It's got EVERYTHING to do with your vorsprung durch technik, ya know?

A segue and homage in that post title; from the Britpop-inspired thoughts of my last response on Cool Britannia, via the cockney-caricature monologue of the real musical epitome of the era in all its pastiched, referential glory, Parklife, to the things I really want to talk about. Like epic scientific/historical documentaries, how we conceive of the course of history, technology's role in it, and the notion of specialized knowledge. And where that leads us, in turn. Sometimes in unanticipated directions.

It'll take me a few posts, spread over a few days (at my slovenly pace) to even scratch the surface of the connections (a pre-emptive pun) that I'm making. But here goes.

This summer, I discovered to my delight that someone has put virtually all of James Burke's major documentary series on the development of modern society, emphasizing science and technology, on Youtube. Thank you, "jamesburkefan." I'm not sure how familiar you are with Burke, Zoran - perhaps you are, perhaps not. But even if you're not, I've got the feeling you would recognize the feel and style of the documentaries he presents.

And what style! To say nothing of the content itself, which is quite awesome. These are the archetypal 70s-80s era BBC popular documentaries, as full of goodness as they are laden with dynamic, easily-parodied stylistic touches. The showy camerawork and cuts, for starters. It is all so nerdy, it can't help but be hip. Britain may have been going down the tubes in the late 1970s, but it couldn't have been all bad if they were capable of producing television like "Connections." Whiz-bang CGI special effects? Who needs those?* Spend the money instead on creating something worth saying, with enough left over for re-creations, round-the-world travels for the sake of a single shot, and one ubiquitous, fantastic off-white leisure suit. They don't make television like this anymore - or even show it much anymore, and that is a shame.

*Then again, the final moments of this episode are not special effects - and it's so much better than anything you could cook up on a computer. Talk about an astounding shot.

I had never seen all of the original Connections, nor most of his other series like The Day The Universe Changed. I've read that a couple of our "educational" cable channels (i.e. Discovery Channel, History Channel) may have shown some of these documentaries years ago, but nowadays they're more concerned with showing educational "documentaries" about custom motorcycle shops, UFOs and ghost hunters. So I've been slowly catching up with Burke on Youtube since late summer. An episode here, an episode there.

At several points, but especially here, in the finale, Burke talks about specialized knowledge in our modern world. And that is what I want to highlight, the idea that the further we go along, the more complex and recondite that knowledge gets (especially at the boundaries of science and technology), the more we all must depend on others, on "experts" and "expert interpretations" to make sense of it for us. Which leaves us extremely vulnerable to all sorts of manipulative things. Speaking as someone who considers himself somewhat intelligent, many intelligent, intellectually curious people are drawn to understanding things which, beyond a certain point, they just can't grasp in full. Stuff like quantum physics, superstring theory, and so on. I know that even the people working in those fields don't grasp it all. Yet we still want to know, and there are people claiming that it really means X, as if they grasp it all, as if it's a settled question. And this can have some political/cultural/environmental consequences. So who do we give creedence to?

I'll say more about this next time. It doesn't have much to do with Burke per se, more about things that interest me like the co-opting of certain near-impenetrable scientific ideas by certain New Age types.

We can talk all you want about James Burke - I would be glad to. He's still writing books by the cartload and heading up a curious project called the Knowledge Web, which seems to extend his basic perspective on history and historical figures - "everything is connected, often in ways you can't predict" - into a collaborative web space. It's a perspective that I find inspiring and provocative. But I would be remiss if I didn't also include this bit from one of his predecessors. Through a little research (I mean, wikipedia) I found that Burke's Connections was really just one in a line of big-picture-oriented historical documentaries produced by the Beeb in the 60s and 70s. Before him, there were projects like Jacob Bronowski's similar, but more highbrow and academic The Ascent Of Man.

Watch this clip. This is one of the more moving, meaningful and important few seconds of television I can remember seeing. Where Burke - not so much an academic, but a former TV science correspondent - tends to leaven the startling parts with a little whimsy and irony, this is pure drama and pathos. It chills. I can't get it out of my mind, the survivor stepping into the ash-puddle and "touching people." I wish that the clip didn't cut off when it did, and I'd like to hunt down the original series, probably on video somewhere but not in our library, to see the whole thing.

Jacob Bronowski at Auschwitz: