The Ascent of Man

"Yes, the BBC published the book I have here. It’s pretty much the script of the TV series. The Ascent of Man was broadcast first at a remarkable time in British television. There was Kenneth Clark’s Civilization and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in 1972, which I rate very highly, and, in 1973-4, Jeremy Isaacs’s The World At War . The Ascent of Man is extraordinary television, and the book is a valuable document of it —-a way of accessing part of what Bronowski achieved. Some of the science he refers to —say with regard to DNA—has of course moved a long way forward since his time, but so much about the book remains relevant. Part of the reason I chose this book is that in the past few years, the Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari has published two books— Sapiens and then Homo Deus . They’re enjoyable but quite pessimistic and unforgiving in many ways. Harari is, perhaps, almost enjoying that bucket of cold water he’s pouring on your hopes and dreams, though he does it well and often convincingly. I gather he’s now writing a book on how to live in the 21st century, and I look forward to it. But after reading Sapiens and Homo Deus , Bronowski comes to mind because of his warmth and hope. That’s right. The title is an allusion to The Descent of Man , Charles Darwin’s hugely important work of 1871. It’s an attempt to look at cultural evolution—what it is, where it’s come from, where it’s going. And I think that one of the things that makes the book and TV series an enduring document is his optimism and the fact that he had earned the right to that optimism. Bronowski was from Poland, and he was Jewish. He was a mathematician and he worked for the British during World War II. He was a friend of Leo Szilard who first proposed the idea of the atomic bomb to the British before the whole thing went to the US and became the Manhattan Project. At the end of the final episode of the series—which you can find on YouTube —he goes to Auschwitz, and in his suit and his dress shoes he walks into a wet ditch. It’s where the outflow from the crematorium was, where the ash sludge flowed—so that mud contains a trace of ash from millions of people including members of his family. He bends down and he picks up a handful of this slimy crud. And he says that when people believe they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave. In other words, they become slaves and ghosts in the service of a terrible, evil idea. “Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.” And I think one of the central themes in the series is the importance of realising that we don’t have absolute knowledge, that patterns of social organisation tend to fall into a rigidity of doctrine and ideology over time. This often very dangerous. One of the things that science—wisely applied—can do, is blow that open to the radical openness that I was talking about, the sense of wonder. It makes us a little bit more humble and I think that’s what wonder’s about. Of course the danger is when science is tied to evil ends as it often was in World War II, obviously. Science and technology and logistics and the rest of it made possible mass slaughter in Europe and East Asia and elsewhere. It’s just a marvellous book and a wonderful series. It’s one of those things where you find you’re watching these faded, slightly strange-coloured 1970s images with this odd narrator who was actually an incredibly brilliant speaker and communicator. It’s a historical document now but it’s beautiful and wise. He says, “We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world”—he’s saying this in 1972, but many people feel it today.“That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one.” That’s optimistic. He also says that“knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it’s a responsibility for the integrity of what we are as ethical creatures.” There is a very strong moral message there, which I think only comes out of hope. It’s not a facile hope, it’s a hard-earned hope."