FRED SPIER
What Is Big History?
In big history, the human past is placed within the context of the history of life, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and even the universe as a whole. Thus, in a radical departure from established academic ways of looking at human history, in big history our common past is viewed from within the whole of natural history ever since the beginning of the universe.
The term “big history” was coined by the historian David Christian. In 1989, Christian started 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 in Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands, including the ones I have been teaching since 1994, first at the University of Amsterdam and later also at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In the 1970s and 1980s, other big history courses emerged independently, such as the ones pioneered by astrophysicist Eric Chaisson and astronomer George Field at Harvard University, historian John Mears at Southern Methodist University, and astrophysicist Siegfried Kutter at Evergreen State College in Washington State.
All these courses have attracted large numbers of enthusiastic students. The need for course materials soon led to the publication of an increasing number of big history books and articles, the most important of which are mentioned in the reference list.1 The emergence of big history was a remarkable development during a period of time when the interest in large-scale overviews had almost disappeared in the humanities after French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard had famously declared in 1979 that what he called metanarratives had become obsolete (Lyotard 1984: xxiv–xxv).
Why Study Big History?
First of all, big history provides a modern scientific answer to the biggest question that can be posed about the past, namely how everything has become the way it is now. To be sure, big history cannot provide all the answers. But more than any other approach to history, big history shows how humans and human societies have become the way they are; how they have been influenced by their planetary and cosmic environment, as well as how they have changed it; and more in general, how both living and lifeless nature have become the way they are 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 can match.
In the second place, big history allows us to see big patterns that escape attention when only smaller processes are studied. Very few historians, for instance, compare the history of humanity with the history of life. Yet doing so brings out striking similarities, such as the fact that in both cases increasing complexity went hand in hand with a division of labor among the parts that make up the whole. This was, for instance, the case during the emergence of more complex cells, the so-called eukaryotic cells, which later became the building blocks of all more complex organisms, such as plants and animals, including organisms like you and me. The formation of more complex cells and organisms caused a division of labor to emerge within and between these cells as well as between whole groups of cells. A very similar development took place during human history when the first state societies emerged. A growing division of labor led to different groups, most notably farmers, slaves, craftspeople, traders, bureaucrats, soldiers, priests and rulers, who all became dependent on each other. And in all cases one may wonder which parts have benefited the most, or the least, from this development. This is only one example of the great many patterns that become visible while one is studying big history.
Although extremely complicated in its details (in all academic studies the details are always complicated), thanks to these large patterns big history offers a surprisingly simple framework for all of the past. In fact, discovering these large patterns may have been one of the most unexpected and rewarding results of doing big history. I have explored this theme in two books (Spier 1996; 2010). Finding these patterns is rewarding, because they help to make history easier to understand. With the aid of these emerging large patterns, the grand sweep of history may now be summarized in rather simple terms.
In the third place, big history offers a straightforward structure within which all scientific knowledge can be accommodated. By marching through history from the beginning of the universe until today, we start with big bang cosmology, which explains how the universe itself emerged, including all the small particles that are the building blocks of all larger structures that have formed, from the tiniest molecules to clusters of galaxies. By looking at the history of our planet in relation to its closest neighbors, Venus and Mars, we discover the importance of its special position in the solar system, which has made possible the emergence and continued existence of life. While considering plate tectonics, we learn how this geological process, unique to Earth, has shaped the continents and the oceans for at least 2 billion years and, as a result, also Earth’s climate and biological evolution. By examining the history of life, we encounter Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution, which, in its modern form, is currently the best scientific explanation for how life evolved on our home planet. By tracing millions of years of early human history, we begin to understand how humans became different from all other species, in both a biological and a cultural sense. And by considering an overview of the last 10,000 years of human history, we become aware of the enormous importance of culture for shaping human societies into what they have become today.
While the big history enterprise may sound wildly ambitious, for its practitioners it has become a daily routine. Yet at the same time, big history has changed our perception of the world beyond recognition. I remember very well, for instance, that while studying biochemistry in the 1970s I often experienced an overwhelming and bewildering feeling in academic bookstores, wondering how these great many different forms of knowledge, from astronomy to small-scale histories, were all interrelated. Nobody could tell me then, and I could not figure it out myself either. Now I look at these publications and immediately know a fitting place for all of them within the overarching scheme of big history. This is a very relaxing and comforting sense which, I think, many people share after having been introduced to big history.2
In the fourth place, big history offers a very detached, and it is hoped to some extent a transcultural, version of history that may become acceptable all around the globe. Although all practitioners of big history are (like all humans) shaped by, and to some extent bound to, their own cultural background, looking at history from a cosmic point of view may make it possible to avoid many biases that result from studying history at smaller scales. My experience with students from all continents, as well as discussions with big history enthusiasts from many different cultural backgrounds, has been encouraging in this respect.
