Jacob Bronowski's wonderfully illuminating series on the role of scientific, mathematical, and engineering innovation through Western history
As BBC controller in the 60s and 70s Attenborough commissioned a sequence of 13-part landmark serials to explain cultural and scientific history through the modern medium of colour television. Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man is a scientific account of the development of Western Civilisation.
As with the other serials of this era, Bronowski is both author and presenter, though the producers had also had a lot of input. His background is staggering. Bronoswki's unique career gave him a PhD student's knowledge of each of the main branches of science. He researched in abstract geometry, early hominids, genetics, explosives, the history of science, and C18th English poetry. He also had a gift for popular exposition, both orally and in written articles.
The first 6 programmes in this serial are particularly lucid and insightful. Bronowski's geometrical explanations of man's early scientific and engineering achievements can be readily understood, but leave few essential gaps. For instance, in his essay on the use of stone, he begins with prehuman flint tools, the making of which required an appreciation of the grain of the stone. This intuitive appreciation of grain is carried through to primitive beam lintels, which reached their artistic apogee in Greek temples, on to Roman arches, practically supporting city aquaducts, and finally to the glories of medieval gothic cathedrals, perhaps the ultimate in stone-working, alongside the great medieval mosques (shown in the following episode).
A later programme on perspective begins with a C10th Spanish-Arab insight on rays of light, and then shows how a flat, C14th pre-renaissance picture can be `popped up' to achieve perspective. Critically, however, he makes clear that the original medieval artist would have seen something almost blasphemous in representing a single human viewpoint. In contrast, the artist intentionally painted each building in its ideal state from a God's-eye view. Thus, he's talking about a change in men's minds, not just what they paint.
Midway through the serial, there is something of a sea change. An entire episode is devoted to Galileo, whom Bronowski identifies as the father of the scientific method. However, Bronowski prefers to spend 35 minutes discussing how the Pope suppressed Galileo's work, rather than providing more details of his observations of the moons of Jupiter, the disproof of the Ptolemaic system, and the verification of the Copernican model of the solar system. Although Bronowski is generally careful to keep his radical politics on a tight leash, this half-hour strays from the main subject to deliver a long plea for tolerance and freedom of thought, which Bronowski believed to be essential to the ascent of man. This happens again towards the end of Episode 11, where there is an unnecessary conflation of the two interwar German developments of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the rise of Hitler. There is also some discussion of the moral responsibility of scientists, in particular, in the matter of weapons of mass-destruction.
Once the series progresses past 1600, from geometry to calculus, from alchemy to chemistry, from astronomy to high-energy physics, from natural history to genetics, and from cottage industry to the industrial revolution, there are far more gaps. It is not possible to present 8 semesters of secondary school science in a few programmes, so Bronowski can only give the viewer a taste of these developments. With his presentational gifts and geometric insight these later episodes are still interesting, despite the lack of real depth. Five subsequent decades of Horizonese have shown that it is difficult to do any better, except in natural history, where the subject-matter is far more visual and accessible.
The early 1970s was a liberated time. Reflecting this, Episode 12 contains the live filming of a child-birth, and concludes with a couple gazing longingly at each other, while lying on a bed. At the end of Episode 11, Bronowski becomes emotional whilst visiting Auschwitz. He walks into a shallow pool of water, and grabs handfuls of the ashes of some of the victims of the Holocaust. His aim is to contrast the human action of touching the victims with the dogmatic, detached, dehumanising, and machine-like approach of the Nazi death-camps. However, even more than the episode with Galileo and the Pope, it is questionable how this scene relates to the main thesis of the serial.
Ecologically speaking, Bronowski is overly negative about the often culturally stimulating effects of the predator. For him, nomadic raiders are dismissed as robbers at a lower state in the ascent of man. That is, except in the case of Joshua raiding Jericho. German tanks, Gengis Khan's hordes, and the Assyrian raiders are all, for him, birds of a feather.
This is a wonderfully illuminating series, to be ranked alongside Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Attenborough's own Life on Earth. Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
