On 11th august, hundreds of millions of people, from the Caribbean to the Bay of Bengal, stared skywards to watch the sun go dark. It was a moment for large thoughts-about how far we had come since our ancestors ran away in fear at the darkened sky, about how science has changed the way we feel about nature: panic turning into wonder or into that quintessential modern emotion, disenchantment.
A time for still larger thoughts is looming. Come 31st December, most of the human race will be like children in the back seat of the family car, peeking over their parents’ shoulders as all the nines on the speedo suddenly turn to zero and we find ourselves racing along the road of a new millennium. Prompted by these millennial and celestial conjunctions, the BBC is taking the Ascent of Man as the theme of the last Prom of this millennium. The theme allows us to see the lineage which connects, say, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mahler’s Second and Tippett’s The Mask of Time. These are works of grand humanist affirmation; they affirm an idea of human progress, of man becoming master of himself and the world around.
Progress became a theme in European thought in about 1750. The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted to replace the Biblical account of time (Genesis, Creation, Fall, Redemption) with a myth which put Man, not God, at the centre of the story. The narrative of human progress was understood to be both a material and a moral process; not just changing our technologies, but altering our instincts-and for the better.
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