Documentary explores virtues, limits of progress
Filmmakers pull off a significant achievement
In the beginning, Surviving Progress feels a little deja vu: Images of chimpanzees, men in spacesuits and a parade of articulate and scholarly talking heads ponder the central question of human progress.
What does it mean to be Homo sapiens? And what are we going to do about it? Others have issued such ontological queries before, but directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks aren’t all that concerned with the monolithic question of human meaning. They are more concerned with the very act of asking the question, because they argue it’s our innate human curiosity that’s propelled us against a wall of our very own making.
It’s a compelling argument, and one based on Ronald Wright’s bestseller, A Short History of Progress, but it’s not the kind of subject matter easily approached in a visual format. Getting to the heart of the human experience — and our central experiment called civilization — is like trying to dissect a jellyfish. The minute you take it out of context, it loses all form, and becomes incredibly slippery. Moreover, it’s unrecognizable. Roy and Crooks seem to grasp the importance of finding the right lens to reflect the content, and while most of the heavy lifting is carried out by the bigbrained talking heads such as Craig Venter (who helped map the human genome) and Stephen Hawking, the directors also find a way to bring in the baseline viewer through pictures and story.
At the top of this reel coproduced through the National Film Board of Canada, we watch a chimpanzee balance two Lshaped blocks on end. In return, she earns the reward of a banana. When the scientists trick the chimp by invisibly changing the weight on the block so it’s forced to tip over, the chimp tries to balance the block like before, but gives up when it won’t stand.
A human child faced with the same challenge quickly turns the block over, and attempts to explain the invisible phenomena that changed the block’s ability to stand on end. In short, human beings ask ‘why?’ all the time.
This desire to know more has taken us to new technological heights, but our brains haven’t really evolved in any great way for millenniums. As Wright says: We are running 21st-century software on an Ice Age hard drive.
Unfortunately, the huntergatherer mindset that selected for fight or flight adrenalin surges, intense competition and sexual conquest hasn’t proved all that conducive to evolution in the modern era.
Picking up on Wright’s idea of a “progress trap,” the film sets up a comparison to our modern era, and that of the Roman Empire.
The link between the two? Taxes. As the movie tells us, the Roman empire was the first civilization in human history not to forgive debt.
Rome needed money to feed its new class of affluent generals who wanted more for themselves, and in return, new territories needed to be plundered. This eventually led to the downfall of the empire, and so dawned the Dark Ages.
The movie goes on to finger the “oligarchs of Wall Street” as the modern version of the corrupt Roman generals. Given the movie was shot in the shadow of the 2008 collapse, the film’s desire to understand the “why?” of the current economic model is easy to understand, but there are no easy answers in the offing.
As the talking heads explore the make-believe of money, and the collective mythology surrounding the so-called laws of economic modelling, they urge us to ask: “Is the economy little more than a religious-style construct, or does it have genuine scientific laws?”
The film features ample proof for the former. The most convincing argument is the denial of the central human urge to question: We’re asked to believe in the economy the way the faithful are asked to believe in God — blindly.
Interviews with David Suzuki and Margaret Atwood bring humour as well an apocalyptic aftertaste to the mix, but it’s the certainty behind the matter-offact delivery of Michael Hudson (former Wall Street banker) and Simon Johnson (former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund) who really pour the concrete foundation, and build a cohesive and urgent argument for change.
In the end, the filmmakers pull off a significant challenge by not only making a rather complex subject simple enough to understand, they find a way to make it relevant to everyone by probing the abstracts and relating them to observable fact.
This is human instinct and reason at its best, so while the content of the movie screams cataclysm as a result of “progress,” its very creation offers endless hope.