral damage, including ecological devastation.
There was a time when human beings had a 'commensalistic' relationship with nature, turning on veneration rather than exploitation. Embracing egalitarianism, most primitive societies didn't have hierarchies of class or gender. Then, around 3000BCE, the 'parasitic' economy emerged. Mesopotamians were the first to behave as though nature was no longer to be communed with but subdued. Religion took the place of animism, preaching dominion over the Earth. For McDonald the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first piece of progress propaganda: in it, the eponymous hero kills the forest guardian, tames the wild, and builds a city, filling it with bread and beer to the unbridled joy of his acolytes.
The Book of Genesis follows suit. God commands Adam and Eve to 'subdue' the Earth and tame every living thing. Later, Christianity – by then a far cry from Jesus's radicalism – proved useful to Constantine, who saw in monotheism a handy formula: one god, one empire, one emperor. Fast-forward a millennium, and capitalism picks up the baton. Progress, now secularised, means capital formation: wealth siphoned from the masses to the enlightened few, who return to us the bric-a-brac of modernity – antibiotics and air fryers and suchlike. The logic of extraction remains unchanged; nature and proletariat alike suffer.
McDonald's book is a satisfying corrective to the smugness of thinkers such as Steven Pinker, who insist that conditions only ever improve. Yet he oversells his case with sweeping judgments. His account of religion, for instance, amounts to little more than a crude reprise of Marx: it's all opium for the masses, a tool to pacify resentment. But that's far too simple. From the Peasants' Revolt to the Taiping Rebellion, Christianity has supplied radicals with a script for inverting power structures.
Equally damaging is McDonald's uncritical endorsement of David Graeber and David Wengrow's vigorously contested claim that Enlightenment ideas came from Indigenous America – specifically from the Wendat diplomat Kondiaronk – a theory historians such as David A Bell have dismissed as fantasy. On the latter's account, the French nobleman Baron de Lahontan wasn't so much lifting his ideas from Kondiaronk as putting his own progressive views into the mouth of a naïf – a common literary device in the early modern period.
Readers may find all the doom-mongering a bit much. Indeed, there's a whiff of the swivel-eyed prophet about McDonald. And like all doomsayers, he is sure that the end-times are nigh. 'Climate change and ecological collapse,' we are told, 'are very likely to cause political fragmentation that nullifies legal and cultural precedents like [slavery] abolition … If market economies continue, there is little reason to assume they will not return to trade in indentured human beings.' Very likely? The confidence is grating and ignores the simple fact that we no longer live in a labour-intensive economy. If anything, AI is making the return of slavery less, not more, likely. McDonald's dismissal of the possibility of mass investment in nuclear energy in a 'neoliberal' world has already aged poorly, with enormous sums being poured into small modular reactors this year. All of which goes to show that the predictions business is a tough one: things can just as easily go the other way.
Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea by Samuel Miller McDonald is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.