Plan
I wrote previously about the limitations of my formal education under the Taylorist model. But I would also like to reconsider everything I have learnt autodidactically to this point, principally because it has been so scattershot. There needs to be a rationale, a basis for knowledge. As John Maynard Keynes once said, those who do not follow a theory are in the grip of a hundred discredited theories. Sometimes it’s best to start as if from scratch.
There are many traps on the path to knowledge. Some are made by the plainly mad or fraudulent. Some arise from overconfidence. Countless prognosticators fill newspapers and airport bookshops with stories about artificial general intelligence (AGI), though core functions of the brain remain mysterious. There is a need to tread well-worn tracks from old maps in the first instance and avoid all rabbit holes. But there again we find traps in the familiar and benign. Some are almost impossible to spot, as with the importance of philosophy and ideology to science. Hence, biologists speak of ‘ecosystems’ not because the evidence led them there but because of Systems Theory; a reductionist theory with links to Taylorism. One must see the value in scientific enquiry while understanding its myriad limitations, theoretical and financial. This is sacrilegious to those who replaced their Protestantism with scientism.
Two recent influences on my thinking are the science communicator and philosopher Jacob “Bruno” Bronowski and the art critic John Berger. The latter’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and Bronowski’s lavish documentary, The Ascent of Man (1974), were commissioned by David Attenborough at BBC2 to follow the success of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969). Although Clark’s documentary was wonderfully produced, both Berger and Bronowski saw it as fundamentally flawed in its wilful ignorance of history, science and economics in favour of mere taste to define ‘civilisation’. It seems Attenborough had come to a similar conclusion. Berger would confound the worldview underpinning Clark’s documentary, revealing an inherently problematic reliance on portraiture (from the renaissance onwards), photography and film as evidence. Bronowski reasserted the importance of the accumulation of knowledge and physical assets to civilisation. Both documentaries were accompanied by works of popular non-fiction. Notably, Bronowski’s documentary led to the Cosmos series (1980-81) presented by Carl Sagan and later updated by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2014, 2020).
The underlying materialism and natural philosophy in the approaches of Berger and Bronowski has the potential to re-explain the world to me, bringing together all there is to learn about the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, anthropology, archaeology, political economy, geography, history (including natural history), literature, art and linguistics.
To rebuild knowledge in this way, information needs to be structured both chronologically and thematically. No good can come from collecting random facts, quiz night preparation, memorising dates or setting out to be a know it all. Similarly, the aim is not to experience human history anew. I want to understand how it is a fur covered bipedal ape transformed into a species capable of genome editing, deliberate interplanetary transportation and harnessing the energy of atomic fusion. Finding an answer will, I believe, provide greater clarity about our own time and the seemingly uncertain future.
So, here are the topics for my education plan as it currently stands:
Human evolution (10mya - 11th millennia BCE)
The neolithic & urban revolutions (10th - 2nd millennia BCE)
The Late bronze age collapse (12th century BCE)
The Hebrew bible (9th - 3rd centuries BCE)
The ancient world before Socrates (6th - 2nd centuries BCE)
Ancient Greek classical philosophy (4th - 3rd centuries BCE)
Hellenistic & Roman philosophy (3rd century BCE - 5th century CE)
Medieval Christianity (5th - 15th century CE)
Medieval Islam (6th - 14th centuries CE)
Modern philosophy (15th - 18th centuries CE)
Nineteenth century philosophy & science
Twentieth century philosophy & science
I’ll provide a list of references with links to content that can be accessed freely. Any important texts that are not free will be listed for you to request from your local public or university library, although I acknowledge that this is becoming hard to succeed at with budget cuts. (Apropos the collapse of civilisation.) After the topic on human evolution a lot of references will be for old scholarship, but I’ve found age to be a winning attribute in terms of quality. However, I will be at pains to update information.
Reading list
