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Home , Big History, Eric Chaisson, Outline of history, Preston Cloud

What is Big ?

David Christian Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute

As they err who study the maps of that includes the pasts studied by biologists, regions before they have learned paleontologists, geologists and cosmologists. By accurately the relation of the whole linking different perspectives and scales, and and the separate parts of it to many different scholarly disciplines, all of which each other and to the whole, so they are try to understand the deep roots of today’s world, not less mistaken who think they can big history can transform our understanding of understand particular before “history.” they have judged the order and sequence of and of all , set However, to fully capture the richness and range of forth as it were in a table.1 teaching, we will eventually need the perspectives Big history represents an attempt at what E.O. ofthis big vibrant new trainedfield of research,in many other scholarship disciplines. and Wilson has called “consilience,” a return to the I hope this essay may encourage such scholars to offer their distinctive perspectives on big history. of the fragmented visions that dominate modern educationgoal of a unified and scholarship. understanding2 Though of reality, it may in seemplace The of historical scholarship in the new, the goal of consilience is very old. And twentieth even in its modern forms, big history has been around for at least a quarter of a century. So the Historians will recognize that my title comes Journal of Big from a classic essay on history, studied by most History provides the ideal opportunity for a stock Anglophone history graduates. It was written take.publication of the first issue of the in 1961 by E.H. Carr, an English of the . Carr’s book began as a lecture series given at Cambridge in 1961 in honor of George It sees big history as the modern form of an Macauley Trevelyan, a historian who, unlike Carr, ancientThis article project. is a personal I am a historian account by of training,the field. so saw history as a literary discipline, and quite my account focuses on the relationship of big distinct from the . As a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Carr took seriously the perspective of a historian trained in the English- Marxist insistence that history should be regarded speakinghistory to world, the discipline and it focuses of history. on big It reflectshistory’s the relationship to Anglophone historical scholarship. own thinking about history as I, too, entered the But not just to Anglophone historical scholarship, as a branch of , and that idea influenced my because the debates I discuss had their the early 1970s. counterparts and echoes in many other traditions field of Russian history as a graduate student in of historical scholarship. Nor do I focus just on In “What is History?” Carr tracks the evolution of historical scholarship as it is normally understood the history discipline in England in the early 20th within the academy, because big history sees century. At one level, his story is of a sustained history as part of a much larger

1 Jean Bodin, 16th century, cited from “Beginningstrend awayand Endings,” from the in confident Marnie Hughes-Warrington, realism, positivism ed., Palgrave Advances in World Histories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 95. 2 E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998).

Journal of Big History Volume 1 Number 1 2018 Spring http://dx.doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v1i1.2241

What is Big History? and even universalism of many nineteenth each offering its own pin-hole view of the world. century historical thinkers, towards increasing Specialization proved a powerful research fragmentation and skepticism. He begins by strategy, but it was achieved by severing ancient scholarship from the 1890s, as Acton presided increasingly isolated from each other. The idea of citing Lord Acton’s confidentCambridge vision of historicalModern alinks single among world fields of knowledge, of knowledge, whether leaving united them by History. Acton saw the Cambridge Modern religious , such as that of Christianity, Historyover the as first “a uniqueedition opportunity of the of recording, … the fullness of the knowledge which the behind ’s attempt to nineteenth century is about to bequeath….” He or by scientific scholarship—the vision thatKosmos lay added: “Ultimate history we cannot have in this was abandoned.5 In disciplines such as generation [but] … all information is now within history,write a scientificwhich lacked universal the sort history of unifying in his paradigm— reach, and every problem has become capable of ideas characteristic of the natural sciences in solution.”3 the of Darwin, of Maxwell and of Einstein, positivist, and optimistic, and it assumes that history is part Acton’s of the view larger of history project is of confident, increasing epistemological realism.6 human knowledge in general. His vision of history specialization also undermined Acton’s confident is also broad. He assumed that historians should Carr captures some of these changes by citing aim at some kind of “universal history,” though he the introduction to the edition of the seems to have understood that phrase to mean, Cambridge Modern History, written by George not an early form of big history, but something Clark in 1957, more than half a century after closer to modern “” or “global Acton’s hopes for an “ultimate history,” Clark which is distinct from the combined history of all writes:Acton’s confident pronouncements. After citing countries.”history.” Acton4 defined universal history as “that Historians of a later generation do not In the early twentieth century, English look forward to any such prospect. They historical scholarship underwent a profound expect their work to be superseded again transformation, and when Carr wrote, the and again. …The exploration seems to discipline was more fractured and less sure of be endless, and some impatient scholars itself. These shifts were part of a sea-change take refuge in skepticism, or at least that affected most scholarly disciplines, from in the doctrine that, since all historical the humanities to the natural sciences, as judgements involve persons and points specialization and professionalization broke of view, one is as good as another and scholarship into ever-smaller compartments, there is no ‘objective’ historical truth.7

3 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 7. 1st published in 1961, based on the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, delivered in 1961 in Cambridge. 4 Carr, What is History? 150. 5 On Humboldt as a big historian before his , see Fred Spier, Big History and the of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015, 18-21, and Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, (London: John Murray, 2015). 6 in 1962, just a after Carr’s book: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of TheChicago distinction Press, 1970).between paradigm and pre-paradigm disciplines was introduced by a book whose first edition appeared 7 Carr, What is History? 7-8.

