The Ascent of the tolerant man

Philosopher Simon Critchley's piece on the philosopher/scientist/literateur Jacob Bronowski's 1973 BBC classic, Ascent of Man, is not only timely, but also makes me take a trip down memory lane.

I remember being riveted to the television on Wednesday evenings every week, waiting for the Polish Jewish British Professor (based in San Diego, California) to appear on the screen and for an hour dive into a narrative of the evolution of human civilization.

Television-watching in India in those days was a dour black and white experience, both in terms of color and content, so any program bearing a non-Indian stamp on it would be welcome for us children.

These days I'm interested in narratives of globalization and have been cruising through Thomas Friedman's paean to the all round "flattening" of the world in The World is Flat. I'm particularly interested in figuring out who do we need to be or become, and what values should we endow ourselves with, in order to qualify as the citizens of a "flat world."

Though Dr. Bronowski gave his views on science, religion and civilization in an era when the word "global" wasn't a known term, yet Critchley's reintroduction of the man and my memory of what he said of the trajectory of global civilization, tells me that the Doctor would have made an excellent citizen of today's globalizing world. In fact he would have made a better candidate for citizenship of a globalizing world than many of our eminent contemporaries, who believe they know precisely what it means to be a global citizen (become "creative" by harnessing the constellation of all of the latest technologies).

As Critchley reminds us, Bronowski had espoused the value of uncertainty, humility and tolerance in our quest for knowing:

For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.” [...] The relationship between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.

Embrace your inner bot

The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, predicts that the future of knowledge work would be largely owned by computers. 

According to the authors, computers would be able to perform increasingly complex parts of cognitive jobs like diagnosing diseasing, picking stocks and granting parole.

Is this something we should worry about?

NYTimes columnist, David Brooks says, we should worry about the future computer displacing the "average" skill-holder, whom he describe in terms of the "middle distance runner." A "middle distance runner" is the worker who regurgitates yesterday's news in language that's comprehensive and length that's graspable, but does nothing more.

However, it's the "creative" sort whom the smart computer will not be able to displace unless the smart computer develops emotive traits and a "heart". Brooks describes the new age creativity brilliantly:

Creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.

Thomas Friedman has some acute observations on the book here, and the authors' interview is here.

No(r)way

Since I'm in a Scandinavian mode these days (having raised a toast to Sweden in my last post), I thought of mentioning Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard's three-part memoir, My Struggle.

The memoir challenges a myth that there is no suffering in Norway. 

Knausgaard, according Gary Shteyngart, humor writer and self-professed lover of all stories that originate from or resolve in suffering (because he grew up in Bolshevik Russia), is a living proof that Norwegians suffer too, and quite acutely to boot.

Here is a review of Knausgaard's memoir.