The Ascent of Man

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape.

Everyone needs at least one role model to inspire them: probably more – different role models for different roles. One of mine came in the unlikely shape of a little man with glasses who dressed like my grandfather and had trouble pronouncing his ‘r’s.

How could anyone be so clever? How did Jacob Bronowski’s life come to be filled with such grand ideas while mine was littered with the tedious transactions of budgets and profit margins? Why was his world populated by brilliant minds while I shared mine with dreary accountants and businessmen? Why couldn’t I shape the landscape rather than being just a figure within it? I wanted to be an omniscient polymath too.

I missed most of Bronowski’s momentous thirteen-part BBC television series The Ascent of Man when it was first broadcast on Saturday evenings between April and July, 1973. I would have been out at the pub. Even when it was repeated at the end of that year, twice a week on both Thursdays and Sundays, I doubt I caught it all. But it affected me profoundly.

Bronowski was passionate and mesmerising, with fascinating hand gestures. He spoke straight to the camera in precise sentences for minutes at a time without background music, rapid cuts or unnecessary images. Yet he held your attention. He gave us a warm, intelligent, gimmick-free exploration of science and humanity. It was unsettling that a single individual could be so knowledgeable about so many varied subjects, from architecture to evolutionary biology, from poetry to relativity. When he appeared on other programmes, such as Parkinson, you realised he was not reading a script. The breadth of his knowledge and understanding were genuine. 

I bought the book. I read it, and then read it again. I knew all thirteen chapters. Turning through the pages now brings back so many fascinating things: the flying buttresses of Rheims Cathedral where the building hangs like a cage from the arched roof; the Peruvian city of Macchu Picchu; a demonstration of the Pythagorean proof in the sand by drawing real squares on the hypotenuse and the other two sides; the coloured shafts of the spectrum that beamed out of Isaac Newton’s “Triangular glass-Prisme”; Gregor Mendel choosing to test for seven differences between peas when he could not have known that the pea had just seven chromosomes; the surreal massive model head, several metres across, that was detectable by a radar scanner while the real man standing beside remained invisible to its long electromagnetic wavelength.

Of course the answer to the riddle of Bronowski’s erudition, as he himself might have said rhetorically, is that the man was a genius. When the television series was repeated again in 1975, I saw every episode, and something else then struck me. It was that Bronowski’s journey through science was personal and autobiographical. He recalled his own moment of revelation around 1950 when he was working on a mathematical model of the teeth of an Australopithecus baby, the Taung skull, to discriminate them from the teeth of apes, when, “... having spent a lifetime doing abstract mathematics about the shapes of things,” he said I “... suddenly saw my knowledge reach back two million years and shine a searchlight into the history of man.” From that moment his commitment moved from the abstract to the human.

He was able to talk about periods in his career when he had collaborated with other people of genius. He had known Einstein, Daniel Lehrman, James Watson, Leo Szilard and John von Neumann. He spoke of them with fondness and enthusiasm.

He remembered Einstein’s lack of materialism in lecturing at Cambridge in an old sweater and carpet slippers with no socks. He talked of afternoons spent with Leo Szilard at the Salk Institute in California, and recounted a tale about the moment when, in a mental flash, Szilard conceived the idea of the nuclear reactor. He had stopped at a red light, and before the light had turned green had realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it broke up to release two, then you would have a chain reaction. The only improbable part of the story, said Bronowski, is that “I never knew Szilard to stop for a red light.”

Bronowski described John von Neumann, the founder of game theory and computing science, as “the cleverest man I ever knew,” and “a genius, in the sense that a genius is a man who has two great ideas.” He shared an anecdote of how, during the war, after they had been discussing a particularly difficult nuclear problem, he had telephoned von Neumann early the next morning to tell him he was right, and von Neumann complained that he only wanted to be telephoned early in the morning to be told when he was wrong.

This anecdote served to illustrate how von Neumann was in love with what Bronowski called “the aristocracy of the intellect”, with which he fundamentally disagreed and considered dangerous. What we need, he argued, is “democracy of the intellect”, where knowledge sits with people who have no ambition to control others. Elsewhere, in what is perhaps the most often repeated sequence from the series when he walks into the pond at Auschwitz crematorium and scoops up the mud of human remains, he talks of the dogma and arrogance that comes from a false belief in absolute knowledge. He talks about the devastation of Hiroshima. It was a moral and ethical lesson that all knowledge is imperfect. Bronowski would surely have been dismayed by the Monty Python quip that he knew everything.

Even today, despite subsequent developments in computing, neural imaging, molecular biology, robotics, and so on, his book and series remain an exemplar of intelligent broadcasting. I was in awe and in envy. His intellect ranged across areas as diverse as literature, poetry, art, architecture, chess, mathematics, nuclear physics and biology, and yet he retained a deep sense of humility.

It was unsettling. From that time I wanted to embark upon my own version of his personal journey, starting by going to university. It felt a failing not to have been. I was drawn towards the ideas Bronowski had talked about: the human sciences, cultural evolution, psychology, sociology and anthropology. I had no idea where it might lead except that it would be a step in the right direction. At twenty-four, without university entrance qualifications, when it was not easy to get in, when completing a degree was just as difficult, it seemed a mountain to climb, but I knew I had to try.


* Use of the image of Jacob Bronowski and the cover of ‘The Ascent of Man’ is believed to constitute fair use. 

