Read of the Week (Sept 7 to Sept 13)

Progress is power. But our modern story of progress is a very dangerous fiction. In the pursuit of progress, of growth and expansion, we have levelled cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe and ushered in a new geological epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. The idea of progress has compelled societies toward exploration, invention, and grandiosity on one hand, and on the other, genocide, slavery, ecocide, and conquest: it is the root of our civilisation’s success, as well as its looming demise.

Geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myth upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its blood-strewn lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. He traces the history of how human societies broke from their pasts, broke from their environments, and broke from longstanding egalitarian values that sustained them, supplanting these with one imperative to rule all others: progress. If humanity is to have any chance of a future, then we must fundamentally change the way we think about one of our most basic political ideas.

Samuel Miller McDonald is a geographer focusing on human ecology, theory, and history. He holds a doctorate from Brasenose College, University of Oxford and degrees from Yale University and College of the Atlantic.