The Day the Universe Changed (TV Mini Series)

The Way We Are: It Started with the Greeks (1985)

James Burke: Self - Host

Quotes 

• Self - Host : That's the kind of thing we do. We try to take the universe apart to see how it works. We can't leave anything alone without knowing what it is. We are insatiably curious. And that's what we defend here with all this military hardware. The right to be curious, to ask questions and get answers. To question authority, and to remove it from power if we don't like what it's telling us. And that's why we've changed constantly throughout history to become what we are today. Because we've never stopped asking questions. And what've we got as a result? Answers. A mountain of them, gathered over the centuries. So much, we've had to invent systems just to handle it. So big, information processing itself is now a science. So total, it's generated the full entire complex of the modern western world. A world based on information, that we can defend from a hole inside a mountain, thanks to the knowledge we've accumulated. And that we want to go on being free to accumulate.

• Self - Host : The Greeks were into questions like 'What's it all made of? Where did it all come from? And what's this constant change in nature all about?' And the technique they'd developed for reconciling opposites to reach political solutions, was also a kind of way of thinking things through in general to reach new ideas. And so, in a physical sense, was their geometry, remember? Whatever happened in nature, lines and angles never changed. And that's where we began. I mean, the rational way we in the west look at things. The rationalism that is the bringing together of logic and geometry. That's our way. Driven since the questioning Greeks to look for the order in nature, without which there would be chaos.

• [first lines] 

  Self - Host : Let me tell you a joke. Somebody apparently went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said, 'What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must've been to look every morning at what's going on behind me now--the dawn--and to have thought that what they were seeing was the Sun going round the Earth. Well, as every schoolkid knows, the Earth goes round the Sun, and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that.' To which Wittgenstein replied, 'Yeah, but I wonder what it would've looked like if the Sun HAD been going round the Earth.' Point being, of course, it would've looked exactly the same. You see what your knowledge tells you you're seeing.

• Self - Host : The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is keeping order. Because if the institutions didn't do that, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So the institutions are usually old-fashioned, don't like change. Well, we all like to know where we stand, don't we? I mean, you wouldn't want this place to make up the rules as it went along, would you?

• Self - Host : [of a scientific research lab]  In spite of the way institutions can act like a safety barrier against the effects of change, because of the way we've made asking questions one of our institutions, we do something that doesn't appear to make sense. Where other societies do things, organizes themselves to keep things the way they are, we, because of our rationalist beginnings back in Greece, create places like this to do exactly the opposite. To make waves, to rock the boat. To ask questions knowing that the answers will change things.

• Self - Host : The western view of things varies a certain amount from one place to another. But basically, it's a dynamic view we all share. A highly individualistic approach to things. And we all keep order in the same way, with the same common beliefs, and the understanding that to hold it all together, you have to compromise between doing your own thing and sticking to a minimal number of rules everybody agrees on, if you're going to avoid chaos.

• Self - Host : If you landed here from another planet, came from another time, all this agreement, all the symbols, the way we do what we do as a group, would be like a kind of message that you could read to find out what kind of civilization we are now. Because like everything else, this unspoken agreement is based on what we all know. And we're unique in the way we learn that. It's not genetic. You pick it up as you go along, the order things are supposed to be in, the way things are done. And when you get down to the individual level, the rules of the game are there too. Much more subtle. But in spite of the fact that, in one sense this is all Greek to me, the agreement is so common to all of us in the west, that wherever you're watching this from now, it'll make sense. Even if you don't speak the language, you know the code.

• Self - Host : [of the court system]  I suppose what institutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work. While they're putting 'em away here in the law court for instance, that leaves us free to get on with making money, having a career, and avoiding the social responsibility stuff these people have to deal with. And after a few centuries of this buck-passing, the institutions get big and powerful, and reach into everybody's life so much, they become hard to alter, and virtually impossible to get rid of.

• Self - Host : The extreme way to protect yourself against change, and keep total order in the face of awkward questions, is to do it the way they do in eastern communities, where say Buddhism is a way of life. In that case, you're not bothered by questions, because you're not looking for answers. Basically, all the answers a Buddhist needs were found over 2000 years ago. Their explanation of the universe is set in theological concrete. And in any case, it's a universe that doesn't change, so there's no need to go looking for change in it.

