Dan Carlin

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Six Degrees of James Burke

January 16, 2009 | 2 comments

Low on iPod fodder for the six-hour drive to my parents’ house this past Christmas, I trolled the web for new listening material.  History has always been prominent among my various geekeries, and this tendency led me to discover the podcast Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.  Carlin’s style and delivery are a little bit AM-radio for my taste, but this is only a small quibble – the subject matter is right up my alley, and his enthusiasm and curiosity are infectious. By the time I returned to LA, I’d already devoured nearly all the available Hardcore History episodes.

Perhaps my favorite was the one devoted to a conversation with James Burke, a British historian, author and producer of TV documentaries of whom I’d previously been ignorant.  I can’t possibly do justice to all of Burke’s theses, but in the most general sense his work has emphasized the endless inter-connectivity of people and ideas down through the ages. He is critical of the modern trend of scholarly hyper-specialization:

With formal education today, learners may study either history or physics, or perhaps only Renaissance history and astrophysics. People tend to become experts in highly specialized fields, learning more and more about less and less. Unfortunately, so much specialization falsely creates the illusion that knowledge and discovery exist in a vacuum, in context only with their own disciplines, when in reality they are born from interdisciplinary connections. Without an ability to see these connections, history and science won’t be learnable in a truly meaningful way and innovation will be stifled.

His ongoing project aims to provide an antidote to this syndrome, and it is an opus about as magnus as they get: Read the rest of this entry »

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