PROGRESS

Dreams of Eden.

Progress does not necessarily make us better. Can you measure happiness, fulfillment, or the spiritual quality of life? This first book by McDonald, a geographer, seeks answers through a great cultural history of the West—running from ancient Mesopotamia to Christian Europe, from medieval faith to Enlightenment reason, from war to peace and war again. We’ve told ourselves a story: The longer we live, the better; the more we have, the better. Rather than praising personal or national acquisition, the author argues for a “calculated commensalism,” societies “that practice economies of reciprocity.” We need to look back to what the author calls older, “ecologically sound societies” for models of this reciprocity. Such societies—ancient, non-Western, agrarian—were often conquered and destroyed by Western imperialism. Those old societies built a “pathway to those qualities of freedom, equality, leisure, abundance and peace…not through the conquest of frontiers and the hysterical extraction of life, but through experimentation…inquisitiveness and courage, and through the willingness to fight for these things.” There is an idealism to this book that refreshes readers jaded by the claims of “techno-futurism” and the aspirations of oligarchs. You read this book and want to love the earth rather than reach for stars. At times, though, the book offers the overstatements of the justice warrior: “We must not see the political change we fight for today as yet another step…along the lineage of progressive history within which we so often situate our struggle.…Indigenous resistance stands outside this lineage of parasitism.” If a sharing, selfless society is out of reach in waking life, it still may fill our dreams.

A critical history of progress rests on wishful thinking for a return to an ecologically sensitive, communitarian life.