Progress Debunked: The Creation-Destruction Balance and Ancient Wisdom's Primacy

Despite accelerating technological advances, most of the world remains in dire poverty. Despite the triumph of “family planning” in the West, traditional religions are winning more converts worldwide—and having more children—than the more progress-minded. And despite the 20th century’s seeming victory over Social Darwinism, the end result of Western “progress” is a civilization that uses five times its share of natural resources, leaving the rest of the world to pick up the scraps of our unsustainable growth.

Is progress—genuine progress—even possible?

Award-winning author and independent scholar Samuel Thomsen engages this question armed with a groundbreaking new argument, employing modern evolutionary theory, Malthusian demographics, and evidence from molecular genetics and anthropology. He leads us to several compelling and surprising conclusions: that the very idea of world progress is logically incoherent; that our oldest traditions contain vastly more wisdom than modern science; and that animate life, in its essence, thrives on a fertile balance of both creation and destruction, both joy and suffering, both good and evil.