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Carr’s own position falls between the robust epistemology in disciplines such as history, widenedThe loss ofthe confidence gulf between in a therealist “two or cultures” naturalist of relativism of Clark. He explores brilliantly the the sciences and humanities that so worried C.P. complexscientific dialectic realism ofbetween Acton and history the hesitantas truth and Snow in a famous lecture delivered in 1959.8 history as stories we tell about the past. He takes The gulf was particularly wide in the English- truth and science seriously, because he believes speaking world, because English, unlike most that history, like science, and like truth in general, has a purpose: it can empower us. It empowers “science,” to the natural sciences. In English, the us by improving our understanding of the , veryother idea scholarly of “historical languages, science” confined began the to word, seem and it does that by mapping the present on to the absurd. By Carr’s time, historical scholarship past: “The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the nature of historical scholarship, and in the realist past, but to master and understand it as the key epistemologyhad lost confidence that still both underpinned in the “scientific” research in to the understanding of the present.”10 It followed the natural sciences. that the maps of the past created by historians had to be good maps. Like good science, they Skepticism and intellectual fragmentation sapped had to give us a better grip on the real world. So Carr, like Marx, was a philosophical realist undermined the ancient hope that history could and saw no fundamental chasm between the empowerconfidence us in by the helping value ofus historical better understand research, and humanities and the natural sciences. “Scientists, the present. As historians became increasingly social scientists, and historians are all engaged in isolated from other disciplines and even from each different branches of the same study: the study of other, they were left with increasingly fragmented man and his environment, of the effects of man on visions of the past, and of the nature and goals his environment and of his environment on man. of history. This growing sense of fragmentation The object of the study is the same: to increase was the scholarly counterpart of what Durkheim man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his called anomie, the loss of a sense of coherence environment.”11 and meaning, an idea that Carr himself glosses in a footnote as “the condition of the individual On the other hand, Carr understood more clearly isolated from … society.”9 Scholarly anomie than Acton that the past is not simply waiting arose from the growing isolation of scholars slab.”12 History consists of stories about the past knowledge. The one force that partially mitigated constructedto be discovered, by historians, “like fish andon a how fishmonger’s we construct theboth growing from each sense other of scholarlyand from isolationa unified was world of those stories changes as our world and our nationalism. Though tribal by their very nature, purposes change. We need empirical rigor to get at the truth about the past, but when telling the nineteenth century, provided some sense of stories about the past we will need the skills of cohesionnational histories, for historians which working had flourished within national since storytellers, including what Carr calls “imaginative historiographical traditions. understanding,” the ability to understand and

8 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 9 Carr, What is History? 32. 10 Carr, What is History? 26. 11 Carr, What is History? 84. 12 Carr, What is History? 23.

Volume I Number 1 Page 6 What is Big History? empathize with those who lived in the past.13 Like Marx, then, Carr understood the complex and delicate balance between history as truth English philosophers of history, R.G. Collingwood, and history as story. History is, Carr wrote, in thoughIn this, Carrhe warned was influenced that Collingwood’s by one of theemphasis great on a passage familiar to many a graduate student the empathetic role of the historian, if taken too in history: “a continuous process of interaction far, could lead to extreme skepticism.14 between the historian and [the] facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”16 Like memory, history does not recall the past; it re- Marx’s dialectical balance between science and creates it. activism.Particularly Marx influential insisted onthat Carr’s there thinking is an objective was past. But making something of that past is a But what past? Carr was even more committed creative task, and how we approach it depends on than Acton to broadening the scope of historical who we are and the particular present in which research. He was, after all, a historian of Russia, we write and study. This is the dialectic that Marx described in a famous passage from the “18th histories that had been neglected by English- Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.” speakingand keen historians.to demonstrate As an the admirer significance of Joseph of Needham, he also insisted on the importance of Men make their own history, but they Chinese history and the histories of many other do not make it just as they please; they parts of the world beyond Europe. do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under But, though Carr’s past is broad, it is not deep. He circumstances directly found, given and shows little interest in human or in the transmitted from the past. The tradition histories of the and the Universe. And of all the dead generations weighs like a that is surprising, given his interest in Marx, who nightmare on the brain of the living.15 saw history as part of a knowledge continuum that included all the sciences. Indeed, Marx, like von Historians, too, “make their own history,” but Humboldt, was a big historian before his time. But they do so “under circumstances directly found, Carr wrote in an era of scholarly fragmentation, and given and transmitted from the past.” What they the idea of universal history was not on his radar, make of the past depends on the time and place in or on the radar of any English-language historians which they write. But the stories they construct of his generation. Strangely, though, it was on the radar of historians in the Soviet Union, the country pasts studied by future historians. As an activist, whose history Carr wrote most about, because Marxabout understood the past may, well in theirthat how turn, we influence describe the the the Soviet Union’s Marxist heritage ensured that past matters, because our accounts may shape the the idea of “universal” or “general” history never future. Indeed, he hoped that his own account of entirely lost its inclusive Marxist sense. That is one the evolution of capitalism would have a profound impact on the future, as indeed, it did. school of big history research led by scholars such asreason Andrey why, Korotayev today, there and is Leonid a flourishing Grinin. Russian 13 Carr, What is History? 24. 14 Collingwood’s work, like Carr’s, was staple fare for graduates of my generation. His most important work was R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., Jan Van der Dussen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 15 Cited from Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 595. 16 Carr, What is History? 30.

