- Written and presented by James Burke, this 10-part series traces the development of
Western thought through its major transformations since the days of ancient Greece.
Program one is an overview of the series, showing how a culture’s view of the world
around it determines how it sees itself, and is reflected even in the smallest de tails of
its customs and habits.
- Relates that in the course of overrunning Moorish Spain, Christian Europe discovered
libraries, universities, optics, mechanics, and natural philosophy. This rediscovery of
classical knowledge led to the founding of universities and the replacement of Augustinian
philosophies by Aristotelian theories.
- Shows that Western Europe’s rediscovery of perspective through the study of Arab
optics led to revolutions in art and architecture. The West’s new-found ability to
control things at a distance resulted in new methods of warfare and the confidence to make
long voyages of exploration.
- Observes that the invention of printing and the advent of cheap paper forever
transformed the nature of knowledge from the local and traditional to the systematic and
testable. Nationalism, public relations, and propaganda are among the results.
- Notes that investigators such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton evolved better
explanations of natural phenomena than those of Aristotle. Highlights the theories that
led to a new conception of how the universe works and of man’s place in it.
- Locates the origins of contemporary consumerism in the English industrial Revolution,
powered by religious dissenters barred from all activities except trade. The invention of
the steam engine, new forms of credit, surplus wealth, and opening markets laid the
foundation for industrial society.
- Traces modern society’s recognition of the value of statistics to medical advances
stemming from responses to the French Revolution and an English cholera epidemic.
Identifies the origins of medicine as a science with the discovery of anesthesia,
antiseptics, and bacteriology.
- Tracks the expectation of change, fundamental to contemporary society, through the
developing sciences of botany, geology, and biology to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Darwin’s theory, in turn, has been used as a justification for Nazism, communism, and
cut-throat capitalism.
- Points out that studies of the properties of magnetism, electricity, and light have led
scientists to the realization that Newtonian physics is inadequate to explain all that
they observe. The public, meanwhile, has continued to concentrate on the technological
by-products of science.
- Observes that over the centuries Western civilization has regularly shifted its
conception of the nature of truth. Citing the example of Nepalese Buddhism, a system as
complete and satisfactory of Nepal as science is for the West, the series ends with a plea
for tolerance.
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