A Short History of Progress

Of the 5 Chapters of A Short History of Progress, Chapter 1 is the best example of how Wright fuses art and literary criticism, contemporary history, and archaeology to make composite arguments about themes in human civilization. This is exemplified well in Wright’s brief biography of Gauguin transforming into a cultural history of Victorian thought, which then shifts into archaeological considerations of early humans before closing with reflections on a novel. This sweeping nature of the text’s relationship to both history and genre helps us understand why Wright dubs it a "short [i.e. compressed, general] history," though we must acknowledge it also sometimes leads to relatively lax or rushed interpretations of scientific data, such as in Wright’s proposition of Cro-Magnon-on-Neanderthal genocide.

Early on in the chapter, Wright gives us the reasoning behind the chapter's title. “Gauguin’s Questions” refers to the three questions of Gaugin’s painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In asking these questions, Wright employs the culturally inquisitive painter Gauguin as a foil of himself and allows Gauguin’s questions to become the seminal questions of Wright’s own book. Wright’s use of Gauguin again exemplifies how the author can use individuals, their art, and other cultural products as artefacts through which to examine cultural conditions, a standard archaeological framework enriched by Wright’s diverse academic background.

Wright provides a careful examination of the “Victorian ideal of progress” (3) at the outset of this chapter, which Wright defines through a quotation of Sidney Pollard: “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind… that It consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement” (3). Wright argues that the idea of progress as essentially good is a foundational “myth” (4) of our culture, one that we can either ascribe to Victorian elitism or to human’s natural urge to innovate, improve, and excel. This concept of progress is a trap that leads us to all the abuses of science and technology that currently damage our environments and societies. This history of the Victorian ideal of progress, therefore, is deeply tied to Wright’s argument that we must examine the histories of ancient cultures—where do we come from—to come to understand our nature—what are we—in order to predict our future—where we are going? As Wright writes, “If we see clearly what we are and what we have done we can recognize human behaviour that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here” (2).

Wright also provides a history of evolutionary science earlier in this chapter as intertwined with the Victorian ideal (pages 11-12). Discussion of this history will lead to Wright’s own treatise on early human evolution, and it also performs rhetorically by casting the author in the same scientific lineage as the great evolutionary thinkers. Like Darwin and the geologist Charles Lyell, Wright will use historical evidence to examine trends in the evolution of civilization itself.

Through this discussion of evolution Wright leads to his second core point: that humans are, in fact, innately disposed to progress. Our predisposition to innovation is the reason we live in progress traps. As his coverage of early human evolution attempts to illustrate, we, just like our ancient ancestors, are programmed to expand, to overtake, and to use every new advancement we make as a step up to the next frontier of existence, even—or perhaps especially—at the expense of other species. The discussion and implicit equivocation of Victorian and early homo sapiens culture in a single chapter is an effective rhetorical tool, burlesquing Victorian society as just as primitive as cave-men.

In his discussion of Cro-Magnon man, Wright is guilty of playing somewhat fast-and-loose with human history. It is difficult to say whether Neanderthals and early humans were engaged in genocidal conflict, or whether this conflict caused innovations in tool and art creation. While an excellent teller of the story of humanity, Wright also tends to imaginatively reconstruct these narratives. This does not discredit his point that reading human history helps us understand the present, but it signals that his text requires careful reading for arguments that border on assumptions.