"Pandora's Box - A Fable From The Age of Science"

[onager]

This will be real old news to some of you, especially in the UK, but I just recently discovered Adam Curtis' BBC documentaries.

Some of you may be as culturally backward as me, so this is just an alert about some good viewing...when you get tired of woo on the science channels and everything but history on the History Channel.

"Pandora's Box - A Fable From The Age of Science" seems especially on-topic here:

Pandora's Box, subtitled A fable from the age of science, is a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.

The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, the economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power. (Wikipedia)

That's...er...a LOT to cover, even in nearly 6 hours. That's one of the problems - though a pretty good one - with Curtis' stuff: he hits you with so much information so quickly that you go into overload. I found myself frequently using the "Back" button to re-watch things.

This line from the Wiki review is a bit misleading: "...the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism." It would be more correct to say that he examines the consequences of Big Business and politicians abusing science. As they continue doing, to this very day.

Another big problem: Curtis' documentaries are not available on DVD. They would be a licensing nightmare, because he uses a lot of archival clips and music. And he often uses those clips in a way the original makers would NOT appreciate. They are available around the Internetz, in various places.

In "Pandora's Box," the section on systems analysis and game theory had an amazing interview with Sam Cohen, formerly of the RAND Corporation. He invented the neutron bomb. Paraphrased, Cohen says something like this:

"Back in the Fifties, we tended to think the world was rational. But we were wrong. The world is a perverse and irrational place. I don't know what the hell we were thinking."

Also amazing: a retired CIA agent bragging, on-camera, that the CIA overthrew Nkrumah. But no one knew it because "we didn't leave any paper trail."

Next, I'll probably watch Curtis' The Power of Nightmares. That documentary explores the similarities between American Xian Fundies and Islamic Fundies. Somewhere on the web, I read that Curtis came to the USA and approached PBS about airing that one. But PBS thought it was "too inflammatory" for One Nation Under Jebus.