All modern academic forms of history, including big history, have emerged within urban settings which were usually well connected to other cities. These histories were developed by privileged city dwellers who had sufficient time and means of existence to create these stories and diffuse them, thanks to the demand from other urbanites. As a result, all forms of academic history cater mostly to the needs of city people, while the great many traditional farmers on this planet, as well as the few still-existing gatherers and hunters, may find them less interesting, if not totally useless, because they are not very helpful in orienting them in their very localized daily lives. Because in the twenty-first century more than 50 percent of all humans are living in cities for the first time in human history, the entire range of academic histories, including big history, may now become acceptable to a considerable portion of humanity. Today, in our rapidly urbanizing and ever more interconnected world, it is more important than ever to develop a coherent common history of humanity that is embedded within the wider history of the planet and the universe, because that will help urbanites to understand the full context of both their current lives and their past.
Last, but probably not least, big history may help us prepare better for the future. Although no one knows the future with any degree of certainty, it appears reasonable to suppose that some of the large trends that have existed in history will also continue into the immediate future. This includes, perhaps most importantly, the practices of energy extraction that are needed to produce all the forms of complexity that we make and use today, ranging from our daily food to airplanes. At the same time we have to get rid of the entropy, “mess,” that we inevitable produce by doing all these things. Because today we are using a rapidly diminishing supply of fossil fuels to carry out all these tasks, a major issue for the near future is: How will humans survive and prosper after these energy supplies are gone forever?
How Old Is Big History?
Big history and its precursors may well represent the very oldest accounts of what we now call “history.” As long as we can trace back such narratives, people have tried to answer the questions of where they came from, as well as how everything else they saw had come into being. Such accounts are now known as origin stories. The questions themselves are usually not made explicit in these stories; they only provide the answers.
The beginning of the Jewish Torah, for instance, known to Christians as Genesis, offers an excellent example of such an origin story. It starts with the well-known sentence: “In the beginning G-d created the heaven and the Earth.” Apparently, for those who produced this document the first big question was how heaven and Earth had originated. The next big question was, apparently, how the shape of the Earth, as well as everything that was on it, had emerged (interestingly, with the exception of water). The next big question was where light had come from (explaining darkness does not seem to have been a problem). After having explained all of this by divine action, the next big question was why there was water both on the surface on the Earth and in the sky. And so it continues, all the way down to the question of how humans had emerged. This was apparently not the first big question for those who codified this story, which testifies to the degree of detachment and contemplation. From a modern scientific point of view, this origin story may be summarized as a series of answers to the question of how energy (light) and a great many forms of complexity had emerged, ranging from the heavens and the Earth to humans. In big history, this is currently becoming the general approach. The major difference is that in big history, divine action is not invoked as the underlying cause for how everything first emerged.
Another major difference with traditional origin stories is that in big history we seek to abstain as much as possible from setting judgmental norms or prescribing forms of desired behavior. Of course, choices have to be made all the time about what to include and what to omit in telling such a story. But we avoid stating what has been good or bad in history, or how people should have behaved. We leave those aspects to the judgment of our audience. All traditional origin stories, by contrast, include both normative and prescriptive aspects. These old stories functioned, therefore, not only as explanations of reality but also as rules of desired behavior. In doing so, they helped to orient people both in time and space. Here, too, big history has a similar goal – but one based on scientific knowledge, without normative or judgmental goals other than using basic scientific insights for providing the best possible overview of the past.
While the narrators of traditional origin stories often claim that their versions of history are “true,” thoughtful big historians will never make that claim, aware as they are that scientific knowledge keeps constantly changing. Just as one’s updated GPS navigation system may provide the newest road map, the latest version of big history is intended to offer the best possible (currently available) map of past reality, the largest scientific map of time and space that humans have yet produced.
When Did Academic Big History Emerge?
When scholars such as Eric Chaisson, John Mears, and David Christian began teaching big history in the 1970s and 1980s, they all thought that they were doing something fundamentally new. Elements of the big history approach are, however, much older. They are based on scientific knowledge that emerged in the sixteenth century (CE), while the first big historians avant la lettre wrote their seminal books in the first half of the nineteenth century. Two major pioneers were the Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the Scottish entrepreneur Robert Chambers (1802–1871).
