"Let me tell you a joke:" "Somebody apparently once went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein, and said "What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked every morning at what is going on behind me now," "the dawn, and to have thought that what were seeing was the Sun going round the Earth." "Well, as every school kid 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 have looked like if the Sun had been going round the Earth"." "The point being, of course, it would have looked exactly the same." "You see what your knowledge tells you you are seeing." "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 of how, through history, every time our view of the universe changed, and us with it, something was created that would help to make us the way we are in the modern world." "With the distinctive way of thinking that makes us, us, and not some other bunch with a different view." "THE WAY WE ARE" "Not some other bunch thinking and acting differently, us." "The end product of centuries of change that thinks it is the best there is." "Just like all the others do, every group, nation, tribe, cult, ideology." "Each one, certain of their version of the truth." "Prepared, if necessary, to defend that version to the death to keep it alive." "And we are no different." "We defend ours, a thousand feet down, here, below me, under that mountain." "It doesn't matter whether it is a hermetically-sealed, radiation-proof, high-tech place like this, or a stack of bows and arrows in a jungle hut." "Every culture has one of these." "It's where the truth is protected." "This is what is meant by, "putting your money where your mouth is"." "It shows just how far you are prepared to go to defend your view of things." "Here, as you can see, the attitude is "quite far"." "It is the North American Air Defence Centre, inside Cheyenne Mountain." "Any defence command centre 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 defence 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 defence enhances the value of your way of life." "That effort here is maximal." "A single multi-megaton nuclear warhead would wipe this place out." "And the Russians could put one through the front door if they tried." "Should it come from an offshore submarine, its flight time would be ten minutes." "Three to identify it as incoming, seven to react." "To get countermeasures off the ground to handle whatever else follows the missile." "All over the Western world, military forces train for what they would have to do in those first seven minutes." "The numbers are massive four and a half million troops, 25,000 battle tanks, over 11,000 aircraft, an unknown number of nuclear warheads." "The Soviet Union test-launches 500 missiles a year." "The next one could be real." "Readiness is unquestioning." "The entire system, poised to go, perhaps for the first and last time, in reaction to the words nobody wants to hear" ""Unknown Track"." "Air Defence Operations Centre with an unknown track." "Track number is Zulu 462" "Time unknown 1930 Zulu," "Course: 130 degrees Speed: 420 knots" "Altitude: 28,000 ft." "Identification:" "None" "F15 scramble The time 1930 Zulu" "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 would 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." "Look:" "In 11th century Arab Spain, these Christian Crusaders made a discovery that led directly to the invention of the modern university degree." "In 1420, we found a new way of painting that helped to give us, in the modern world, the ability to navigate our ships to a precise landfall anywhere on earth, or on another planet." "Up to the 15th century, we memorised our knowledge in song or poetry." "Then we invented a way to do without memory." "And, as a result, ushered in today's standardised technological existence." "Three hundred years ago, we believed the sky was made of crystal spheres." "Then, around 1600, these gunners destroyed that glass universe, and triggered the beginnings of modern science." "For centuries, we handcrafted everything we needed." "Then an 18th century religious misfit invented the power to move mountains and turned us all into compulsive consumers." "The French Revolutionary Wars brought into existence an obsession with gambling that was to make every 20th-century Western Citizen, a healthy, long living, number." "In the 19th century came discoveries about nature that generated our belief, ever since, in the inevitability of progress." "And in 1844, came the invention that would give us computers." "So why did all that happen to us and not to the other cultures on the planet?" "Why did we keep on changing?" "Well, because of the kind of people we are." "Let me try and show you what I mean." "Look:" "You don't know what that is, do you?" "But you want to, don't you?" "Okay, I'll show you." "Is that enough?" "No?" "OK, try this." "There." "It's a lock." "See?" "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 is telling us." "And that is why we have changed constantly throughout history to become what we are today, because we have never stopped asking questions." "And what have we got as a result?" "Answers." "A mountain of them, gathered over the centuries." "So much, we have had to invent systems just to handle it." "So big, information processing itself is now a science." "So total, it has 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 have accumulated and that we want to go on being free to accumulate." "So why are we so uniquely curious like that?" "Why did we first start asking questions?" "And why did we start there?" "If, as I said earlier, we are what we know and we know a lot, then we have Greece to thank for it." "The Western view of things varies a certain amount from one place to another." "But basically, it is 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 are going to avoid chaos." "If you landed here from another planet, came