Jacob Bronowski
The Ascent of Man (5***)
When I read The Ascent Of Man again in August, 2015, I gave it a book review rating of 5*** because I had indeed read it over and over again, possibly six times, since I bought it in 1975, through which it became of considerable personal influence. I noted that reading it yet again, it may have lost a little of its freshness, but I remained in awe of Bronowski's encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to explain things. I keep wondering whether to buy the DVDs, or whether that would spoil it for me.



Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Tackling Rugby

“Tackling should be banned from school rugby,” campaigners argued this week. Well, that would be a start, but I would go further and ban the whole hideous game completely. After that I would erase it from the record books as if it had never existed.

I detested rugby from the moment it was forced upon us at grammar school. Having moved from junior school where we played football, where I had even been good enough to get picked briefly for the school team, I was dismayed to find myself in a place where football was proscribed. It was what they played at the modern school across the road. It was perhaps the only point in favour of failing your eleven plus.

The doctors and academics behind the campaign base their proposed tackling ban upon sound foundations: they have convincing data to show that most rugby injuries and concussions occur in tackles. The figures for days lost from school, serious fractures, head and spinal injuries, cognitive impairment, not to mention death, make alarming reading. These things can have lifelong consequences, and not only for those receiving them.

On the other hand, I am prepared to accept that for some adolescent boys, and I emphasise some, teachers and rugby enthusiasts who want to retain tackling might also have a point. They say that rugby helps build character for the very reason that it is risky; that it provides the kind of physical challenge gradually being removed from everyday life; that it develops masculinity by putting the body on the line; and that it leads to increased confidence and self-esteem.

But I pay little attention to any of these arguments, reasoned or not. I just dislike rugby. I am not particularly competitive and don’t like shivering outdoors in hailstorms, slithering around in freezing mud while others try to knock the hell out of me. I have no interest in the game at all whether Union or League, touch or contact. I have never had any inclination to watch it on television, not even when England won the world cup in two thousand and something. And I am certainly no connoisseur of other men’s masculinity, no matter how intimate the scrums.

It’s all the fault of Mr. Ellis. Woe betide anyone with the effrontery to bring a note from their parents hoping to be excused because of some insignificant ailment such as a broken arm or bronchitis. He expected you to get stuck in to the scrums and tackles just the same, without any protection from degenerate appliances like gum shields, jockstraps or “tower of power” body posture.

The nastier the weather the better. Thick fog was one of his favourites. It was ideal for practising high kicking: blasting the ball up into the air and wondering who it was going to strike when it came back down again.

And when the pitches were too waterlogged to play on, there was tackling practice. You were paired off with a partner who would run slowly away as you charged up to tackle them from behind. You dived shoulder-first into their bum, bringing the cheek of your face firmly against their thigh, while simultaneously circling your arms tightly around their legs to bring them down into the mud. You had to be careful not to fall on their boots in such a way as to injure yourself where it hurt most. You then swapped round so that your tackling partner could do the same for you.

By far the most important concern in this was to make sure, at all costs, you were not paired off with Ivor Longbottom. Never has anyone been more aptly named. He looked as if he had two rolls of stair carpet stuffed down the back of his shorts, one each side. He must have had a body mass index of over forty. You would have had more chance of success trying to tackle one of those huge leather vaulting horses in the school gym. When you dived at full speed putting all your weight through your shoulder into the back of one-half of his enormous longbottom, you just bounced off ineffectually as he continued to trundle away still wondering when the expected tackle was coming.

The other way round, him tackling you, was too awful to contemplate. Even when the mud made it impossible to run, you had to make sure you were quicker than him so he couldn’t catch you, and hope Mr. Ellis did not notice. Being tackled by Ivor Longbottom would have been a sure way to get yourself included in the injury statistics, had anyone then been concerned enough to bother collecting them.

When it came to rugby games themselves, my main objective was to keep as far away from the ball as possible, and if by some accident or misfortune it came to me, to get rid of it immediately. It was an effective strategy. It ensured I never got picked to play with the heavy mob: the sturdily built lads who played rugby for the school and seemed to like nothing better than pulverising each other flat into the mud. These were the bullies who, on seeing someone thin like me in their way, would run straight at you with maximum momentum, leaving you with little choice but to get out of the way or suffer serious bruising. I almost did have to face them once when Mr. Ellis mistook me for someone else who had “... had a good game last week” and should “... see how you get on in the first team.” It was a close call, but I managed to convince him I was not who he thought I was, and had no inclination to “... well, let’s see how you get on anyway.” 

I suspect that to get into college to train as a games teacher there used to be two essential requirements. One was that you had to be able to convince them you were good at sports, and the other that you had to be a sadist. With Mr. Ellis it must have been touch and go on both counts. He was never ever observed to participate in any game or sport for more than a couple of minutes, nor was he a total sadist – he was a good way along the scale, admittedly, but he had been known in rare circumstances to excuse people from rugby. Those at death’s door might be allowed to run up and down the touchline waving a flag, and those already dead to go off and help the school gardener.

I must have been very effective at appearing dead because I spent quite a few games periods sweeping up leaves. Only once did I have to act as linesman, but turned out to be so inept I was never asked again. Evidently, to be a linesman, it helps if you understand the rules of the game.

Dreadful game!

Andrew Petcher is another blogger who hated rugby at school, as recalled in a post with a great punchline. Clearly, bloggers tend not to make good rugby players.

It was apparently a Chancellor of Cambridge University in the eighteen-nineties who came up with the oft misquoted comparison between football and rugby. Studiously taking care not to say which was which, he observed that: “one is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans; the other a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.” (see the saintsandheathens blog)

The image shows a match between Llandover College and Christ College, Brecon, Wales in 1965.