Fools Progress

The spires of capital are crumbling. The anabolic boiling in the towers of the global village has been reduced to a simmer, and as the bubbles burst, the high water mark is adjusting down. The boys down on Wall Street with their bright suits, their million dollar smiles aren’t worth so much anymore: the market—sum of their shared belief, totality of their actions—has hysterically convulsed downward over the last month, and the faith of the watching world has been shaken to the core. No longer reassured by the giant American flag that hangs limp from the exchange wall, we need something a little more solid. But Don’t Worry, the great towers of glass and steel are rising again. Just down the street, climbing out of the ashes of the old World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower recently crested ground level. Stories speak louder than words, and it’s going to have 108 of them. But what are they saying?

The brilliant Canadian author and social critic Ronald Wright might know, if anyone asked him. And if they listened long enough, he’d likely mention Easter Island. In his insightful 2004 book A Short History of Progress, the little atoll is but one of several societies, including ours, in which he identifies the tell-tail signs of oncoming collapse.

The island was ecologically devastated by the time it was “discovered” by the Dutch, and with no wood to support such large building projects, the island’s famous statues were long a mystery. “We could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber [or] strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully 30 feet high,” Captain Cook wrote on first seeing the island, before going on to lament that God had not provided the islanders with any useful natural resources. But he had: at one time the island had been a virtual paradise, with lush soil which supported a rich tropical forest. “The catastrophe on Easter Island,” says Wright, “was man.”

Like many other oceanic peoples, the Islanders practiced ancestor worship. The giant stone moai were their fathers and mothers, from whom flowed the bounty of the island, and by praying to the moai on their beachside alters, the islanders could be sure that the bounty would not run dry. This system was not to last. The islanders became competitive with each other and carved larger and larger statues; cutting down more and more of the trees they needed to transport the silent moai down to the beach. “We might think,” Wright postulates, “that as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes such as boat building and roofing. But that is not what happened. The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway. All shade vanished from the land except for the hard-edged shadows cast by the petrified ancestors, who the people loved all the more because they made them feel less alone.”

And they didn’t stop there. Unable to question their belief in the ancestors, the islanders kept building. “[The statues] promised the return on plenty, if only the people would keep faith and honour them with increase. ‘But how will we take you to the altars?’ asked the carvers, and the moai answered that when the time came they would walk on their own. So the sound of hammering still rang from the quarries, and the… walls came alive with hundreds of new giants, growing even bigger now that they had no need of human transport.”

“The people had been seduced,” Wright says, “by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ‘ideological pathology.’” He’s right: the largest moai that the islander managed to drag to the beach is 30 feet high, and weighs 80 tons. The largest ever carved is 65 feet tall and weighs 200. It never moved from the spot it was built.

The Freedom Tower will be 1,776 feet high, a reference to the Declaration of Independence, and will accommodate 2.6 million square feet of office space. It will weigh 510,000 tons. More than one million people worldwide are inadequately housed, mostly living in slums and tent cities, while one hundred million have no homes at all. Between July 2007 and July 2008, steel prices nearly doubled, and as demand grows, the cost of cement continues to climb.

And what does the freedom tower say to us? It says everything is okay. It says the engines that built it are running smooth, the ideology intact. Limitless expansion can go on. It need not even stop at the edges of this world. In the words of Daniel Childs, head architect for the project, the Freedom Tower will reflect and embody “an important piece of New York City property,” that most potent and unattainable symbol of freedom, “the sky.”