Alexander von Humboldt was as famous during his lifetime as Albert Einstein is today, first of all thanks to his daring five-year expedition through Spanish America, during which he undertook a wide range of scientific experiments, and later also because of his writings. Usually considered the father of modern geography, von Humboldt was interested in nearly everything – ranging from peoples and their cultures to the universe as a whole. After his epic voyage he spent the next 30 years, mostly in Paris, publishing his results. After moving to Berlin later in life, von Humboldt wrote a multivolume series called Cosmos, in which he tried to summarize in a coherent manner all the existing knowledge about nature, including humans. The first volume was published (in German) in 1845. Like his earlier works, these books set a new trend. They were widely read and translated into many languages. Unfortunately, von Humboldt died before he could finish this project. His descriptions in Cosmos were often rather static, because he refused to speculate about the history of nature beyond the available evidence, such as specific ages of rocks and fossils, which were simply unknown at the time.
A second pioneer of big history avant la lettre was the Scottish publisher and author Robert Chambers. Like von Humboldt, Chambers was familiar with the world of contemporary science, including, of course, the broader Scottish Enlightenment. He lived in an increasingly entrepreneurial society that was rapidly industrializing. The introduction of the steam press had made the publishing business more profitable, which is how Chambers made a living. His book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was anonymously published in London by John Churchill in 1844, because Chambers correctly foresaw some of the controversies that his book would generate. Only in 1884 was the identity of the author posthumously revealed.
In contrast to von Humboldt’s mostly descriptive solid history of the universe, Chambers’s Vestiges offered a dynamic and very speculative process history of everything, beginning with the origin of the universe in the form of a “fire mist,” and ending with the history of humanity (see Chambers 1994). Some of his challenging hypotheses still look surprisingly modern, including the idea that matter emerged in a fire mist and that civilizations rose as a result of specific ecological and social constraints. But Chambers had also other ideas, less appealing today, such as a racial theory about the evolution of humans, which started at the lowest stage with black savages, leading ultimately to English Caucasian whites at the pinnacle of history.
It is not clear to what extent Chambers may have been influenced by von Humboldt’s work. In England, Chambers’s Vestiges and von Humboldt’s Cosmos both appeared in print at more or less the same time, while von Humboldt had been lecturing about such issues for about 20 years. In either case, Vestiges caused a huge stir in Victorian Britain and sold very well. Following the works of the naturalists Charles Lyell and Alexander von Humboldt, among others, Vestiges suggested a time span for the history of Earth and of life that was far longer than the generally accepted biblical account allowed. Vestiges contributed substantially, therefore, to preparing the ground for Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s later work on the evolution of life.
During the second part of the nineteenth century, to my knowledge no new big histories were published. The academic world was splitting into clearly demarcated disciplines, and most emerging academic historians were oblivious to attempts to place humans within a wider terrestrial, let alone a cosmic, context. They focused instead on constructing patriotic histories and civilizational trajectories, as these helped to shape the identities of the emerging nation-states in Europe and the Americas. As a result, there seemed to have been little or no room for big history in academia. Yet there remained room for large-scale accounts within the wider walls of science. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalists increasingly adopted historical approaches, for example, while at the same time the biblical account was losing credibility within academia as a literal historical source.3
In the twentieth century big history reemerged, first a little feebly and later with new force. The first pioneer was the English author H.G. Wells in his book published in 1920, The Outline of History (Wells 1930). The horrifying effects of World War I motivated Wells to write such an all-embracing history. He hoped it would foster a global identity which could contribute to preventing new wars. Because the universe was still seen as both stable and infinite, Wells concentrated his efforts on the areas in which change took place – namely the history of Earth, life and mankind (as he called it). Yet after this publication appeared, not much happened in terms of big history until the 1970s. I do not know why it took so long. Possibly, earlier twentieth-century big history texts have not yet been rediscovered.
During the 1970s most of today’s key scientific paradigms (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) relating to the history of the universe and Earth became accepted. This coincided with the introduction of novel techniques to determine the ages of rocks (and thus also of fossils) with the aid of radioactive decay measurements. Furthermore, new methods were devised or refined to determine the age of other objects and events, such as the counting of tree rings, the analysis of ice cores, genetic dating and the detection of electromagnetic radiation that originated in the early universe. All of this led to what David Christian (2009) calls a “chronometric revolution.” As a result, scientists could construct much more precise accounts of the history of life, Earth, the solar system and even the entire universe. By that time, also the more distant view of the Earth resulting from the Apollo moon flights, as well as the ongoing globalization and industrialization, stimulated the idea of looking at things as a whole once again.
