PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, food for deep thinking before you yell at the new Congress

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It
SAMUEL MILLER McDONALD
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’—existence on a planet in crisis.

In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Progress is like success, or victory: what exactly do you mean by that? Progress is responsible for all the good things we, the richest country in the richest civilization the planet has ever seen, have right now. I don't know that I agree with that assertion, but I know that it or its twin underpins assumptions about the way we perceive the world. What do people in the US talk about when they discuss "The Economy"? Wall Street indexes of "performance" and the pieces of that puzzle like meeting analysts' expectations, announcing restructurings of debts and offerings of shares...debts companies take on to finance progress and profits that will pay shareholders....

It's a casino, the croupiers at the roulette table of the exchange floor are analysts and brokers and other members of the casino staff who must all get paid, but only after the casino owners are given their majority of the funds. The way this money is created: Destruction. Extraction. Exploitation.

In no way does that represent "THE Economy." This book takes us through what the present systemic definitions of progress are, why they exist, what economic activity they promote and why on multiple axes. Then Author McDonald asks "...and why is it like this again?"

There is no one single model for how best to organize a society since what's best will depend on local ecologies and circumstances. The Anthropocene is likely to be an epoch of re-diversifying human cultures and societies even as coastlines shift, deserts expand and climate zones climb latitudes. What I am most concerned with is that the faulty relationship between human systems and ecological systems at the heart of the last 5,000 years. A relationship built on expansion and exploitation should be forever destroyed. Freedom from parasitism will ensure long-term survival of some sort.

Okay! Great!

How, exactly?

So no, this is not the teacher's edition with the answers in it. But considering how much time I spend thinking about this stuff and the pretty incoherent rant above is the best memory approximation I can come up with after reading and taking notes on this book, I'm going to say most all y'all could benefit mightily from the read. It will prepare us all for the intense, loud, really really rude arguments to come about that hydra in lamb's clothing that we unthinkingly call "The Economy." (Spoiler: there's more than one, and they do not follow the same rules! Oh fun!)

But y'all listen a minute. I bet anyone who reads my reviews is aware of how bad the economy is treating you and yours. The only way to know if some bloviating gasbag is lying to you to steal from you, like certain fat immigrant asswipes and some revoltingly orange pedophiles I needn't name, unless you have some information they did not give you to measure their ideas against, how will you ever be able to spot the con? No one wants to be duped. No one who knows enough to form questions to ask is sure as shootin' to fall for it.

Read before you think, think before you agree with anyone. #ReadingIsResistance