from another time, all this agreement, all the symbols, the way we all do what we do as a group, would be a like a kind of message that you could read" "to find out what kind of civilisation we are now." "Because, like everything else, this unspoken agreement is based on what we all know." "And we are unique in the way we learn that, it is not genetic." "You pick it up it 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 agreements are so common to all of us in the West that, wherever you are watching us from now, it will make sense." "Even if you don't speak the language, you know the code." "Look:" "The way we are began on the coast of Turkey about 2700 years ago, with a group of Greeks looking for somewhere to settle." "After centuries of war and confusion had forced this particular lot to jump in their boats and head east for a bit of peace and quiet." "Just as well these Ionians, as they were called, were a hardy, adventurous, pioneering lot, because they all fetched-up in a part of the eastern Med not exactly known for its five-star accommodation." "You could see that this was not going to be milk and honey, for instance." "Everywhere they looked, it was the same story:" "mountains inland hemming in a bit of scrubby coastal strip good for olives, wine and getting out of!" "But since they had just arrived, the Ionians did the next best thing, they went into Shipping." "By 800 BC, this intrepid lot had gone north to the Russian steppes, south to the Sahara, west to the Atlantic." "And their little Ionian ships were like floating bazaars." "Wine, oil, corn, silk, salt, millstones." "You wanted it, they would find it for you somewhere." "Now, the thing about people like that is that they have always been after one thing above all else haven't they?" "They are always looking for a better deal." "Same with the Ionians." "That's why they left Greece in the first place." "And why, once ashore, in this inhospitable dump, they started doing something nobody else had ever done before." "They started looking round to see what they could make of the place to make life a shade better than dreadful." "Now, I know it sounds strange that I make such a big deal about something that seems perfectly common sense:" "'taking a practical view of things', but you have to remember that at the time, 3000 years ago, the rest of the world was heavily into myths, gods, mysteries and other views of nature not designed to tell you very much about the world around," "except that nature was none of your business." "So when one of these Ionians, a guy called Thales, started asking practical questions about his environment, he was really breaking all the rules." "Thales looked at nature with mechanisms in mind, rather than magic." "And he noticed how everything came in opposites." "Hot; cold, wet; dry, up; down." "Opposites." "Just like the two sides of a deal, a crafty, business-like Ionian like Thales would have said." "This business of opposites in nature and argument was to go meaningfully well with something else Thales did, which was to nip off to Egypt and bring back their geometry." "Now, in the laid-back opulence of life up the Nile, here the local conditions produced the world's most regular good times, they lived a kind of "feet up and mind in neutral", so to speak." "Problem-solving was very much not their thing, so geometry got used for building pyramids and measuring land and nothing else." "Thales, with practical needs in mind, tipped the pyramid on its side and used the triangle so that two people, one here and here, could get a cross-bearing on a ship out at sea here and work out how far from land it was." "Good, eh ?" "But, he did something much more clever." "He took the circle, with its 360° and halved it, so this line had to contain 180°." "Half of 360, right?" "Okay, try this." "Here is a straight line." "Here is another one." "Now, these angles here and here must add up to 180, mustn't they?" "Let's call them A and B." "And these angles here and here add up to 180, too, call them B and C." "Now if A and B make 180, and B and C make 180, then A and C must be the same." "Opposite angles are equal." "From a self evident thing like a circle," "Thales had gone to a non-self evident thing, like this." "That is the basis of geometry." "Going from something you know to discover something you don't." "And all this was to turn out to go very well with that business of reconciling opposites I was on about." "Because by about 500 BC, that's how they were running their cities." "In the town squares, they would settle things by the first ever public-debates, well, shouting matches, called "politics"." "And that kind of arguing opposite point of view, plus their new geometry, went together to produce an entirely original kind of structure for thinking, with which, you could tackle any subject." "So, being an adventurous lot, they did." "The Greeks were into questions like" ""What is it all made of?" "Where did it all come from?"" "and, "What is this constant change in nature all about?"" "And the technique they had 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 the 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 is our way, driven since the questioning Greeks, to look for the order in nature without which, there would be chaos." "Today, the rationalist Greek way has brought us to the stage where our search for order, our questioning, reaches out even across the depths of intergalactic space." "The answers we get from this antenna, come from millions of light years away." "And if you look around, here, or wherever you are now, you see how the modern world is made up of answers." "Answers to questions in the past that was so good, we hung onto them." "They are all around us, influencing the way we are." "This is an 18th century answer." "I mean, being able to build a gigantic metal structure like this radio telescope, because the answer to a question