In an earlier post I mentioned that I experience Catch-44-ish feelings almost every day, e.g., when I read about rising hydro costs and our growing demand for more juice.
I elaborated a bit on my use of the term in a later post re rising infrastructure costs, i.e., related to tarmac roads, and our inability to pay our way when I said, “In other words, we’re in a Catch-44, a bad trap, twice as bad as a Catch-22.”
In my mind, I relate Catch-44 back to another term - a progress trap - and illustrative examples of the same found in the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (see Read This, right margin).
In it he writes:
“Since the early 1900s, the world’s population has multiplied by four and its economy - a rough measure of the human load on nature - by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers,” (pg. 31) i.e., lest we fall into a progress trap.
“We have already caused so many extinctions that our dominion over the earth will appear in the fossil record like the impact of an asteroid... a bad smell of extinction follows Homo sapiens around the world.”
["Asteroids - like the blunt fist of mankind"; photo link here]
In Chapter 2 he reveals “what we can deduce from the first progress trap - the perfection of hunting, which ended the Stone Age - and how our escape from that trap by the invention of farming led to our greatest experiment: worldwide civilization. We then have to ask ourselves this urgent question: Could civilization itself be another and much greater trap?”
What a great question.
The book is a real page turner.
I highly recommend it, but don’t expect a happy ending a la Walt Disney, e.g., Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The tone of the book is reflected in Wright’s thoughts about some of the roots of modern civilization.
“From ancient times until today, civilized people have believed they behave better, and are better, than so-called savages. But he moral values attached to civilization are specious: too often used to justify attacking and dominating other, less powerful, societies. In their imperial heyday, the French had their “civilizing mission” and the British their “white man’s burden” - the bearing of which was eased by automatic weapons. As Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1898: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Nowadays, Washington claims to lead and safeguard “the civilized world,” a tradition in American rhetoric that began with the uprooting and exterminating of that country’s first inhabitants.” (pg. 33)
So, about that first progress trap mentioned earlier...
Stay tuned.
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Please click here to read Catch-44, the progress trap, and the greedy monkey PT 1
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