'Which Will Win, Wisdom or Greed?'

[Editor's note: In A Short History of Progress, his bestselling 2004 Massey Lecture, Ronald Wright questioned the uncritical embrace of progress by examining the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. The book became a surprise international hit that led to Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary Surviving Progress, which used his ideas to explore how close our own civilization is to the edge. Wright, who read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, spent several years in South America, and now lives in B.C., is the author of nine books including Stolen Continents, Time Among the Maya, and the dystopic novel A Scientific Romance, in which an archaeologist travels 500 years into the future to survey what remains. On Sept. 26 at 5 p.m., he will give a free public lecture at UBC's Cecil Green Park House as part of the "Utopia/Dystopia: Creating the Worlds We Want" lecture series organized by the Creative Writing Program and Green College. Wright will outline what he calls the 'Progress Traps' that threaten our civilization and the natural world on which it depends, assessing what has changed -- for better and ill -- in the years since he sounded his original warning of what may lie ahead. Wright recently corresponded with Radovan Zuffa for the Slovakian magazine Profit. Here, excerpted from that interview, is what he had to say...]

Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires

[Q&A] Ronald Wright talks to The Mark about inequality, the Tea Party, and the decline of the American empire.

As the Occupy movement continues to evolve, The Mark caught up with esteemed novelist, historian, and essayist Ronald Wright – author of A Short History of Progress- to discuss the changes afoot in American society.

In your 2008 book What is America?, you argued that the American empire – or what you call the “Columbian Age” – is at its end. Have the past three years changed your mind?

Well, I have to say that the past few years have persuaded me that I was on the right track. I think the Columbian Age – which of course began with Europeans and was brought to its culmination by the Americans – certainly does seem to be running out of room. It is also running out of credibility. The land of opportunity has become a place with the greatest inequality between rich and poor in the developed world today.

In the United States, there’s been a backlash from the right with the Tea Party movement, and now from the left with the emerging Occupy movement. What do you make of these movements, and what do they tell us about the state of the American empire?

The Tea Party is, to some degree, a manufactured movement. It’s been heavily financed by extremely wealthy people such as the Koch brothers, and others. It continues the neo-right confidence trick (which I think we can say really took off with Ronald Reagan) whereby the poor are persuaded that their interests lie in voting for the party of the rich. Due to poor public education and a very strong religious element, many Americans no longer approach politics in a spirit of enlightened, rational self-interest, which is the way democracies have to be if they’re going to work.