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Over recent days I have been reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I finished it last night. Today's commentary is essentially a review of that book but many of the things in that book also intersect with two television programs I've been watching with much interest in recent weeks: Simon Schama's The American Future: A History and The Voyage to the Planets series on ABC Television.
The answers to some big questions...
 Bill Bryson's book I have found curiously uplifting and depressing at one and the same time. Let me deal with the uplifting part first as that is easier to understand. Even though I trained as a physicist this book taught me how much my knowledge is out of date and how much more has been discovered in the sciences since I completed by degree at the beginning of the 1970s. To me all new knowledge is uplifting — even when some of it might be uncomfortable news. Our life, and our world, can always only benefit from deeper insight into how the world works and how we work.
In the most concise summary I can give, this 500+ page book, is a quest to answer two questions:
- How our world, and the universe we inhabit came to be; and
- How life came to be — and, more particularly, how human life came to be.
Published in 2003, this book is probably the most readable book I've yet come across seeking to explain the complexities of scientific discoveries and insights for the average person with an interest in the two aforementioned subjects but who does not necessarily have any rigorous training in the sciences or an understanding of how science reaches its conclusions. Perhaps the biggest impact this book had on me from a scientific perspective is how rapidly scientific insight is advancing in these big questions at the moment. Bryson's book is still reasonably up-to-date, particularly as a means of gaining a broad overview of a massive canvas of human knowledge, but more recent programs like the documentary series "Voyage to the Planets" which has been screening on the ABC in recent weeks, brings home to me that even in the seven years since Bryson's book was published some of the earlier theories are still being revised at an incredible rate as we gain access to clearer images at both the cosmological level and at the level of the very small in sub-atomic physics and genetics.
Bill Bryson is an immensely gifted writer. His normal genre is as a travel writer and I think a major reason why this book is so enjoyable is that he approaches his subjects from the perspective of a travel writer and adventurer. He's endeavouring to entertain and give a broad picture overview of why things are as they are without getting bogged down in the political arguments as to who is right and who is wrong if he were writing this as a science specialist. He doesn't shy away from explaining where the scientists might be still arguing about competing theories but he doesn't dally in those places. He gives a "big picture analysis" of what the disputes are about but quickly moves on to the next piece of general knowledge that might help the general reader understand how "the big picture" of our knowledge is changing.
It hardly needs to be said that this book is not written from a religious perspective. By that I mean it is not written from a perspective of trying to prove, or disprove, the existence of God — or reach theological conclusions about how the world was formed or where life came from. It is written purely from a perspective of endeavouring to explain what we know at the moment (the 2003 'moment') from a scientific perspective. I do though recommend it as a book that religious people might read to their great benefit and more particularly if they have no understanding of what science is on about and what it is trying to find out or prove. While the book is endeavouring to compress an awful lot of knowledge into it's 500 pages, Bryson provides excellent footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography for the reader who might want to explore any particular paddock of knowledge more closely.
Now to the depressing side of the picture...
Basically the depressing side of the picture can be summed up in the well-worked adage that "the more we learn the more we realise how limited our knowledge is". Is it somehow a human intuition, or perhaps imbued into us from the culture we have emerged from, that the more we study something the more "expert" we think we might become about that something. In other words, the more we study something, the less our lack of knowledge about that something must become. It is counterintuitive to think that the more we might study something the less we realise we end up knowing. That is depressing. I feel depressed firstly because of how dumb this book ended up making me feel — how dumb we human beings are in terms of what a huge amount we still have to learn about life, about our world and about our universe.
There is a second kind of depression though. It comes from an attendant knowledge that there are a heck of a lot of people in the world who don't seem to understand, or comprehend, this paradox or conundrum that must be one of the most fundamental laws of our existence: the more we learn the more we realise how much we do not know. I'll print this is small type: this is basically what is fundamentally wrong with the thinking of fundamentalists! They actually think there are answers to everything — and if there aren't you can go consult some priest, or witch doctor, or "expert" who does have all the answers. What we're increasingly finding out — and I think Bill Bryson's book does this wonderfully ... and across the entire canvas of our developing knowledge about matter, the universe and life itself that the deeper we go the greater the Mystery becomes. In his chapter on life, and human life, what we know about the internal workings of cells, proteins, molecules is still miniscule compared to what we still now know there is to be learned. But all the stuff we don't know is not some kind of "magic". The emerging insight we have is that it is all entirely rational it's just that there is so much to know that we don't yet have the capacity to work out the rationality.
What I find depressing, or frustrating, is that while in a community like Catholica what I have been writing about in the last two paragraphs might be comprehensible, I also know there is a significant population out in the world — with a significant amount of power — to whom what I have written is just about double dutch. And there are few ways of explaining it to them.
