Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It

For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it--no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our--and all species’-- existence on a planet in crisis.

In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

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. He has written essays and analysis for The Nation, The Guardian, The New Republic, Current Affairs, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has contributed interviews to BBC Ideas, VICE News Tonight, and various radio and podcast programs. Progress is his first book.