A few farsighted scholars started to synthesize this new knowledge in the classroom and in print. The first resulting account of big history known to me is a large volume titled The Columbia History of the World (1972), edited by John Garraty and Peter Gay. This book, written by a team of scholars from Columbia University, ran to more than 1,000 pages, 45 of which covered the period from the emergence of the universe to the rise of agriculture. The first modern university course to offer such a grand overview, designed by Eric Chaisson and George Field, started at Harvard University in 1975 and is still running today. Chaisson also wrote a stream of pioneering books and articles (1977; 1981; 1987; 1988; 2001; 2006). In 1977, NASA Apollo scientist Robert Jastrow wrote the bookUntil the Sun Dies, which covered everything from the beginning of the universe until the far future, namely the end of our solar system.
In 1980, the American astronomer Carl Sagan’s 13-part television series Cosmos presented a magnificent view of the history of the universe, including the emergence of humans (see Sagan 1980). Other astronomers, such as Hubert Reeves, joined in this effort to synthesize cosmological knowledge and to explain it to a wider public audience; they all drew on earlier pioneers such as Harlow Shapley and Robert Jastrow (see Shapley 1959; 1963; Jastrow 1967; 1977; Reeves 1985; 1991; Reeves et al. 1998). In the same year as Sagan’s television series, the Austrian philosopher Erich Jantsch developed the first systematic model for big history in his book The Self-Organizing Universe (Jantsch 1980). Jantsch died soon after its publication, a tragic fact that may partially explain why his book did not become better known in academic circles. In the Soviet Union, though, Jantsch’s work served as a source of inspiration for many scholars, including the psychologist Akop Nazaretyan, to formulate their own approaches to universal history (i.e. Nazaretyan 2010). The fact that these scholars have published most of their work in Russian has not facilitated the globalization of their insights. (See Naumann, this volume.) Soon thereafter, also during the 1980s, other innovative American scholars, such as the geologist Preston Cloud at the University of Minnesota and the astrophysicist Siegfried Kutter at Evergreen State College, drew on this new knowledge to craft their own grand syntheses (Cloud 1978; 1988; Kutter 1987). Being natural scientists, they paid only limited attention to human history. In the 1990s, these large-scale accounts of natural and cosmic history began to fuse into a new genre, increasingly known as “big history” among historians in Australia, Western Europe and the United States, as “cosmic evolution” among astronomers and astrophysicists, and as “universal history” in Russia. Also in other countries, such as France, England, Colombia and Peru, broad-minded and intellectually gifted scholars began to write their own big histories, which have tended to be remarkably similar in approach. Today, such scholars may well be found in almost every country on Earth.
By the end of the 1980s, two pioneering academic historians began to teach the big story in a newly and thoroughly scientific way: David Christian at Macquarie University, in Sydney, and John Mears at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. While Mears took up the huge task of designing a big history course that he taught solo (see Mears 1986; 2009), David Christian designed a course model in which specialists from different academic disciplines were involved (1991; 2004; 2008). Astronomers taught about the history of the universe; geologists explained Earth history; biologists lectured on life and evolution; while archaeologists and historians covered human history. This course model not only produced the potential for synergy among the teachers, but has also served as an example for similar courses in Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands, where sociologist Johan Goudsblom and myself started such a course at the University of Amsterdam in 1994 (Spier 2005b), after Goudsblom had become familiar with Christian’s initiative during a visit to Macquarie University in 1992. Christian himself later moved away from his collaborative teaching model. Finding that it was easier to tell a coherent story by doing all the lectures himself, Christian now usually teaches his big history course solo. In the Netherlands, however, we continue to use the co-teaching approach in our big history classes.
Who Is Doing Big History Today?
Despite this remarkable rise of big history, by the end of the 1990s only a handful of academics were actually active in this area (cf. Hughes-Warrington 2002).4 Since 2005, however, there has been a considerable increase of big history scholars. An internet-based survey carried out in 2009 by the American big historians Barry Rodrigue and Daniel Stasko found big history courses being taught at 32 institutions in 7 countries, by 28 professors (or teams of professors) (2009: 1). Most of these courses were offered in the United States, scattered across 10 different states. The survey did not include the increasing number of courses, lectures, books, and websites in which large portions of history are told by astronomers, physicists, social scientists, or lay people. Grand historical narratives appear to be making an impressive comeback in the new millennium.
Let’s now take a closer look at what a few of the major players in the field are doing today. While teaching big history at Macquarie University, and also at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, South Korea, David Christian is working on the construction of a general paradigm for human history based on collective learning, which is intended to become the cultural equivalent of the theory of natural selection in biology. Together with Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin, Christian is writing a lower-division university level big history textbook planned for publication in 2012.5Furthermore, Christian and others have begun to develop an online syllabus for big history teaching at secondary schools. (See Bain, this volume.) This educational enterprise, called the Big History Project, is sponsored by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, who became enthusiastic about big history after listening to an audio version of Christian’s big history class in 2008.6
While teaching cosmic evolution (his version of big history) at Tufts University and Harvard University, Eric Chaisson promoted it also for decades through the Wright Center for Science Education that existed at Tufts University until 2011, and through the informative website Cosmic Evolution.7 In his seminal books, Chaisson has elaborated an energy and complexity approach to all of history that has increasingly been adopted by other big historians (Chaisson 2001; 2006). He is now working on a new book on this subject.
