'Only Connect...'

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 1967

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

This year's Reith lecturer is the British social anthropologist Professor Edmund Leach. He is the current Provost of King's College, Cambridge and throughout his academic career he has challenged received notions about cultural change. He explores the notion of 'relational structures' in his Reith series entitled 'A Runaway World?'

In this lecture entitled 'Only Connect', Professor Leach concludes his series by explaining the interconnectedness of humans with the natural world. He warns that without a fluid collective identity we might irrevocably destroy our environment and species. He argues that everyone needs to understand where they fit in to the system, and provide a collective attitude of protection by communicating with each other. He suggests that educating and stimulating the young to enlarge their expectations in imaginative ways could lead to a better future. He warns that whenever we assert dominance over the universe, we must also remember the interconnectedness of the universe. The good and the bad, the weak and the strong; all have a right to exist.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.
0:04.7	This lecture in the series A Runaway World, given by Edmund Leach, was originally broadcast in 1967.
0:12.8	As an introductory text for these lectures, I might very well have taken E.M. Forster's magic phrase, only connect.
0:24.0	All the way through, I have been urging you to keep on remembering the total interconnectedness of things as distinct from their separate isolated
0:29.5	existence. But there is more to it than that. In most cases, the connectedness is dynamic,
0:35.5	not static. The starting point of any scientific inquiry is exact
0:40.3	description, and description always leads us to break down big units into little ones and then stick
0:47.0	neatly classified labels onto the component parts. But in complex systems, we are inclined to oversimplify
0:53.9	the pattern by which the parts are fitted together.
0:57.6	A static complex, such as the interlocking arrangements of the gear wheels of a watch,
1:02.9	is a much easier kind of model to hold in the mind than a dynamic complex,
1:07.6	such as the organisation of a machine in which all the component parts function in three dimensions and are made of elastic.
1:15.0	Because of this, our education, which lays so much stress on tidy, over-elaborate classifications, makes us think that society ought to be organised like a watch rather than like a jellyfish.
1:29.0	This bias produces conservative-minded people who take fright whenever they come up against the fluidity of real-life experience.
1:38.8	But there is also another reason why the traditional emphasis on classification has become inappropriate to contemporary education.
1:47.0	It is becoming less and less important for the scientists to understand just what are the
1:52.2	component parts of the natural world. The essential thing now is to know how the system works,
1:58.3	how the bits fit together. If you'll give your son a radio kit for Christmas,
2:03.0	the bits and pieces are just like so many black boxes. Unless he is a very unusual boy, he does
2:08.8	not understand in detail what these objects are, but he doesn't need to. Provided he follows the
2:14.4	instructions carefully, he can assemble the parts into a radio set,
2:18.3	and it will work.
	...

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