Big History and the Future of Humanity

Fred Spier

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118881712
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

big history and the future of humanity

"This remains the best single attempt to theorize big history as a discipline that can link core concepts and paradigms across all historical disciplines, from cosmology to geology, from biology to human history. With additional and updated material, the Second Edition also offers a fine introduction to the history of big history and a superb introductory survey to the big history story. Essential reading for anyone interested in a rapidly evolving new field of scholarship that links the sciences and the humanities into a modern, science-based origin story."
— David Christian, Macquarie University

"Notable for its theoretic approach, this new Second Edition is both an indispensable contribution to the emerging big history narrative and a powerful university textbook. Spier defines words carefully and recognizes the limits of current knowledge, aspects of his own clear thinking."
— Cynthia Brown, Emerita, Dominican University of California

Reflecting the latest theories in the sciences and humanities, this new edition of Big History and the Future of Humanity presents an accessible and original overview of the entire sweep of history from the origins of the universe and life on Earth up to the present day. Placing the relatively brief period of human history within a much broader framework – one that considers everything from vast galaxy clusters to the tiniest sub-atomic particles – big history is an innovative theoretical approach that opens up entirely new multidisciplinary research agendas. Noted historian Fred Spier reveals how a thorough examination of patterns of complexity can offer richer insights into what the future may have in store for humanity.

The second edition includes new learning features, such as highlighted scientific concepts, an illustrative timeline and comprehensive glossary. By exploring the cumulative history from the Big Bang to the modern day, Big History and the Future of Humanity, Second Edition, sheds important historical light on where we have been – and offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead.

1
INTRODUCTION TO BIG HISTORY

Introduction

This book is about big history: the approach to history that places human history within the context of cosmic history, from the beginning of the universe up until life on Earth today. In a radical departure from established academic ways of looking at human history, in big history the past of our species is viewed from within the whole of natural history ever since the big bang. In doing so, big history offers modern scientific answers to the question of how everything has become the way it is now. As a consequence, big history offers a fundamentally new understanding of the human past, which allows us to orient ourselves in time and space in a way no other form of academic history has done so far. Moreover, the big history approach helps us to create a novel theoretical framework, within which all scientific knowledge can be integrated in principle.

The term ‘big history’ was coined by historian David Christian (1946 CE–).¹ In the 1980s CE, Christian developed a cross-disciplinary course at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, in which academics ranging from astronomers to historians gave lectures about their portions of the all-embracing past. This course has become a model for other university courses, including two courses that I have been teaching since 1994 CE, first at the University of Amsterdam and later also at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Although all the knowledge taught in big history courses is readily available in academia, only rarely is it presented in the form of one single historical account. This is mostly the result of the fact that over the past 200 years, universities have split up into increasing numbers of specializations and departments. Since the 1980s CE, however, academics ranging from historians to astrophysicists have been producing new grand unifying historical syntheses, set forth in books and articles.

In the pages that follow, I seek to explain big history. Within the emerging field of big history scholarship, this book presents a novel account of our all-embracing past. Building most notably on the work by US astrophysicist Eric Chaisson (1946 CE–), a historical theory of everything is proposed, in which human history is analyzed as part of this larger scheme. In Chapter 2 this theoretical approach will be introduced, while in the subsequent chapters it will be applied to big history. In this first chapter, a selected number of themes are discussed that are vital for a better understanding of big history.

Studying the Past

To understand the view of history proposed in this book, it is important to first address the question of how the past can be studied. Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski (1945 CE–) succinctly formulated his answer as follows: ‘We can’t study the past precisely because it’s over, gone.’² By saying so, Ostrowski pointed to the undeniable fact that all we know about history can only be found in the present, because if this knowledge were not available here and now, how could we possibly know about it? This is just as much the case for the history of the universe as for the history of us people. The idea that all historical knowledge resides in the present is not a new point of view among historians. Yet it is rarely stated very clearly.³ As I hope to show, in big history, this issue is perhaps even more urgent than in traditional historical accounts.