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In 2001, David Cannadine edited a collection of of knowledge or meaning. Historians became essays called What is History Now? based on a increasingly isolated from other disciplines (the conference held to mark the 40th anniversary of decline of is a striking example Carr’s book.17 Much had changed since Carr wrote. of this process), and even from each other, and any The history discipline had become even more consensus about the nature and goals of history fragmented, in both content and epistemology, seemed to evaporate. In an introductory essay and even less sure of itself. The universalist vision to Cannadine’s book, Richard Evans noted the of Marx or von Humboldt or H.G. Wells seemed increasing focus in a postmodernist era on the to have vanished completely, surviving only in creative and subjective role of the historian and on the cut-down version of national histories. Many the historian’s role as storyteller. This approach of the changes evident in Cannadine’s collection had been epitomized in Hayden White’s 1973 classic, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination university students, historians, and historical sub- in Nineteenth Century Europe, which focused disciplines.reflect the post-war This was proliferation a worldwide of phenomenon, universities, almost entirely on the literary aspects of historical so similar trends can be found, with variations, in scholarship, rather than on the truth claims it many different historiographical traditions. made. Historical scholarship seemed to have splintered into multiple, incommensurable, stories Since Cannadine’s book was no longer about a about the past, each representing a particular single history discipline, it was appropriate that it had multiple authors. More historians and more on historical truth. Historians seemed to have students seemed to mean more diverse ideas takenperspective, on the anddeep none skepticism confident towards about grandits claims on the content, the meaning and the purpose of or meta-narratives that Jean- François historical scholarship. Each chapter is about a different type of history, so there are chapters thought.18 called: “What is now?” “What is Lyotard saw as a defining of postmodern Now?” and “What is Cultural And yet, … though the tremors barely registered History Now?” The absence of “What is Women’s on the seismograph of Cannadine’s volume, History Now?” or “What is by the year 2000, the idea of a new form of Now?” is striking, though Cannadine insists that universal history was already rattling the margins of historical scholarship. World history was disciplines into which history was then divided. his book reflects just a small number of the sub- scholarly organization and a successful journal Fragmentation was accompanied by increasing (flourishingThe Journal in of the World USA, History had a well-established), and was taught in an increasing number of universities and nature of the discipline. True, most historians schools. But several scholars now ventured far continuedskepticism to about approach the objectivity the details and of theirthe scientific research beyond world history. They began to explore the with a robust, realist empiricism, so much so, possibility of a truly universal history that would that many caricatured the discipline as just a embrace the whole of the past, including the catalogue of facts. But, as the circle of questions pasts of the biosphere and the entire universe. By 2001, I had been teaching big history for 12 dwindle, and few were comfortable with the idea , but I was just one member of a small but ofwidened, historical the scholarship confidence asof parthistorians of a larger seemed system to vigorous community of scholars moving in the

17 David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002). 18 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Press, 1984).

Volume I Number 1 Page 8 What is Big History? same direction. had been teaching What seemed just decades ago an archaic, astronomer’s versions of big history for more than unrealistic, and perverse approach to historical twenty years, and big history was being taught in scholarship is now beginning to look like a Amsterdam by Fred Spier and Johan Goudsblom, powerful, rigorous and even transformative in by John Mears, in San Rafael by Cynthia form of modern scholarship, which can re- connect historical scholarship and teaching to Graeme Davidson, and elsewhere. Big history other disciplines in both the humanities and the snuckStokes up Brown, on a history in Melbourne discipline by Tomthat Griffithswas looking and sciences. in the opposite direction. Why the return to Universal History? big history remains marginal, but it is beginning What happened? toToday, shake fifteen up the years history after discipline. Cannadine’s19 There volume, is an emerging scholarly literature that proves big Some of the crucial changes occurred within history can be written with rigor and precision the history discipline itself. There had always and can yield new, sometimes transformative, been a few scholars, such as H.G. Wells or insights into the past.20 Big history is being taught Arnold Toynbee, who kept alive the vision of a successfully in several universities, mostly in the more capacious understanding of the past. But English-speaking world, and even those history specialist research also laid the foundations for a departments that do not teach it often include broader view of the past, by generating a colossal discussions of big history in their amount of new historical scholarship and tackling seminars. There are several MOOCs (Massive subjects and regions and epochs that had been Open Online Courses) on big history. There is ignored by earlier generations of historians. a scholarly association (the IBHA), which has Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a world historian with held three major conferences, and now there is extraordinarily broad interests, puts it nicely in a a journal of big history. Macquarie University chapter in Cannadine’s volume: has established a Big History Institute, which has organized two research conferences. Big history Historians dig ever deeper, narrower is even being taught in hundreds of high schools, furrows in ever more desiccated soil mostly in the USA and , through the “Big until the furrows collapse and they are History Project,” a free, on-line high school buried under their own aridity. Yet on syllabus in big history, launched in 2011 and the other hand, whenever one climbs out funded by . of one’s furrow, there is now so much

enriching new work, which can change more of the field to survey, so much 19 One interesting example is The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), which offers an aggressive critique of short-termism in contemporary historical scholarship. 20 A start up list might include Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, Cambridge, MA: Press, 2001; David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley, CA: University of Press, 2nd ed., 2011; Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity, 2nd ed., Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2015; , Big History: From the to the Present, 2nd ed., New York: New Press, 2012; a university text, David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014; anthologies of essays, such as Barry Rodrique, and , eds., From Big Bang to Galactic : A Big History Anthology, Vol. 1, Our Place in the Univere, Delhi: Primus Books, 2015; and a beautifully illustrated overview, Macquarie University Big History Institute, Big History, London: DK books, 2016.