being asked in the 18th century showed how to generate the power to make things like that." "And when you can cut metal on an industrial scale, you can make machines on an industrial scale and manufacture on an industrial scale, to solve the problems of a rising population." "Steam power was the answer to that 18th century problem." "They produced enough to feed themselves, alright, and, in doing so, started things we still live with." "Regular work for regular wages, factories and unions, the expectation of a steadily rising standard of living, and the problem of unemployment." "The telescope here maps the sky." "You feed in the coordinates and it gives you that." "It is a radio map of a galaxy." "Two million light years, straight out, that way." "This is a map of our galaxy." "There is Andromeda." "There is the galactic centre." "That use of coordinates to map the sky, or where you live, or anywhere, is another answer we found and kept, in the 15th century." "Back then, the question was" ""how does the newly affluent Florentine merchant get a bit of class into his life?"" "The answer was to go to Greece and pick up some classical culture, which they did." "Together with an entirely new way of measuring things, things like the world," "with a system that used grid lines." "The kind of technique we use today for town planning, or placing an intercontinental ballistic missile within 10 ft. of its target." "But we live with more than just physical answers from the past." "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 of 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 institutionalise it, so that it won't change even when we do." "The business of questioning, itself, has been institutionalised like that." "In the kind of place Jodrell Bank telescope belongs to, a university." "If we are what we know, then this is where we pass on what we are, to the next generation." "And in the interests of safety, to keep the boat from being rocked too much, we teach the young to ask questions that have, in the main, already been answered." "Tristram Shandy asks us to help write the novel." "But in so doing, we write ourselves." "Good I like that." "Particularly, I think, what you said about time..." "And, to make sure we have passed on the view of how things are, unmistakably, we test." "After all, that is the only way you can be sure they know what they are supposed to know." "The oldest answers to the most basic questions about how to operate are common to virtually every culture on the planet." "Because, at the simplest level, every culture needs to keep order," "especially this kind." "This is one of the things in life we protect most against being changed when knowledge changes us." "We protect it by turning it into a ritual." "When you get married, or buried, get christened, or anything else too important to play by ear, the event is turned into a kind of play, where everybody gets a role they act out." "It's a kind of public agreement to stick to the general rules about whatever it is." "The people doing it, are effectively saying," ""No matter what else may change, we won't rock the boat, we are not maverick, you can trust us"." "Expressions of approval follow." "Most of these ritual ways of answering a social need that we got from the past, look like it." "They include something from an ancient rite, in this case, the old symbol of fertility, the ring." "And then, it is all done in the presence of a supernatural being, a god, so the agreement is also made under what was once a real threat of heavenly retribution if you broke your promise later on." ""Some things", this ritual says, "must be permanent."" "Rituals, if you like, permit change to happen." "Like the change in status of the two people involved here." "But it is change strictly by the book." "Ceremonial, formal, nerve-wracking." ""Phew", is usually the feeling at this point." "Well, a ritual would be much of a ritual if you didn't feel you had been put through the wringer, would it?" "So, now it is official in every sense, the new order of things, 'two are now one', gets public recognition." "And for just a few minutes, limited disorder is permitted." "Mind you, most of the rituals in life don't involve a booze-up." "In most cases, if something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that is when the ritual becomes something else." "It becomes widespread enough to affect that 'general agreement' we all share." "So that is when the responsibility for running it goes out of your hands." "To be taken over by the institutions set up to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis." "So that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow if they decide to get up to that particular ritual." "The institutions take the admin out of daily life, and run it for you:" "banking government sewage, tax-collecting." "Or, if you break the rules and regulations, one institution can take you out of daily life." "This one:" "In every community, the law, whether it is dressed up like this, or the village elders telling you what the local custom is, the law is all those rules I was on about earlier." "This may be double Dutch to you, but you get the point." "I suppose what institutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work." "While they are putting them 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 had to deal with." "And after a few centuries of this buckpassing, 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." "The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is "keeping order"." "Because if the institutions didn't to that, it would be the end of civilisation 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?" "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 it in eastern communities, where, say, Buddhism is a way of life." "In that case, you are not bothered by questions because you are 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 