• Self - Host : You see how a culture reveals itself by what it does. All that evidence about ours down there. You can read it like a book. And in our case, the message you get is that the only constant in life is change. Not just in the physical shape of the world around. In standards, attitudes, ethics, values, morals all shifting. The inevitable end product of that Greek rationalism I talked about earlier is all around you. It's our world of here today and gone tomorrow.

• Self - Host : So here we are: commited by our Greek origins to a life of asking questions, that provide answers, that turn out to create more questions. And no end in sight. And as our amazing abilities grow more amazing, the more questions we ask. We're reaching the stage where it's not a matter of what novelty and change the future will bring next, but what kind of future we care to invent, make happen. We can make deserts bloom, or make deserts. Move mountains, maybe create life. All because we can't leave things alone.

• Self - Host : Well that's what this series is going to be about. How what you think the universe is, and how you react to that in everything you do, depends on what you know. And when that knowledge changes, for you the universe changes. And that is as true for the whole of society as it is for the individual. We all are what we all know today. What we knew yesterday was different, and so were we. So that's why this series is also going to look at the past. At the way we were, because of what we knew that was different from today. And at how, through history, every time our view of the universe changed--and us with it--something was created that would help make us what we are in the modern world. With a distinctive way of thinking that makes us us, and not some other bunch with a different view.

• Self - Host : So, why are we so attached to being the way we are? So attached that all these people are prepared to die for it? Well if you asked nine out of ten people in the west, they'd probably use the word 'freedom', wouldn't they? Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of self-expression. Or maybe 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. That, and the fact that we think our version of things is the best version there is. Look back, as I'm going to in this series, to the moments when what we were changed because what we knew changed, and you see how far we've come. And also how each of those stages in the growth of our knowledge also brought into existence a vital bit of what it is we are today.

• Self - Host : Not some other bunch, thinking and acting differently. Us: the end product of centuries of change that thinks it's the best there is. Just like all the others do. Every group, nation, tribe, cult, ideology, each one certain of its version of the truth. Prepared if necessary to defend that version to the death to keep it alive. And we're no different. We defend ours.

• Self - Host : When any good attitude or concept or system worked well, we hung onto it. We preserve representative democracy, intended for a time when only a few could get to the capital to speak for the many. Modern finance was designed in the 17th century. Literacy as a test of intelligence came in the 15th century. The idea of progress is 19th century. And yet all those things are part of our mental furniture today. Because when the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, suits us, we kind of institutionalize it, so that it won't change even when we do. The business of questioning itself has been institutionalized like that, in the kind of place Jodrell Bank Telescope belongs to: a university.

• Self - Host : We live between more and more change, and less and less time to adapt to it. We believe in the right of the individual to do his thing. But at the same time, we change what that thing is, all the time.

• Self - Host : So, this is what questioning has brought us. If we are what we know, then what we are in the modern west is... unsure about how long it'll be, before what we know is out of date.

• Self - Host : Any defense command center is where we define our boundaries, within which our view operates, and across which any threatening movement will start a war. Here, those boundaries extend far beyond national frontiers. They reach out into space. If how right your view is can be measured by the territory you defend, then this global defense makes this view about as right as you can get. But then we would think that, wouldn't we? So do all the others, in their war rooms or jungle huts. And for everybody, the amount of effort you expend on defense enhances the value of your way of life. That effort here is maximal.

• Self - Host : But why do we go on asking questions? If the only point has ever been to find the right answer, to explain all this lot, what was wrong with the one the Greeks found? Why didn't we stick with their view of the universe? Or any of the other views that have come along since the Greeks? Why didn't we stick with one of them? Well in a sense, we did. Part of the way we view things now does come from the past. Many of the institutions and attitudes we have originated in the past. Born of different answers to different questions, in different times with different problems. But they continue to exist, still operate--modified but basically the same--still affecting us like living fossils. Even in a world of constant change like ours, many of those systems that control, organize our view of things, and the way that we do what we do, are outdated. So why do we keep them?

• Self - Host : [holding a computer microchip]  The point about all this technological pizzazz isn't the gee-whiz hi-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take, say, what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this, you could have telecommuting. That's where you work at home from a screen, and you never go into the office. Great, no more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses? Or to the car manufacturers, and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output? Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses? Or to the downtown property values where maybe your pension fund's invested? Not to speak of working at home day in day out, and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work, when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that, from just one application of this microchip?