When I was in college, one of my instructors was a young graduate student in the Marx-inflected economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was smart and nice and open to hearing perspectives other than her own—she was a self-described “communist”—and even though I was going through a cranky libertarian phase, I grudgingly admired her. But I was always struck by how everything she said was nearly unrecognizable to me, whether it be about the feasibility of building large-scale democratic communes or the apparently all-consuming presence of wage slavery. She would casually assert things about capitalism and politics that literally nobody else I knew believed.
I was reminded of her as I read Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, a book by Samuel Miller McDonald that came out on Tuesday. McDonald is a geographer, freelance writer, editor, and climate activist. He believes that the idea of progress is, as the U.K. version of the book puts it, “humanity’s worst idea.” McDonald faults “progress” with nearly all of our modern ills—loneliness, inequality, racism, genocide, climate change, you name it. He argues that people espousing a “progress narrative” have pulled the wool over our eyes, blinding us to the myriad ways in which the lives of human beings and every other species on earth are worse today than they were prior to the building of the first state, around 3,000 BC. The progress narrative is not just incorrect, according to McDonald: It is an exercise in “ideological propaganda.”
Those graphs you’ve seen showing the reduction in poverty over the past 5,000 years? They’re wrong, says McDonald: “In fact, poverty is not falling in most places, it’s rising.” Okay, but at least we no longer have slavery, right? Wrong again: “[W]e do not currently live in a condition in which slavery is rare or has been abolished” (emphasis in original). Hmm … how about women’s equality? Surely we’ve made progress on that front, no? “While women have enjoyed some great successes in expanding equality … much of women’s liberation has meant only that a privileged few women get to dominate while most of the rest still must toil for a small elite, and many of these successes are being eroded.”
According to McDonald, across most indicators—democracy, economic inequality, maternal mortality, life expectancy—we are living in apocalyptic times. “In short,” he concludes, “nearly everything is dying or degrading.” People who tell you otherwise are merely perpetuating a “collective mass delusion.”
McDonald traces the “myth” of progress back to ancient Mesopotamia, when the first “proto-factory” was formed. He argues these societies were the first “parasitic” societies—they “extract[ed] and expand[ed] rapidly, to the detriment both of the ecological diversity in their region and certain members of these societies.” (The word “parasitic” appears 174 times in the book, not including in the end notes. He’s usually referring to human beings, especially—but not always—those of European descent.) By contrast, all prior civilizations were characterized by “commensalism,” a type of relationship between organisms that involves extracting energy from a system mostly without harm. People in these societies lived in “an agrarian paradise” that was marked by “an abundance of wealth in which production was mostly innovated, maintained, and governed by women.”
Once parasitic societies were formed, there was no turning back. Civilizations expanded continuously. As they did so, they conquered neighboring societies, usually less technologically advanced than their own, either by exterminating them or incorporating them into their empires. The parasitic class expropriated wealth from the host class. Along the way, they invented new progress myths—the secular ones with which we’re more familiar today, in which “the solution to all problems . . . is simply more of everything that is at the root of those very problems” (emphasis in original). (Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s ears are burning.) In 1492 they sailed the ocean blue and discovered an untapped wealth of natural resources. These they exploited by killing off all the natives and forcing kidnapped African slaves to till the fields until the land was exhausted. Once they discovered the steam engine, they were off to the races. They dug up coal and tapped oil wells, burned those resources for fuel, and released “catastrophic” levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—all while clearing out vast swaths of virgin forest and gleefully exterminating every animal that got in their way. All of this exploitation was eventually aided and abetted by the “theocracy” of neoliberalism, a world-encompassing extractive state featuring Friedrich Hayek as its chief theologian and the International Monetary Fund as its main enforcement arm.
McDonald points out several negative aspects of history that I agree are bad. The forced relocation of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the release of large amounts of atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide—all of these things are regrettable. If I could go back in time, I would stand athwart history, yelling Stop! at the people responsible for such vile actions.
But the all-consuming pessimism with which McDonald writes is so outlandish that it’s hard to take him too seriously. Presumably, McDonald didn’t write his book on cuneiform tablets, and I’ll bet he and everyone he knows live in dwellings with indoor plumbing—plus, he survived past the age of infancy—so at least some things have actually gotten better. Meanwhile, various figures in U.S. history are pilloried as monsters: Somehow Abraham Lincoln is responsible for the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, even though he died in 1865. I won’t try to defend Andrew Jackson, but I will always give Thomas Jefferson a bit of a pass for his wishy-washy attitude toward slavery because of his role in advancing the idea of political equality. Not McDonald. If you think Jefferson deserves some grace, you are trying “to erase, rationalize, or justify the nation’s founding genocide.”
McDonald is unapologetic about his pessimism—in fact, he believes it’s just and necessary. After all, “hope is a frequent invocation of those who wish to instill faith in a progress narrative.” A better emotion to address parasitism is “righteous anger,” which is “far more motivating” to the human spirit. “Technological optimists and other modern progress pundits” just don’t get the enormity of the situation we find ourselves in. Like modern-day Panglossians, “they think we can keep the story going as long as we make a few technical tweaks here and there, or maintain faith in the miraculous technological breakthrough that shows no evidence that it will ever come.” In fact, particularly when it comes to environmental degradation, “there are currently no technologies capable of mitigating these problems” (emphasis in original). McDonald seems to ignore the fact that exponential progress—yes, progress—in technology has been the norm over the past few centuries, so it’s entirely possible that we will have effective methods of carbon capture in the near future. Plus, we actually do have carbon capture technology today. Whether it’s advanced enough to scale (McDonald says it’s not) is another question. But to simply wave it all away as irrelevant is an exercise in defeatism, if not outright dishonesty.
If we can’t innovate our way out of certain death, what can we do? “We must, simply, halt and dismantle the parasitic human ecology in which most of the world lives.” In its place, we need to take inspiration from indigenous peoples and adopt “new forms of energy capture based on calculated commensalism.” This might sound vague, but McDonald offers a few concrete suggestions. Due to rising sea levels, billions of people will flee coastal cities. They’ll need somewhere to go. This mass migration offers an opportunity to rethink the way cities are designed. We should ensure these new cities have wild spaces, “green walls and roofs,” and urban agriculture, all of which demand fewer cars. In order to build such cities, we must reimagine the way they are governed so that they are “democratic and participatory” and “focused on liberty, egalitarianism, and mutual integration with ecologies.” This in turn requires “citizens” to “challeng[e] planning decisions and dismantl[e] existing infrastructures” by “disrupt[ing] and interject[ing] themselves into that process, and overpower[ing] opposition.” Easy-peasy.
Progress is incredibly dark, sometimes sinister. McDonald views “a total break” with our parasitic lineage as a life-or-death necessity. After all, “when a parasite invades your body, you don’t negotiate with it, you kill it” (this time, emphasis added). What he hopes for most of all “is that the faulty relationship between human systems and ecological systems at the heart of the last five thousand years … should be forever destroyed.” McDonald wants us to lose whatever cosmic battle he thinks we’re fighting. He wants us to suffer the consequences of our exploitation. In his narrative, there is no redemption, only fire and brimstone.
I don’t think reality is that dark. Yes, we live in a bleak time. We face many challenges. Some of them will not be easy to solve. But, as Ruby Sue said of her Uncle Clark’s house in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: “I love it here. You don’t gotta put on your coat to go to the bathroom.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