Because all evidence of the past can only be found in the present, creating a story about the past inevitably implies interpreting this evidence in terms of processes with a certain history of its own. We do so because we experience both the surrounding environment and our own persons to be such processes. As a result, all historical accounts are reconstructions of some sort, and thus likely to change over time. This also means that the study of history cannot offer absolute certainties, but only approximations of a reality that once was. In other words, true historical accounts do not exist. This may sound as if there is endless leeway in the ways the past is viewed. In my opinion, that is not the case. Just as in any other field of science, the major test for historical reconstructions is whether, and to what extent, they accommodate the existing data in a concise and precise manner. Yet there can be no way around the fact that all historical reconstructions consist of a selected number of existing data placed within a context devised by the historian.

The idea that all our knowledge of the past resides in the present also means that we do not know anything about things that may once have happened but did not leave any traces in the present. We do not know anything either about events that actually did leave traces in the present that have not yet been uncovered or interpreted as such. All of this may well be the largest portion of what has happened in history, yet we will never know for sure. Surprisingly, perhaps, this rather problematic aspect of studying the past appears to have received very little attention among historians. Yet if the opposite situation existed, namely that we had at our disposal exhaustive information about everything that had ever happened, we would be totally drowned by the available data. Furthermore, as William McNeill has argued, the art of making a persuasive historical reconstruction consists to a considerable extent of what is left out. As a result, all historical reconstructions are rather patchy maps.

To make a reasonably persuasive historical reconstruction, we need to do at least two things, namely (1) find out what has happened to the data since they were generated, including their discovery by humans, and (2) find out what these data tell us about the past. Inevitably, academic studies of history always involve these two types of reconstruction, although this is not always shown explicitly. For big history, the best-selling overview A Short History of Nearly Everything by US author Bill Bryson (1951 CE–) may serve as a highly recommended illustration of mostly the first type of historical account, while David Christian’s magnum opus Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History focuses on telling the story of the entire past. In contrast to Maps of Time, Bryson’s account does not include our human past, probably because a globalized tradition of human history research does not yet exist.

The study of history, including big history, consists of an ever-continuing discussion about how to view and understand past reality, and in doing so, provide the best possible images of what has happened in history. All these accounts are answers to questions about the past. Very often, however, these questions are not very clearly posed, while sometimes they are not even mentioned. In such situations the resulting answers may appear to come out of the blue. For instance, the biblical account of Beresheet/Genesis offers religiously inspired answers to the basic origin questions of its time and place about how the universe, Earth, life and humanity evolved. But the questions themselves are not mentioned in the account. By studying these stories in such ways, they throw a very interesting light on the major origins questions of the people who shared them as well as the answers they thought were convincing. Such worldwide studies would, in fact, put these religiously inspired accounts as well as the people who shared them into a fresh socio-scientific perspective.

The same is the case for modern scholarly accounts that offer academically based answers to questions about the past, but quite often without mentioning them explicitly either. Yet it is very important to keep in mind, and teach our students, that all our knowledge, including big history, has come as a result of inquisitive humans seeking answers to almost endless numbers of questions in a continuous dialogue within certain social situations. To be sure, most academic research does not focus on fundamental questions, but instead aims to answer much smaller concerns. Yet the resulting views should, in principle, all fit into the larger story of our grand past. In consequence, all big history accounts are by necessity composites of a great many academic answers to a great many questions, large and small.

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Origin of Cosmic World Views

In his autobiography The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir, William McNeill argued that the origin of world views can be traced back to billions of years ago, when the first organisms began to form images of their surroundings using the first primitive sensors that were neurologically connected to the first primitive brains (2005, pp. 32–3). When, a few million years ago, these sensors and brains had become bigger, more complex and more refined, while better communicative capabilities had also developed, the circumstances were in place for the emergence of a species that not only could form such images in their brains but also discuss them with others, and thus improve them.

Most of these early human w...