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one’s perspective or broaden one’s of that discovery would only become apparent framework of comparison.21 over the next decade or two. The discoveries that clinched plate tectonics and Big Bang However, many of the changes that allowed a still lay a few years in the future. By 1970, though, return to universal history occurred beyond the new paradigms were already encouraging the history discipline, and particularly within the natural sciences, which had always been in the natural sciences. Some scientists began to more friendly than the humanities to the idea hopes of a new unification of knowledge, at least of consilience.22 The quantum physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, had already anticipated new forms of Particularlytalk of “Grand striking Unified is Theories.” the fact that the new

World War II on the nature of . Gone was the static universe of Newton, replaced scholarly unification in a book he wrote just after byscientific a universe paradigms that operated were historical according in tonature. historical We have inherited from our forefathers and evolutionary rules. E.H. Carr was aware of the “historical turn” in the natural sciences, and its embracing knowledge. The very name giventhe keen to the longing highest for institutionsunified, all- of learning reminds us that from antiquity yearssignificance or so. forScience, history, he thoughwrote: his insights would and throughout many the be ignored by most historians over the next fifty universal aspect has been the only one to had undergone a profound revolution …. be given full credit. … We feel clearly that What Lyell did for and Darwin we are only now beginning to acquire for has now been done for reliable material for welding together , which has become a science the sum total of all that is known into a of how the universe came to be what whole; …23 it is …. The historian has some excuse for feeling himself more at home in the In the natural sciences, as in the humanities, world of science today than he could specialized scholarship over many decades have done a hundred years ago.24 yielded a huge bounty of new information and ideas. Equally important was the of In the English-speaking world, Big Bang new unifying paradigm ideas. The most important cosmology encouraged astronomers such as were Big Bang cosmology, plate tectonics and to recount the history of the universe, the modern Darwinian synthesis. The new while plate tectonics encouraged geologists paradigms were barely visible when Carr wrote. such as to write new histories of DNA had been discovered in Carr’s own University .25 It turned out that many natural scientists were in the same messy business of21 Cambridge, Cannadine, ed.,in 1953, What isbut History the full Now? significance 149. 22 This section summarizes and adds to arguments I have presented in “The Return of Universal History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue, 49 (December, 2010), 5-26. 23 Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? barriers that specialization placed in the way of such ambitions. 24 Carr, What is History? 57. (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 1 [first pub. 1944]; Schrödinger was also acutely aware of the 25 Carl Sagan’s television series, , Cosmos, Earth, and Man: A Short History of the Universe ( New Haven: Press, 1978) was published just two years earlier; the Soviet Union already was first broadcast in 1980; Preston Cloud’s I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998. had a flourishing tradition of “biosphere” history, pioneered by the great geologist, Vladimir Vernadsky in works such as V.

Volume I Number 1 Page 10 What is Big History?

This all changed with the emergence of vanished past from the random clues it had left techniques in the 1950s. In toas thehistorians—that present. The ofhistorical trying to turn reconstruct in the natural a 1953, Claire Paterson used the half-life of uranium sciences brought the methods of scientists closer in meteorites to determine that Earth is 4.56 to those of historians. Controlled experiments old. His date stands to this . on the origins of life on Earth or the Russian When Carr wrote in 1961, radiometric dating Revolution were out of the question. Instead, it was just beginning to transform the thinking of archaeologists and pre-historians. In 1962, at the same methodological challenge as historians: Kenniff Cave in South Queensland, John Mulvaney thatturned of collectingout that many as many scientific clues disciplinesto the past facedas they used radiometric techniques to show that had lived in Australia since before the end of the last ice , and over the next few decades, the plausiblecould—from and ancient even meaningful starlight, toaccounts zircon crystals,of the earliest dates for human settlement in Australia past.to fossil This trilobites—and was territory usingfamiliar them to historians.to reconstruct The would be pushed back to between 50,000 and knockdown dis-proofs favored by Karl Popper perhaps 60,000 years.29 As Colin Renfrew writes: were rarely available, and other, fuzzier, skills familiar to historians, such as pattern-recognition … the development of radiometric dating or hunches bases on prolonged familiarity with methods, … allowed the construction of a for prehistory in every natural sciences.26 part of the world. It was, moreover, a a given field, acquired increasing salience in the chronology free of any assumptions Particularly important for the emergence of about cultural developments or modern forms of universal history was the relationships, and it could be applied as development of radiometric dating techniques well to nonliterate societies as to those with written records. To be prehistoric for histories of the deep past.27 When H.G. Wells no longer meant to be ahistoric in a attemptedthat could providea universal a firm history chronological just after skeletonWorld War chronological sense.30 I, the early parts of his story sagged because, as Wells admitted, all his absolute dates depended Eventually, radiometric and other dating on written records, so he could provide none techniques made it possible to construct rigorous before the First Olympiad (776 BCE).28 Nineteenth reaching back to the origins of the century geologists had learned how to construct relative chronologies by studying the layering tell a universal history based on a robust universal of ancient rocks, but none could tell when the chronology.universe. For the first time, it is now possible to occurred or when Earth formed.

26 Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 27 SeeThere David is a fineChristian, account “Historia, of the real, complejidad as opposed y revolución to the idealized, cronométrica” methodologies [“History, of modern Complexity science and in the John Chronometric Ziman, Revolution”], Revista de Occidente, Abril 2008, No 323, 27-57, and David Christian, “History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution”, in Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella, eds., Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context (NASA, 2009), 441-462; and see Doug Macdougall Natures’ : How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 28 H.G. Wells, : Being a Plain and Mankind, 3rd ed., (New York: Macmillan),1921, 1102. 29 John Mulvaney & Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 1-2. 30 Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), 41.