Perhaps if I now introduce Simon Schama and his deeply insightful television series into the American people it might help explain this further. Simon Schama to me is a guy on the "same page" as Bill Bryson except Schama is working on the canvas of political culture, social culture, religion and business instead of science. In the final two episodes Schama was exploring the force of fundamentalism, firstly in the realms of religious fundamentalism and, in the last episode political and cultural fundamentalism, and the deep threats they pose to civilised society.
American (United States) culture and the American people are this strange, perhaps contradictory, mix of some of the very best things about human culture and some of the most boorish and revolting to people of other cultures. In our Australian culture people often speak after their journeys to other parts of the world of the "ugly Americans" or "loud Americans" they have encountered in their travels — everything is bigger, better or whatever in America to what is found in other cultures. (To our American readers: don't get too offended, we recognise we export plenty of Australians for short times as tourists also who are a profound embarrassment to our culture! We have as many stories about "ugly Australians" as we have of "ugly Americans".) I used to be an enormous fan of the late BBC journalist Alistair Cooke who weekly in Australia used to give us an insightful look into the culture of the people of the United States. Simon Schama I now think eclipses even Alistair Cooke. There is an understated charm in his way of giving us insight into the culture of the people of this superpower which offers both so much in hope to the world and is also perceived by so many to be an enormous threat to the world.
The great uplifting thing I found in both Bill Bryson's style and the journalistic style of Simon Schama is that I think in very different spheres and in different ways they point to what is at heart a problem we also encounter in the religious, theological and spiritual sphere of our existence — there are no simple answers to the complexities of life. One of the great insights of Catholicism is supposed to be Mystery — the ultimate Mystery of the Divine as well as the Mysteries of Life. For nearly two centuries Science thought that with enough study we could take all of the mystery out of Life. That started to change with the insights of people like Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg early in the 20th Century. In the 21st Century we increasingly understand how very little we know of how even an organ as familiar to each of us as the human brain is works. At the same time we have insight that it isn't "magic". The challenge we face as human beings is one of learning to live with the great Mysteries of life, and the great theological Mysteries without attempting to reduce the mystery through magic, superstitious or fundamentalist beliefs. We have to learn to live with an increasing array of things to which there are no answers, or no simple answers. This causes severe anxiety in sectors of our populations — both secular populations and religious populations. The challenge we face as a human family is to not let the anxieties of those sectors of the human population try to replace the great Mysteries of science, religion and our own existence with simplicitudes and the fundamentalist thinking that, in the blink of an eye, has the capacity to turn humanity back to some law of the jungle and survival of the fittest with the loudest voice or the greatest capacity to bully other people. In last night's episode of Voyage to the Planets we even had he spectacle of scientific fundamentalists protesting at the relegation of the former planet, Pluto, to non-planet status. These two television documentary series, and Bill Bryson's book might be thought of as hymns to the Mystery of Creation and what babes in the woods all of still are in the face of what we do not yet know and, for religious believers, how little we yet know of the Mind of God whom we believe is the designer of all this Mystery and Majesty. They are lessons in how absolutely dumb and stupid and infact dangerous to the very welfare of civilisation it is whether in science, politics or religion to try and artificially create certitude to try and take the mystery out of the great Mysteries of Life, the Divine and Theology.
We human beings have yet to learn to live comfortably with the unknown, and situations where there are no easy or straightforward answers. One of the tragedies of life today is that the great religious institutions because of their much earlier intuitions about Mystery should be the leaders in conveying this important lesson to humankind. Sadly the religious institutions have become some of the worst agencies in Creation for encouraging the fundamentalism that attempts to replace Mystery with superstition, dogmatism amd certitudes in places where even God himself seems hesitant to dictate answers.
LINKS (to further reviews, you tube clips, and where you can buy these resources new or second-hand):
More Reader Reviews & Information about Bill Bryson's book is available in the Catholica Marketplace:
 American Future episodes available on iView:
Episode 1: No longer available
Episode 2: Design for Life: www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/577335
Episode 3: American Fervour: www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/574063
Episode 4: What is an American: www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/574063
Simon Sharma Library of Congress Address (28min) on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovrJfEza0IA
 ABC's Voyage to the Planets website:
Much more information and where you can watch full episodes or download podcasts of the episodes in the series. Voyage to the Planets is not yet available on DVD. The ABC Shop advises it will be available on DVD and Blu-Ray in early August. I expect it will also be available through Fishpond and Amazon around the same time.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Images used in this commentary have been sourced from the websites above.
Brian Coyne, 18 Jun 2010
Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica.
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©2010Brian Coyne
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