is a universe that doesn't change, so there is no need to go looking for change in it." "The reason this culture is not like ours is because, like us, they are what they know." "But since what they know doesn't change, they don't." "The symbols and monuments that surround them are a part of their daily living." "To our way of looking at it, they don't live with bits of the past affecting them, they live in the past." "The Nepalese way of life reflects their lack of interest in novelty." "They don't change not because they are backward, but because they don't want to." "We, on the other hand, do." "And that gives us a problem." "In spite of the way institutions can act like a safety barrier against the effects of change, because of the way we have made asking questions one of our institutions, we do something that doesn't appear to make sense." "Where other societies do things, organise 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." "It's a scientific research lab." "In places like this, we have institutionalised the business of change itself." "And, as with the other institutions, this kind has taken root." "Ever since science first started affecting our daily lives." "Today, the mysterious world of the research lab comes up with so many answers so fast, that only a few insiders know what the question was." "If, as I said earlier, we are what we know, then this particular kind of institution spends its working hours finding ways to make things that will sooner-or-later change what we are, our view." "Once it took decades, even centuries for us to change." "Now, it could happen with every new discovery." "But these places aren't just here to design fancy new gizmos." "These semi-independent scientific communities, spend as much of their effort involved in the kind of abstract, theoretical thinking that may never have an application, but you never know." "What they produce is ultimately approved by us, or not, when it gets on to the market." "If what they make doesn't sell, then the kind of change it would have brought, wasn't the kind of change we wanted." "Problem is, we often don't know what they produce because it is not the kind of thing you would know about, unless you read scientific magazines." "As often as not, product changes the way we do things, rather than the things themselves." "They modify the world around us." "Like you still go on using lifts, they just work differently." "The buildings still go up, they are just built with different construction techniques." "The point about all this technological pazzazz isn't the "gee whiz", high 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 is invested?" "Not to speak of working at home day-in day-out and what that might due to a marriage." "And what do you get out of work, when it is only you?" "What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?" "From just one application of this microchip." "And every innovation modifies life like that." "And our culture has been doing it for a thousand years." "That is the way we are, and it shows." "Look at any western city and you will see a culture trying to come to terms with constant change." "Look at the detail of your home town or this place." "And you see the way people saw things in the past and how different their views were to ours." "You can still see those attitudes, because of what they left behind them." "Some of those past views lasted long enough, and were so certain of themselves, that they left behind really major bits of evidence of what they thought was important." "Look at this, for instance." "19th century San Francisco built churches and believed in heroes." "How many statues do we build to honour great men today?" "And look at the public buildings of the period." "Almost imperial, and they obviously didn't think things were going to change much, or they wouldn't have built like this for a view that obviously thought it would last as long as the Greeks did." "Today, power lies with the quick fix, with the marketplace and big business." "And, where once a home was a house, today it is a box in a skyscraper." "We have gone from this way of looking at things, to this, in a generation." "Now, people work at night because, somewhere else on the planet, it is not night." "The public transit system exists to deliver millions of people to their work every day, like an extension of the production-line process that runs the modern world, and that everybody has to fit into and that changed the meaning of work 200 years ago, when it first happened." "Life now is working to buy this year's model, because the last year's, is last year's." "And everywhere freeways, expressways, throughways." "All to make it easier for everybody to go places faster and in greater comfort than they were able to only yesterday." "We live, caught 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." "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 will be before what we know is out of date." "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 is our world of 'here today and gone tomorrow'." "I said at the beginning, all cultures think their view is worth defending to the death." "But we, more than most, are split between yesterday and tomorrow." "Defending a way of life that is, by definition, a question mark." "So here we are, committed 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 are reaching the stage where it is 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." "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 a long 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, organise our view of things, the way we do what we do, are outdated." "So why do we keep them?" "Well, that is also what this series is going to look at." "The changes in knowledge that brought them into existence in the first place, the problems they were designed to solve, and the way they made us what we are today."