Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE ASCENT OF MAN. PBS. Tuesday, January 7, 8:30 p.m. E.S.T. The first episode of this ambitious series, Jacob Bronowski's "personal view" of the development of civilization, carries the gloomy foreboding that the viewer may be in for a three-month brush-up course in anthropology--no bad thing, perhaps, but not an exciting prospect either. Bronowski in Ethiopia's Omo Valley musing over the cranial capacity of our earliest ancestors, Bronowski reflecting on the first stirrings of the artistic impulse before the cave paintings at Altamira --it is all ground that other popularizers have covered. Though he makes an engagingly earnest guide, other cultured minds have already taken short trips over the same territory.

The opening program, however, should be taken with a grain of patience. In the next episode, freed from the obligation to pump out basic information, Bronowski is off to Jericho and an examination of agriculture as the basis for civilization. This is one of those undramatic notions whose miraculous qualities have faded with familiarity. Bronowski restores the vital and mysterious dimension with a simple tactic. He precedes his superb little essay on the domestication of wheat and animals in Jericho with a study of the Bakhtiari nomads of Iran, whose endless search for pasturage precludes the development of any culture worthy of the name. He then focuses on other nomads who domesticated only one animal -- the horse -- and turned it into the basis of a new and terrible art, that of warfare. Bronowski is critical of ethologists who insist that man has some inborn instinct for organized violence. War, he says, is nothing but "a highly planned cooperative effort of theft," rationalized by "the predator posing as hero." Cultures that live by the sword alone "can only feed on the labors of other men." They inevitably die, often because they are absorbed by the gentler, more intelligent civilizations they came to conquer.

Bronowski, who was born in Poland, went to England as a child and received his doctorate in mathematics at Cambridge. He turned to his self-appointed task of blending science and human values after working on a statistical study of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atom bomb. While continuing his scientific research, most recently at the Salk Institute in San Diego, he turned out a wide variety of books including The Western Intellectual Tradition and two volumes on William Blake.

The Ascent of Man is determinedly antiromantic. Stability, that homeliest of virtues, was for him the one essential condition for civilization's great leaps forward. His insistence on this point forms valuable corrective to the more dramatic visions of historical development that frequently titillate us today. Bronowski died last August of a heart attack at age 66. The Ascent of Man is an excellent introduction as well as a last testament by one of the most valuable travelers between the scientific and the literary Cultures.

Richard Schickel

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