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Some of these changes did just register in David Cannadine’s collection of essays. In the last explore several, overlapping descriptions of what chapter of that book, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto bigIn the history final ispart and of what this essayit could I would be. These like to are argued that history had widened its scope, personal thoughts, and some are speculative. But specialization by specialization, and now needed I hope they may interest even those who are less to embrace the natural sciences: “history can no persuaded by them than I am. And I hope they longer remain encamped in one of ‘two cultures’. may encourage a broad discussion about big Human beings are obviously part of the history and its future. My thoughts are organized, continuum.”31 In 1998, the great world historian, loosely, along a spectrum running from the ‘truth’ William H. McNeill, argued that historians needed end of Carr’s dialectic of history towards the to embed the history of humanity within the ‘storytelling’ end. history of the biosphere and even the Universe as a whole: The goal of big history, like that of all good knowledge, is to empower us by helping Human beings, it appears, do indeed us understand the world we live in. Big history belong in the universe and share its empowers us by helping us understand our world. unstable, evolving character.... [W]hat Like all forms of history, big history empowers us happens among human beings and primarily by mapping the present onto the past, what happens among the looks so as to help us better understand how today’s to be part of a grand, evolving story world came to be as it is. This claim about the featuring spontaneous emergence of purpose of history assumes a realist or naturalist complexity that generates new sorts of understanding of knowledge. As evolved behavior at every level of organization creatures, we interact with our surroundings from the minutest quarks and leptons with some degree of success, and that success to the , from long carbon chains presupposes that we (like all living organisms) to living organisms and the biosphere, can attain a limited but real understanding of and from the biosphere to the symbolic our surroundings. Though aware of the limits to of meaning within which knowledge, big history, like science in general, human beings live and labor, …32 resists extreme forms of skepticism or relativism. It builds on the same realist and naturalist In his last years, McNeill became increasingly foundations as good science, and has the same interested in the idea of Big History, seeing it ultimate goal, of empowerment. as a natural extension of his own broad vision of history. It was, as his son, John, has written: Big history is universal. But if “the thing that excited him most (aside from understanding the past can empower us, shouldn’t grandchildren).”33 we try to understand the whole of the past? What distinguishes big history most decisively from other forms of historical scholarship is its attempt What is Big History? to understand the past as a whole. It aspires to a universal understanding of history. Big history is So, what is big history? not hostile to specialist historical scholarship. On the contrary, it is utterly dependent on the rich

31 Cannadine, What is History Now? 153. 32 History and Theory, 37, no. 1 (1998): 12-13. 33 Origins (Newsletter of the International Big History Association), VI.08 (2016), 7. William H. McNeill, “History and the Scientific Worldview,”

Volume I Number 1 Page 12 What is Big History? scholarship of specialists. But it tries to link the may occur in other parts of the big history story, as biologists probe the origins of life on earth, unifying vision, just as millions of local maps can or astronomers look for life around other befindings connected of specialist to form scholarship a single world into map. a larger These systems, or as neuroscientists and psychologists ambitious goals mean that big history swims begin to get a grip on the ‘hard’ problem against the tide of intellectual fragmentation that of consciousness, or historians get a better structured so much scholarship in the twentieth understanding of the role of religion and science century. Big history aims at consilience, at what in at multiple scales. Alexander von Humboldt once called the “Mad Frenzy … of representing in a single work the whole material world.”34 comprehensive understanding of history, the intellectualWith these qualifications,equivalent of a big world history map aims of the at past.a Like a world map, the big history story can help history’s ambitious universalism. Big history us see not just the major nations and oceans of recognizesMany interesting no disciplinary consequences barriers flow to from historical big the past, but also the links and synergies that knowledge. It presumes the existence of a connect different scholarly continents, regions whole range of historically-oriented disciplines, and islands into a single knowledge world. The all of them linked by the same goal: that of broad perspective of big history also encourages reconstructing how our world came to be as us to move among multiple scales, from those of it is. Indeed, I often wonder if we may not the universe itself, to those of humans, to those of see, sometime in the future, a re-arrangement individual cells, within which millions of precisely of university campuses, so that, instead calibrated reactions occur every second. Big of putting the sciences at one end and the history encourages us to connect the dots in time and , to look for the synergies between devoted to ‘the historical sciences’, in which disparate entities, disciplines and scales. Russian astronomers,humanities at geologists,the other, you evolutionary would find biologists, a zone scholars such as Andrey Korotayev have been neuroscientists, and historians would all be particularly active in the important task of looking working together. for mathematical patterns in the evolution of complexity at multiple scales. The universal aspirations of big history mean that it will embrace all areas of knowledge that have By focusing on the ideas that link disciplines, big generated plausible, rigorous, evidence-based history can help us overcome the more extreme accounts of the past, and any discipline whose forms of skepticism characteristic of much insights can illuminate the past. This means twentieth century scholarship, particularly in that, at present, it makes sense to draw a line the humanities. In Durkheim’s hands, the idea of between everything that happened just after the “anomie” referred to the absence of a clear sense of place or meaning, a condition of intellectual homelessness in which the world itself made little thebig bang—abig bang, past territory that can where be reconstructedthere is plenty with of sense and individuals could feel isolated enough to interestingoodles of evidence—and speculation, but anything not, as thatyet, precededa taut, contemplate suicide. The extreme fragmentation evidence-based story. This may change, of course, of twentieth century scholarship allowed great in which case, the big history story itself will intellectual , discipline by discipline. expand to incorporate, perhaps, evidence for a But it did so at the cost of isolating disciplines multiverse or for string theory. Similar changes from each other, which limited the possibilities 34 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature, Chapter 18, “Humboldt’s Cosmos.”

