The 1973 television series, The Ascent of Man, by the British mathematician and science historian, Jacob Bronowski, is approaching its 50th anniversary. Its intelligent commentary on the evolution of science in human civilization is still relevant today. However, events in the last few years have imbued Bronowski’s erudite praise of our scientific accomplishments with an unsettling irony.
Bronowski was motivated to create The Ascent of Man because he felt that the successful 1969 television series, Civilisation, by the British art historian, Sir Kenneth Clark, did not give enough attention to science as an element in humanity’s creative endeavours.
But the title for The Ascent of Man resonates at a deeper level because of the 1871 publication of Charles Darwin’s second major work of his life, The Descent of Man. This two volume tome, in which he explained that humanity “descended from some pre-existing form,” was a sequel to his famous 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species.
Notice that Darwin’s meaning of “descent” is meant to describe humanity’s historical rise toward increasing complexity and sophistication which, like Bronowski’s use of “ascent” is “to increase in importance”. This is opposite to one of the root meanings of the word “descent”, which is “to go down” or “to sink in importance”. So the thinking of Darwin and Bronowski are both praising the growing intelligence and abilities of humanity in evolutionary terms: one is describing our biological and sociological sophistication as a species, while the other is extolling our rational and technological accomplishments.
However, what if all of these evolutionary processes that Darwin and Bronowski have been praising should end in catastrophe, both for ourselves and for the ecology of our planet? If this should occur, then the measure of our history would have to be totally inverted, to be judged from the opposite perspective. This possibility is reflected in our current unfolding environmental crisis, a situation anticipated 53 years ago with Sir Kenneth’s sober and final words in his Civilisation series: “One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”
Historically, as the Home sapiens species, we have existed for about 300,000 years, most of this time as timid and fragile gatherers and scavengers who had little impact on Earth’s ecologies. As we became hunters with increasingly effective tools and weapons, we began to diminish the populations of megafauna, in some cases to the extent of extinction. The disturbed environments adjusted to these traumas, but we suffered the consequences because we were still entirely dependent on nature’s generosity for our survival.
A major change occurred about 12,000 years ago with the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. Instead of nature controlling us, we began to control nature. The effect on both our surroundings and ourselves was profound. Forests and grasslands, meadows and alluvial plains were converted to farms, and their excess production of food allowed our small and scattered populations of families and tribes to expand and coalesce into settlements, villages, cities and eventually entire empires. All this radically restructured our sociology, psychology and mythology. The rise in complexity accelerated our empowerment until here we are in the 21st century, a master species of 8 billion that is able to influence the fundamental ecological structures of our whole planet—but not necessarily to our advantage.
We are now responsible for Earth’s sixth major extinction event, the result of multiple and complex environmental impacts that are getting too numerous even to list, although they do fall into three basic categories: climate change, species collapse, and ubiquitous pollution. Indeed, these disturbances are becoming so extreme that they now threaten not only our food security and the habitability of large swaths of our planet, but the constructs of civilization that we have so diligently built.
Should civilizational collapse be the end result of our ingenuity and sophistication, then an inversion of our understanding of progress would be justified. Chipping stones for sharper tools would be judged as an unfortunate technological breakthrough. The success of farming to feed larger and larger populations simply created larger problems that grew beyond our ability to solve. The construction of cities and empires destroyed forests and created deserts. The design of arches to build bridges and aqueducts accelerated ecological deterioration. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment increased the folly of our self-confidence and hubris. Then the Industrial Revolution, with its fossil-fuel consumption and mass-production, simply accelerated the rate of deterioration. And in the last 200 years, with a civilization hyped on various kinds of ingenious devices and technologies, we have not only been destroying the fundamental fabric that we once recognized as nature, but with one stupid mistake we could unleash a nuclear holocaust that would bomb most of our historical accomplishments to oblivion.
Should either of these two options occur, or any combination of them, we could consider—or, those of us who remain could consider—that our proud and vaunted progress was a special human journey toward an unmitigated tragedy. Indeed, we may be well enough on our way that we are already beyond the point of return. What a colossal irony if Jacob Bronowski’s impassioned praises in “The Ascent of Man” became the much more sober meaning of Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man”.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top illustration credit: Where is human evolution going? – Picture byTkgd2007 (Own Work) via Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
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