An excerpt from the documentary film Surviving Progress.
Ronald Wright’s bestseller “A Short History Of Progress” inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired. Some of the world’s foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome “progress traps”, which destroyed past civilizations and lie treacherously embedded in our own.
Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired SURVIVING PROGRESS, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.