Journal of Big History Page 13 David Christian both for a larger, unifying vision, and for truth- checking between disciplines. Particularly in of expertise. But the extraordinary breadth of the humanities, intellectual isolation generated biginsights history and means paradigms that, thoughfrom outside it will theirbuild fieldson the insights of experts, it will also require many in claims to generate meaning or to achieve a other scholarly skills, not all of which are valued in morescholarly general forms grasp of anomie of reality. that The sapped postmodernist confidence today’s fragmented knowledge world. Big history skepticism shared by so many scholars in the requires, above all, an ability to grasp and then humanities in the late twentieth century was link scholarship from many different disciplines. It demands breadth as much as depth, and a sharp positivism. But, when taken to extremes, it eye for unexpected synergies among disciplines. createda useful acorrective splintered to sense over-confident of reality that forms could of be And it requires an ability to tune into the different profoundly dis-empowering, both intellectually intellectual frequencies of multiple disciplines. and ethically. Some saw it as the scholarly Big historians will have to be interdisciplinary equivalent of suicide. translators, sensitive to subtle nuances in the way different disciplines use similar concepts, words and methods. And they will also ask deep interdisciplinary questions. Are there ideas mapsBig history of reality. returns, By removing with due scientificthe partitions modesty, to that work well across multiple disciplines, from betweenthe ancient disciplines, project of big trying history to assemble can help unifiedre- cosmology to biology and history, ideas such as the establish a more balanced relationship between “regimes” and “Goldilocks conditions” described specialist scholarship and large, paradigm ideas. by Fred Spier, or the “free energy density” rates that lie at the heart of Eric Chaisson’s work? Can Big history is collaborative and the idea of , which plays such a powerful collective. The big history story is being role in , illuminate our understanding of assembled, like a vast mosaic, using tiles from human history? Can the atomic level molecular many different countries, epochs and scholarly machines being explored today by nano-biologists disciplines. All scholarship is collaborative. But the extraordinary range of big history puts today’s world?35 Are there universal mechanisms collaboration at the heart of the new discipline. A (perhapssuggest new some ways form of ofmanaging universal energy Darwinism?) flows in rich and reliable big history story will not be the that explain the appearance of increasingly product of individual scholarly minds, but the joint complex entities despite the second of creation of millions of minds. ?

The extreme scholarly collaboration required By focusing not just on the individual islands to write big history should encourage a re-think and continents of modern scholarship, but also of what we mean by expertise. Specialization on the many links between them, big history can encouraged the notion that, if you narrowed provide a new framework for interdisciplinary thinking and research. Researchers familiar with big history’s world map of the past will naturally becamethe field experts.of enquiry This enough, view was individual always scholars naïve seek out useful ideas and methods from beyond becausecould achieve even thetotal narrowest mastery ofof aexperts field. They drew on their own specialist disciplines. Transdisciplinary

35 Peter M. Hoffmann, Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos (New York: Basic Books, 2012), is a wonderful exploration of how molecular machines exploit the “molecular storm” created by the random energy of individual molecules to power the of cells; and why doing so does not breach the second law of thermodynamics, because it depends on additional sources of free energy, mostly supplied by the battery molecule, ATP.

Volume I Number 1 Page 14 What is Big History? research will become particularly important as millions of individuals, working within shared more and more problems, from networks of knowledge. In just one century, the sphere of human mind, or the “Noösphere,” as Vernadsky called it, has become a planet-changing disciplines.to the study Indeed,of cancer the or very financial success crises, of research begin force.36 withinto depend disciplines on findings explains and insightswhy more from and multiple more interesting and important problems now lie My personal conviction is that the idea of between disciplines. As interdisciplinary research “collective learning” offers a paradigm idea that becomes increasingly important, big history can can frame our understanding of human history offer a new model of scholarly expertise, that and of the distinctive nature of our own species. demands breadth of knowledge and an alertness Human history is driven by collective learning to unexpected interdisciplinary synergies. just as the history of living organisms is driven by natural selection. If this idea is broadly correct, The young discipline of big history has also it illustrates the capacity of big history to clarify shown that intellectual collaboration is a deep problems by helping us see them against an distinctive feature of our species, sapiens. exceptionally broad background, as part of the “world map” of modern knowledge. as a species, our technological creativity seems toThough have beenmany clinched evolutionary by the features evolution define of an us Big history is a story. So far, I have exceptionally powerful form of language that discussed the nature of the truth-claims that allows us to exchange ideas and insights with can be made by big history, and its capacity to such precision and in such volume that they can synergize collaborative, interdisciplinary research. accumulate in the collective memory. We know But of course, big history also tells a story. It of no other species in which learned knowledge arises, as Carr wrote of all history, from “an accumulates across multiple generations so that unending dialogue between the present and the later generations know, not just different things, past.” Its two poles are the past as a whole and the but more things than earlier generations. And historians who view that past from a particular this difference has proved transformative. The vantage point in the present. Like history in accumulation of learned information by millions general, big history is very much a product of the of individuals across multiple generations explains historians who are constructing the big history our increasing control over the resources and story. That means, of course, that big history is evolving and will evolve, like all stories, as it is told trend has shaped much of human history, and has by different tellers, in different contexts culminatedenergy flows today of the in biosphere. making us Thisthe single accelerating most and with different preoccupations. powerful force for change in the biosphere. In my own work, I have described our unique capacity Big history is an origin story. But for sharing and accumulating information as because of its universalist ambitions, big history is “collective learning.” It has given us humans not not just another story about the past. Its universal ambitions mean that big history shares much resources through the environment, but also with traditional origin stories. As far as we know, increasingonly increasing insight control into the over world flows and of energythe universe and all human communities have tried to construct we inhabit. Modern science, as well as modern religions and literatures, are all the creations of surrounds us. This is the sense in which I will use unified accounts of the origins of everything that 36 On the idea of a Noösphere, see David Christian, “The Noösphere,” from the Edge.org Annual Question for 2017 (Jan 2017), at https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27068

