Genius of the Modern World

I love all of the information that is presented but the camera bothered me so much that I got most of the way through the first episode before I had to turn it off and switch to something else. On top of the akward and distracting camera, there's A LOT of footage of things that don't relate to the topic at all. Very dissapointing. I wanted to watch this.

This is a 3-part BBC follow-up to Genius of the Ancient World (2015). Host Bettany Hughes examines three big thinkers who ushered in the modern 20th century; Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. There is an inherent improvement over the previous series. I know very little about the lives of these three famous names. Even their groundbreaking works are only bumper sticker slogans to me. So a lot of this series is new information and that's very compelling. In a way, these three episodes are much darker, more tragic, and more human. That also makes their stories more complex and more fascinating. They can be depressing. They have powerful echoes throughout the modern world. It's an interesting dive into these big names.

Bettany Hughes, a historian and author, takes viewers on a journey into the tumultuous times of late 19th century, when 3 particular intellectuals perfected their mind-boggling ideas. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud are examples of those larger-than-life thinkers who, through their penetrating insights into human condition, crystallized their ideas and ended up transforming the world and ushering in the 20th century. The world was never the same.

As a huge fan of factually accurate and documentaries (e.g., Sir Ken Clark and Carl Sagan) with an educational as well as reflective bent, I loved this 3-part series. Interspersed with beautiful visuals of visits of Ms. Hughes to many of the actual places of interest in the lives of these gentlemen, the narrator also interviews several leading scholars on the various aspects of their intellectual and personal life. I can't recommend it enough.

I have read quite a-lot about the "Geniuses" mentioned in this series. It baffles me to see the amount of ignorance the makers of the show has about the relevance of the thinkers mentioned in this series. All three of them belong to the school of suspicion which to put it crudely had a very cynical view of the human condition and human society. They are the ones who provided the tools and analysis to deconstruct the social relationships of the society they were born into. Here Freud takes an approach focused on the individual. Regarding the applications of their ideologies and philosophy, two of them (viz. Marx and Nietzsche) greatly influenced the regimes that mass murdered their own people in the 20th century and at times these sufferings can be traced back to the writings these geniuses. For those who are curious about those regimes, they were the Communists and the Nazis. We know what happened to those regimes in the end. As for the writings of Freud, since he worked in a rather stringent scientific discipline, he analysis were soon discarded or greatly modified by the later practitioners of his field. Carl Jung being one of them which is ironic since he was his student once. Very few of the Marx and Nietzsche writings can provide an insight into the native societies and people other than the european contingent which is reasonable as they never attempted to. It is their students who insist and then go on to great lengths to make their works universally applicable. Freud is an exception here since his work was centered on the human mind rather than societies or cultures. As it with reality not being black and white, they do provide some penetrating insights into some aspects of the human condition but those aren't enough to put them on a pedestal as the show attempts. This show is a continuing example of modern writers and scholars having a leftist bend in their outlook which certainly doesn't provide a complete picture. The thinkers mentioned in the previous iteration of this show (Genius of the Ancient World), which too has its flaws of taking a western perspective on Buddha and Confucius, all had arguably a more positive view and impact on the human society at large than the thinkers mentioned in this series which is disappointing as I had high hopes for this iteration. The choice of thinkers between the two iterations really shows the sad state of affairs of today's modern world. Overall, very disappointed with the choice of thinkers and the narrative of the show.

It is a documentary series that can be watched focusing on German thinkers. You can squeeze a little while watching. I hope it's not just his mind that he focuses on the Germans.