In 1973 BBC radio broadcast ten conversations between the polymath Jacob Bronowski and his colleague George Steedman. The conversations, entitled ‘Voyage round a Twentieth-Century Skull,’ belong to a vanished culture, one that assumed its audience could range comfortably across considerations of poetry, art, music, science and philosophy. Bronowski had grown up in an intellectually charged atmosphere, particularly during his years at Cambridge University. He studied Mathematics but also read widely in modern literature and found the time to edit a literary magazine with a prodigy named William Empson (who, shortly afterwards, gave up Mathematics to study English Literature, and quickly revolutionised the subject while still in his mid-twenties.) Despite C P Snow’s pessimism that intellectual life in Britain had split into “two cultures,“ science and art were harmoniously confused in this charmed atmosphere. In fact one of Bronowski’s fondest memories of undergraduate life was when he watched W B Yeats and Albert Einstein receive honorary degrees on the same stage.
In the final conversation, Bronowski cheerfully admitted that he paid little attention to politics “which seems so important to the newspapers.” Yet he remained confident that this mattered little because “the men I have spent my life with have said little things on bits of paper, sometimes written in mathematics, sometimes written in poetry, which will shape the future far more profoundly than those silly political decisions.” This was no idle boast; Bronowski had worked with some of the leading scientists of the century, most notably Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard – whose role in the development of nuclear technology is hotly debated to this day. Furthermore Bronowski had visited Hiroshima after its devastation and written an influential cri de coeur on the need for a restoration of ‘human values’ to scientific inquiry. Like many others, he had abandoned physics, determined to compensate for its lethality by embracing life in the final decades of his career.
If Bronowski were alive today, to survey the ideas in a twenty-first century skull, he would certainly be less sanguine about the consequences of political ignorance. Digital technology has revolutionised the ways we store, retrieve, analyse and share information, but it seems to have done precious little to help us reach wiser conclusions. The current roster of candidates for the US Republican Party equivocate when asked about the theory of evolution and are equally vague about whether global climate change is substantiated by the voluminous findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or simply a myth. The bureaucrats who staff the American government are little better. President Obama recently postponed a controversial pipleine project that would increase exploitation of the Canadian tar sands – and consequently raise the planet’s temperature significantly over the next few decades. But this decision was driven as much by politics as science and if re-elected the president is just as likely to approve the project as deny it.
Modern technology has overwhelmed us with a ceaseless flow of information, but few among us have learned how to sort the wheat from the chaff, and even fewer have determined how to make use of this knowledge to inform modern politics. The scale on which modern ‘knowledge management’ operates is difficult for those raised in a world of real bookstores and libraries to grasp. Google Books – to name only the most famous of many current digitisation projects – aims to scan more than 100 million books that have languished in the vaults of the world’s great libraries. And, despite various legal entanglements it is likely that books, films, music will be distributed on a similarly lavish scale in the future – last month Apple’s iTunes store notched up its sixteenth billion download, in July it marked 15 billion application downloads.
Yet, to date, these miraculous advances have done little to diminish the parochialism of modern education, far less break the grip of increasing specialisation. Few undergraduates at Cambridge, or elsewhere, could confidently name a leading scientist and only a vanishingly small number could follow that up with the name of a serious poet. In this brave new world we are accustomed to surfing oceans of information but remain content with just a few scattered morsels of real knowledge. This outcome would have shocked Bronowski and Steedman, but passes largely unnoticed in our gadget-hungry culture. Inevitably, however, this imbalance will take its toll. Eventually, just as earlier generations came to regret their complacency over nuclear technology and the exploitation of natural resources, we too will learn that our distraction from the urgent political and scientific debates of today comes with a heavy price. Unfortunately, like them, we seem doomed to acquire this knowledge only when we are no longer in a position to use it wisely.