Journal of Big History Page 15 David Christian the idea of “origin stories.” Origin stories attempt experience, a deep sense of loss. Today, we are so to hold together and pass on all that is known in a used to a world without universal framing ideas given community about how our world came to be (particularly in the humanities), that it is easy as it is. They are extraordinarily powerful if they to forget how painful it was to lose the sense of are believed, if they ring true to those who hear intellectual coherence that goes with trust in an and re-tell them, whether we are talking about origin story. But that sense of loss is apparent in foraging communities of the world, or much of the literature, and art of the the great philosophical and religious traditions of late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here are just major world civilizations, from Confucianism to two, more or less random, examples of what I Buddhism to the traditions of the Aztec world, of mean. In his 1851 poem, “Dover Beach,” Matthew Christianity and of Islam. They are also powerful Arnold writes: because they are shared by most members of a given community, who learn the rudiments The Sea of Faith of their origin stories as children, and then Was once, too, at the full, and round internalize those stories in the course of many earth’s shore years of education, with increasing detail and Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. sophistication. As far as we know, origin stories But now I only hear can be found at the core of all forms of education. Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, They have provided foundational knowledge in Retreating, to the breath seminaries and universities, as well as in the rich Of the night-wind, down the vast edges oral traditions passed on by elders in all foraging drear communities. And naked shingles of the world.

In the light of this discussion it is apparent The poem continues with a terrifying vision of a that Durkheim’s notion of “anomie” can also be future without coherence or meaning: understood as the state of mind of those who lack access to a credible, rich and authoritative Ah, love, let us be true origin story. Intellectual anomie is a state of map- To one another! for the world, which lessness and meaninglessness. Curiously, it is seems the intellectual state that became the norm in the To lie before us like a land of dreams, twentieth century, as globalization and modern So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor stories, both in the metropolitan centers of the light, worldscience and battered at its colonial confidence margins. in traditional Everywhere, origin Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for modern secular educational systems ceased to pain; teach within shared traditions of foundational And we are here as on a darkling plain knowledge. Swept with confused alarms of struggle

Some found the decline of traditional origin Where ignorant armies clash by night. and flight, W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” was written in worldstories without exhilarating a shared and originliberating, story. and But glorified many, 1919, just after the Great War seemed to realize bothin the in multiple, the colonial free-floating world and perspectives in the metropolitan of a Arnold’s haunting vision of the future. heartlands, experienced, and continue to

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre But a different interpretation is also possible. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Perhaps for much of the twentieth century, we Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; have lived in a sort of intellectual building site, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, surrounded by the debris of older origin stories, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and while a new origin story was being constructed all everywhere around us, a story for humanity as a whole. The The ceremony of innocence is drowned; best evidence for this idea is the re-emergence of

The poem ends with a famous and terrifying from this perspective, big history is the project image: ofnew trying unifying to tease stories out inand the build last afifty modern, years. globalSeen origin story. what rough beast, its come round at last, Big history is an origin story for the Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Anthropocene . Perhaps, then, we can think of big history as an origin story for the Specialization and the loss of traditional unifying narratives were symptomatic of the chaotic and intellectual achievements of modern science, but incoherent world described in so much twentieth ittwenty-first is also the century.product of Big an history increasingly builds globalized on the century literature, art and philosophy. Indeed, world, that is very different from the world of it has often been assumed that this world of isolated, even incommensurable disciplines faster than he could have imagined, and new and perspectives is characteristic of technologiesE.H. Carr. Scientific such as knowledge the Internet has have advanced created in general. The modern world threw together a much more intertwined world. But perhaps peoples, cultures, religions and traditions so the most important changes arise from the great violently that it created a growing sense of a acceleration, the astonishing increase in human numbers, human energy use, human control over traditional visions of the world. In the Communist the environment, and human inter-connectedness, Manifesto,single humanity, we read while that, undermining in the bourgeois confidence era of in in the sixty years since Carr wrote. In that brief period, we humans have collectively become the with their train of ancient and venerable single most important force for change in the prejudiceshuman history: and opinions, “All fixed, are fast-frozen swept away, relations, all new- formed ones become antiquated before they can role in the 4 billion year history of life on earth. ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is Thatbiosphere, is an outcome the first singlethat Carr species could to not play have such a holy is profaned, …” In a book on modernity that imagined in 1961. These spectacular changes takes its title from this passage, Marshall Berman mean that questions about the nature and source writes that the modern world has created: “a of the astonishing power wielded collectively paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us by 7.4 billion humans loom much larger today all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration than they did in Carr’s time. In this sense, big and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of history can be thought of as an origin story for the ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part Anthropocene Epoch of human history. of a universe in which, as Marx said: ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”37

37 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988, 1st published 1982), 15.

