The Day the Universe Changed (TV Mini Series) Worlds Without End: Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality (1985) User Reviews

What You Get Is What You See.

[rmax304823 · 8/10 · 2 November 2012]

Burke sums up his view of human nature in this concluding episode of his exceptional series. There isn't a single word to describe that view. It consists of bits and pieces from diverse systems of thought.

The fundamental notion is that culture -- defined as all of learned behavior -- determines our view of the universe. Not just the physical universe, but our social worlds and our philosophy. Particular cultures generate what he calls "mental structures" which interpret things in one way while excluding others.

When we learn something new, those mental structures change, and so does our view of what's about us. It's a little complicated and, as I say, can't be reduced to one or two descriptive words.

"Cultural relativism" might help, though. Burke spends quite a bit of this episode in Nepal, among Tibetan Buddhists who believe in an unchanging universe. Everything is highly structured. Even the life force remains the same, simply changing from one body to another at death.

Other cultures are more receptive to change, however much their view of the universe is still determined by what they know. Those of us watching this program are open to change, for example, in a way that the Tibetan Buddhists are not. Yet both cultures -- theirs and ours -- serve the same purpose. They make us feel secure because we believe we know what's going on.

In the end, Burke hints that some day the world will be linked in -- what did he call it, "a tolerant anarchy?" -- by computers, so that the Nepalese and Manhattanites will in a sense be living next door to one another, and we will all be part of a global community.

Well, maybe. But all along in this series Burke has concentrated on the physical sciences and the punctuation points in their gradual development. (He never mentions Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" or its "paradigm shifts. He deals with a lot of mini-paradigm shifts that are historically linked to one another.) But one of the major subjects he has little to say about is behavioral science. And biology is hardly mentioned. But what we've found out about human behavior, especially in the last generation, suggests that Burke is a little optimistic if he believes that cultures are going to tolerate one another instead of trying to kill one another.

The things Burke deals with here are all cortical functions -- puzzle solving, thinking, inventing, communicating, planning, recognizing patterns and so forth -- but beneath that sublimely logical cortex lies the midbrain and its limbic system, where powerful impulses towards preservation of self and group are governed. No sense getting into it. I hope he's right but I doubt he is, unless we can find a way of keeping ourselves from being hijacked by our amygdalas, that part of our lower brain that controls rage and fear. Maybe some day they'll start implanting certain kinds of computer chips in the brains of newborns. It sound horrible but the alternative may be more horrible still.

A Prescription for an Anarchism of the Future

[raymroz · 10/10 · 10 June 2014]

Host James Burke closes out this great series by contrasting the static, unchanging traditions of Nepalese Buddhism with the ever changing nature of our own rational, scientific way of doing things. While these two systems are radically different in their obvious, outward appearance, both serve essentially the same function, namely, to provide us with a degree of certainty about our universe and a sense of our respective places within it. Burke further expands upon the central theme of change and of shifting truths, perhaps the defining characteristic of our ever- changing, scientific world, highlighting the fact that even our so- called permanent values are in fact subject to the constant process of re-evaluation and change, and are only ever relative to what our current interpretation of the truth happens to be.

In spite of this undercurrent of change and of our complete awareness of its role in shaping our ever-shifting perceptions, we still inevitably and quite readily accept that our current way of doing things is The One Right, Immutable Truth For All Time. This fact highlights a fundamental limitation inherent in our society; that it is only capable of handling a single version of beliefs, values and ethics at a time. We have never had any systems in place capable of handling more. Furthermore, it is the underlying nature of this limitation that those who are unable or unwilling to conform to these collective conceptions are ostracised and rejected; our society has never been particularly kind to its radicals. The net result has been a centuries old waste of human talent as large segments of the population who did not conform, who were too poor, who did not have the right parents or god or skin colour were pushed beneath the surface and smothered, their voices never contributing to our collective song.

Mr. Burke enlightens us to an ironic twist of fate. The very system which has for so long raged hostile against the dissenting voice may have, in fact, given us the very tool with which we shall one day move beyond it. It is here we consider his very prescient assessment (considering that this episode was filmed in 1984) of the present and future role in which modern computer networks, namely the Internet, will take in shaping our collective approach in the way we do things, fundamentally redefining the human relationship with itself. He proposes the notion that this silicon revolution will provide us with the bones of a system which will allow us to emerge from the historical bottleneck of The Single View Reality into a type of conceptual pluralism, or what he terms, a "balanced anarchy"; a place where human freedom is nourished and where every voice is heard. He also considers the transcendence of the tired concept of the nation state, where every individual has unobstructed, free access to all information and knowledge, a future where people are no longer confined to the limitations of geography and where physical geography is not determined by societal requirements, where even the archaic, tribal notions of national boundaries are replaced with non-hierarchical, voluntary electronic communities. True anarchism indeed. "A utopia?", he ponders.

When we consider some of the emerging trends and technologies of the modern day, such as the peer-to-peer, anonymous crypto-currency Bitcoin and the complimentary Dark Wallet, which places an entire digital currency and consequently a complete economy beyond the auspices of any state control, we see perhaps the beginnings of the realization of Mr. Burke's prescient prediction. As the widespread adoption of strong crypto and peer-to-peer technologies such as the so-called "dark markets" continues, we can see those tentative first steps of humanity as it moves beyond and transcends the very nation state itself, closing the chapter on a dark period of human history, and with it making real the host's vision for an open, all-inclusive, pluralistic society. This hope, however, comes tempered with a warning; just as these technologies may open up a future of infinite promise, they also hold the very real danger of being leveraged to enforce a nightmarishly oppressive, totalitarian conformity. We need only look to the recent activities of the US-based criminal organization known as the National Security Agency (NSA) as example. We must also keep in mind that these potential hurdles are all products of our own creation, this panopticism a construct of our own Byzantine bureaucratic systems, layered thick by generations of statecraft and blind nationalism. But as we created them, so we can tear them apart. As we walk together into a future of boundless promise, the road ahead will be anything but an easy one.