A myth & its unmaking

A dismantling of the idea of progress, forcing a rethink what it means to advance at all

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

FEW IDEAS HAVE seduced humanity quite like progress. From the Enlightenment's candlelit salons to Silicon Valley's glowing screens, we have told ourselves one great story: that the world is getting better-faster, fairer, freer.

In Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, Samuel Miller McDonald asks whether this cherished notion is not in fact a myth-one that blinds us to the ruin in our rear-view mirror. What if progress, the idea we celebrate as civilisation's triumph, is actually the story of its undoing?

McDonald's argument is sweeping and unsettling. He suggests that progress-that glittering word which politicians, scientists and billionaires utter as mantra is not an achievement but a disguise: a moral-alibi for exploitation, a story invented to justify power and soothe conscience. "We have mistaken speed for direction, and change for improvement," he writes, setting the tone for a work that challenges not only history, but the way we think.

The book begins before civilisation's dawn-in what McDonald calls "the time before progress", when human life was still embedded in the natural world. "When we ceased to live with nature and began to live off it," he observes, "civilisation was born-and so was hierarchy." It is this shift, from coexistence to extraction, that he traces across five millennia.