Cultural Amnesia

[gdt]

Clive James, 2007.

Short essays purportedly on the lives of thinkers of recent times, but like all "Lives" books really essays on humanity.

The book is well written - the essay on saintliness of Sophie Scholl is heartbreaking. This makes James' blind spot all the more enraging. The book enthuses about an number of obscure Viennese philosophers but, with the exception of Freud, doesn't mention a scientist at all.

How can he be unaware of the insight into the human condition that science brings? The ugly ambition of Watson and Crick, willing to trick and deceive, one of the first to realise that the Nobel Prize was no longer an honour for a life's outstanding work. The simple lack of collegiate feeling between Wilkins-the-hick and Franklin-the-sophisticate that doomed their chances, and how that realisation made Wilkins a forever generous teacher thereafter. And that's just to pick the search for the structure of DNA.

Imagine what moral James could have drawn from the life of Edward Teller or Wernher von Braun.