Recherche dans la collection - Wright, Ronald. Seeing the future in the ruins of the past

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Wright, Ronald. Seeing the future in the ruins of the past

Niveau hiérarchique :

Dossier

Date :

August 2010

Référence :

R16853-107-3-E, Numéro de volume : 2, Numéro de dossier : 17

No dossier (créateur) :

17

Genre de documents :

Images en mouvement, Documents textuels, Documents sonores

Trouvé dans :

Archives / Collections et fonds

No d'identification :

5858797

Contexte de cette notice :

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The Green Interview fonds

Interviews

Wright, Ronald. Seeing the future in the ruins of the past
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Notice descriptive – Détails

Date(s) :

August 2010

Lieu de création :

Canada

Étendue :

1 video file (.mov).
1 closed caption file (.vtt).
1 textual document (.pdf).
1 sound file (.mp3).
1 folder of textual records.

Langue du document :

anglais

Portée et contenu :

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File consists of an interview with Ronald Wright titled "Seeing the future in the ruins of the past." The interview was conducted by Silver Donald Cameron as part of The Green Interview. File includes video of the interview, printed transcript, sound recording, and closed captioning file.

From the interview: "Of course, progress can be defined in many different ways. Until relatively modern times, until really the beginning of the Enlightenment of the Industrial Revolution, people thought of progress in a moral sense or a spiritual sense. But then when the pace of technological change began to accelerate and became noticeable, then you got this sense of material progress. Each generation of steam engines is better than the last, for example. Agriculture, machinery and farming practices became more productive, so the idea took hold that-and this was defined by the British economist, Sidney Pollard, in his book called The Idea of Progress, and I am just paraphrasing here, but essentially he said, the assumption is that there's a pattern of change in history, and that these consist of changes in one direction only, and that that direction is towards improvement.

"And of course, if you look in the short term, and you look at the experience of the wealthy, industrialized countries of Europe and North America and a few other places, that is true. Myths are not necessarily untrue; they're usually partly true. The danger lies in the part that isn't true. And so it's partly true: we have noticed people living longer, eating better and so forth, and having more opportunities and more money and more leisure. The idea that this can go on forever is where the myth of progress gets dangerous, because there have been many times and places in the human past-not even necessarily in our own cultural tradition, but among other civilizations-where there have been great periods of expansion and prosperity, and everybody started to get the idea that life was getting better and better. But usually those periods of rapid expansion are done on "nature pays the bills for that." And the typical pattern of a civilization is to find a new way to exploit natural resources that makes human wealth, or makes a big population expansion and therefore an expansion in political power and the power to build things and so forth, in the short run. But there's a cost for that, and the cost is being paid by nature in the long run."

Nom(s) additionnel(s) :

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Wright, Ronald

No d'instrument de recherche :

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MSS2736

Information additionnelle :

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Note générale :

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From The Green Interview website: "Topic: Philosophy."

From The Green Interview website: Ronald Wright, novelist, essayist, historian and philosopher, whose studies in history and archaeology reveal disturbing patterns in the rise and collapse of human societies - patterns that we are repeating today.

Archaeology, says Ronald Wright - who began as an archaeologist - "is perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead" because it allows us to see patterns in the rise and fall of human societies over the ages. It tells us "that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes."

When societies fail - and almost all do, sooner or later - the story is remarkably consistent, as Wright points out in A Short History of Progress (2004). We see failing societies "sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory."

Groupes de documents reliés :

For audio-visual recordings of this interview, see IDCISN 607813.

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Volume [R16853]

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2 Numéro de dossier 46

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Date de modification :: 2024-05-10