This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jacob Bronowski's masterpiece documentary The Ascent of Man. I have an article in Discourse about why Bronowski's "personal view" remains relevant today. Here's an excerpt:
His intellectual interests were indeed so varied that one reporter called Bronowski “not one man, but a multitude.” Yet he saw the sciences and humanities as parts of a single effort to chart a modern, humanistic philosophy based in reason and discovery, instead of the superstition, poverty and violence that had so badly marred the 20th century. He thought of these last three as consequences of the “ascetic virtues” inherited from the medieval era—alongside nationalism, traditionalism, conformity and self-sacrifice. Such ideas produced only “societies constantly on the brink of famine, in which the greatest virtue of man was to achieve the heroics of an insect in a colony, and sacrifice himself for the hive.” Believing that mankind was “past those famine days, and should be past those famine virtues,” Bronowski offered instead a philosophy he called “human specificity” or “scientific existentialism,” which he first articulated in 1956, in a series of lectures at MIT entitled Science and Human Values. Casting aside the alleged dichotomy between “is” and “ought,” he argued that science provides the foundation for a universal, human ethics: “We ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so.” That commitment to discover the nature of reality led inexorably to values such as honesty, individualism, freedom of speech and respect for self and others. “The society of scientists must be a democracy,” too, because “it can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of others, and tolerance for them.”
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