for - progress traps - interview - Ronald Wright

summary - In this more recent interview, Ronald Wright, author of "A Short History of Progress" and advocate of the idea of "progress traps", offers his cogent take on the world today, as refracted and reflected through an archeological lens - Wright sheds light on the relevance of history and especially archeology on our contemporary polycrisis, illustrating how, while different in details, are very similiar to the same mistakes our ancestors of every age have made - The archeology lessons of Sumeria, Stone age humans, Easter Island and more illustrate that it is dangerous to romanticize our ancestors as their mistakes cost them their civilizations, as much as the current mistakes we are now making may cost ours - I would add that our own Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity research compliments Wright's superb work on Progress Traps with ideas borrowed from the East - specifically, Shunyata or Emptiness - Complimenting progress traps with Emptiness reveals another dimension of the perennial problem our species face since time immemorial, and in every generation henceforth - Deep Humanity integrates Progress with Emptiness, the individual with the collective, friends with enemies and proposes that we are approaching a singularity in our species, - in which all past civilizations are converging in one heterogenous entity in modernity - and the future of our species will depend on whether we can culturally adapt quickly enough to the multiple existential risks we now face - Our future as a viable evolutionary species may depend on the collective direction we move in in the next few years, of resolving the age-old quagmire of the holographic unnamable present in every one of us born into a living and dying body, continually fractures itself into violently polarized pieces. - Do we have the collective foresight to penetrate our own ignorance?