Fresh
These are critically important issues, but it needs a sharper point to get through thick skulls, and even evolved humans who are tired of the treadmill of progress might ask: What else is new?
Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Surviving Progress
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
2011 · 1h 26m · NOT RATED
Documentary
Directed by
Mathieu Roy
,
Harold Crooks
Overview
Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
75%
Tomatometer
Rotten
A slick jeremiad, "Surviving Progress" is expertly made (it's far from tedious) but intellectually muddled.
Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
Fresh
[A] remarkably cogent, albeit remarkably alarming, film.
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
Fresh
They shy away from proposing solutions, and the filmmakers capture humanizing clashes that illustrate the challenges of finding a balance that serves all parties.
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Fresh
Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, adapting a book by Ronald Wright, argue so persuasively that the human race is spinning out of control.
J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader
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