The Ascent Of Man — Jacob Bronowski

This book, and the accompanying BBC documentary series, was roundly condemned in feminist circles when first published. If there was an ascent of man, it was argued, its result was the descent of women. I must admit to boycotting the initial broadcast in 1973 because of this blowback and it was not until a few months later, when Michael Parkinson interviewed Bronowski on his talk show, that I began to regret my decision. He was not only warm, witty and fully human, he was also incredibly interesting.

Obviously, I’d missed the television series but there was still the book, a word-for-word transcript, which I bought secondhand, intending to dive right in. But in the way of all book lovers, I had a large unread pile demanding my attention and never opened it. Indeed, it followed me through multiple apartment changes over the next 16 years, and it was the summer of 1990 before I idly plucked it off a shelf and binge-read it during a long holiday weekend.

How best to describe it? Everything you ever wanted to know about the last 10,000 years packed into less than 500 pages? A crash course in the rise of the human race, which according to Bronowski started with the end of the Ice Age and the shift away from Nomadism. Those who failed to make this move, he says, failed to survive because ‘civilization can never grow up on the move’.

For it was village agriculture, — the harvesting of wheat, and the harnessing of domestic animals — that led us through the great civilizations of Greece and Rome to the Reformation and the Renaissance, with all their scientific milestones.

From there we entered the Industrial Revolution, which was ‘terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihood it overturned (but which) became in time a social revolution and established…the equality of rights… on which we depend’. And this catapulted us into the 20th Century world of Einstein, Bohr, Fermi et al, with the book ending on what we now know was the dawn of computer technology.

Where the feminist criticism is valid is that this is a book about the white patriarchy. There are no brilliant women between its covers and one must simply accept that as an unpleasant truth. Bronowski does not exclude us out of malice, but merely records history as it presents itself. Women and other disenfranchised people were barred from formal education and had few opportunities to contribute to the Arts and Sciences.

But what is left is a recitation of magnificent facts: the discoveries and upward steps, made by men ‘of immense integrity and at least a little genius’. And credit where credit’s due: they did a great job. Against the purveyors of tragedy and pain — the war mongers, the robber barons — it’s a relief to acknowledge the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein. And, in a world where almost everything bad can be laid at men’s door, it’s good to remember they are also responsible for many of the positives that have moved us forward as a species.