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We will need the broad scale of big history to how strange today’s world is may also give us see the Anthropocene clearly, because it is not a renewed appreciation for the insights and just a turning point in modern world history, understanding of our ancestors, who maintained over many millennia a much more stable as a whole, and even in the history of planet relationship with the biosphere as a whole. earth.but a significant Most contemporary threshold withinhistorical human scholarship history studies the last 500 years. The danger of this Big history is the first origin story for foreshortened perspective is that it can normalize all humans. If big history is an origin story, recent history, making the technologically and economically dynamic societies of recent centuries as a whole. Emerging as it does in a densely seem typical of human history in general. They it is also the first origin story for humanity are not. Their dynamism is extraordinary and constructed by, and available to, all human beings. exceptional. The very idea of history, of long- Whileinterconnected traditional world, origin it storiesis the first tried origin to sum story change, is modern and, as John McNeill has over knowledge from particular communities shown, the scale of change in the modern era, and particularly since the mid twentieth century, really origin story that tries to sum over accumulated is “something new under the .”38 In contrast, knowledgeor regions or from cultural all parts traditions, of the world. this is theThat first most people in most human societies over the last alone suggests the wealth of information and the 200,000 years lived whose structures and astonishing richness of detail of a modern origin surroundings seemed relatively stable, because story. change was so slow that it could not be observed at the scale of a few generations. Traditional origin stories provided a unifying vision for particular communities, by highlighting Only within the capacious scales of big history is the ideas that different people shared, just as it possible to see clearly that the Anthropocene modern national histories provided a unifying Epoch is strange not just on human scales, but vision for nation states despite internal differences also on those of the history of planet Earth. This of language, culture, religion and ethnicity. In is perhaps why, in a recent article, a group of a similar way, the big history story can start to paleontologists suggest that the Anthropocene provide a unifying vision for humanity as a whole, Epoch counts as one of the three most important despite the many differences between regions, turning points in the history of the biosphere, classes, nations and cultural traditions. The along with the emergence of life, almost 4 construction and dissemination of a global origin billion years ago, and of multicellular life 600 story can help generate the sense of human unity million years ago.39 Never before has a single that will be needed as human societies navigate species dominated change in the biosphere as collectively through the global challenges of we humans do today, and never before has the the next few decades. Though the national and near future depended as it does today, on the cultural tribalisms that dominated Carr’s world decisions, insights, and whims, of a single species. are still very much present today, he would have Appreciating the strangeness of modern society been astonished to see, emerging alongside them, is vital if we are to tackle the global challenges it an origin story for humanity as a whole. poses for the near future. Understanding

38 For more on these claims, see David Christian, “History and Time,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 57, no. 3 (2011): 353-365, and John McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 39 The Anthropocene Review, (2015): 1-24.

Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, et. al., “The Anthropocene Biosphere”, Volume I Number 1 Page 18 What is Big History?

So interconnected is today’s world that the idea of More recently, the great American world historian, William McNeill, has made the point with equal salience that it lacked in Carr’s time, when eloquence: a unified humanity with a history of its own has a Humanity entire possess a commonality tothe be most either significant nation states human or communitiesculturally cohesive seemed which historians may hope to regions such as “the West” or the Muslim world, or the zones dominated by great traditional empires comprehend what unites any lesser such as China or India. Today, a sense of global understand just as firmly as they can citizenship, of belonging to the global community parochial historiography inevitably does, angroup. intelligible Instead world of enhancing history conflicts,might be as precision. (Generically speaking we are, after all, expected to diminish the lethality of aof remarkably humanity, is homogenous not just a matter species, of scientific so that the group encounters by cultivating a sense category, Homo sapiens that the category of “Chinese human being” or triumphs and tribulations of humanity as “American human being”has lacks.) a scientific Awareness precision of aof whole. individual This, identification indeed, strikes with me the as the what all humans share is increasingly a matter moral duty of the historical profession of self-preservation, particularly in a world in our time. We need to develop an with nuclear weapons. E.H. Carr wrote “What is ecumenical history, with plenty of History?” one year before the Cuban missile crisis, room for human diversity in all its when, according to President Kennedy, the odds complexity.42 of an all-out nuclear war lay “between one out of three and even.”40 As Wells understood, a universal history is the

H.G. Wells’ attempt to write a universal history in because, unlike national histories, big history 1919, when the horrors of the Great War were still natural vehicle for a unified history of humanity, vivid in his mind, was driven by a similar sense but as a single, and remarkably homogenous, of human unity. Peace, he argued, required new species.first encounters And it is humans a story that not ascan warring now be tribes, told with ways of thinking. It required: us understand the place of our species not just in . . .common historical ideas. Without theincreasing recent past,precision but in and the confidence, history of the and biosphere, can help such ideas to hold them together in and of the entire universe. harmonious co-operation, with nothing

nationalist traditions, races and peoples but narrow, selfish, and conflicting and destruction. This truth, which was apparentare bound to to that drift great towards philosopher conflict Kant a century or more ago . . . is now plain to the man in the street.41

40 Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 271. 41 GrahamH.G. Wells, Allison Outline and of Philip History, Zelikow vi. 42 William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, , History, and Historians,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (Feb. 1986), 7.

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