In Russia, the psychologist Akop Nazaretyan is at the center of what Russians call “universal history,” which he teaches at Dubna International University, not far from Moscow. Together with colleagues such as Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, Nazaretyan has organized a number of conferences and panels on universal history over the past 10 years. In 2002 this group of scholars also started the groundbreaking journal Social Evolution and History, which published a special issue on big history in March 2005.8
The geologist Walter Alvarez gained fame for his discovery, together with his father, the Nobel Prize winner Luis Alvarez, of an asteroid impact near the Mexican peninsula of Yucatán that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. He now teaches big history from a geologist’s perspective at the University of California at Berkeley, while also further promoting the web-based interactive time line ChronoZoom initially created by Roland Saekow, one of his students.9
Trained in anthropology, biology, history, and geography, Barry Rodrigue teaches big history at the University of Southern Maine. He is actively building a communications network among the global community of big historians. This includes a big history Facebook site and surveying who is doing big history today.
The astronomer Tom Gehrels, responsible for the imaging component of the NASA Pioneer missions to Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s, the “Space Science” series from the University of Arizona Press in the 1980s, and electronic surveying of asteroids and comets in the 1990s, went on to teach big history both at the University of Arizona and in Ahmedabad, India, the latter as a part of a UN course for graduate students from Uzbekistan all the way to North Korea. Until his death in 2011, Gehrels, in addition to developing a new view of what happened in the early universe, was especially interested in the moral implications that he saw as arising out of big history (Gehrels 2007).
Since 1996, several important big history books and articles have appeared. Authors include the US-based writer Bill Bryson (2003), the Colombian scientist Antonio Vélez (1998), the UK-based scientist Robert Aunger (2007a; 2007b), the American astronomer Russell Genet (2007), the German scientists Harald Lesch and Harald Zaun (2008), and the Australian scientist Joseph Voros (2007). In 2008 the American scientist John Smart and the Belgian philosopher Clément Vidal started an organization for scholars interested in acceleration processes in the evolution and development of the universe.10 In the Netherlands, a school teacher, Jos Werkhoven, has developed his big history method for primary schools, while in 2009 Bryson produced a children’s version of his book.
A word about my own big history activities in the Netherlands: inspired originally by David Christian’s course, I have been teaching big history since 1994 at the University of Amsterdam, since 2003 at Eindhoven University of Technology, and since 2009 also at Amsterdam University College. The realization in 1995 that by structuring a big history course I was also structuring big history itself led to my first book on big history. After becoming acquainted with Chaisson’s work, I developed a theory that aims to explain all of history, first in an article and more recently in a book (see Spier 1996; 2005a; 2010). As the present chapter suggests, I am also very interested in the history of big history.
On August 20, 2010, during a big history meeting at the Coldigioco Geological Observatory in Italy, Walter Alvarez, Craig Benjamin, Cynthia Brown, David Christian, Lowell Gustafson, Barry Rodrigue and Fred Spier founded the International Big History Association (IBHA). The purpose of the IBHA is to promote the teaching and research of big history worldwide with the most up-to-date technological means.11
Different Approaches to Big History
During the reemergence of big history, a number of different approaches have been pursued. Scientists such as Eric Chaisson have placed great emphasis on natural science and, consequently, on the importance of energy for the emergence and continued existence of a great variety of forms of complexity, ranging from stars to human beings. Historians such as David Christian and Cynthia Brown (2007) have sought to combine scientific views and historical accounts within one large narrative with some attempts at rigorous theory that includes major aspects of Chaisson’s work. Currently, the trend appears to be that all these approaches are converging into one single approach. This means that among big historians worldwide a large degree of agreement exists today about the major trends in history. This remarkable situation may have been caused by the fact that looking at history at the largest possible scale has suddenly rendered these trends and patterns visible, while they remained obscured as long as scholars were only studying more limited portions of history.
Big History and Religious Views
Because big history and traditional origin stories provide different answers to the same fundamental question of how everything has become the way it is now, a lively discussion is now taking place between proponents of these two different approaches to understanding the past. This has led to some interesting publications, including several by small teams of US scholars: one New Age-influenced book by the mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme and the cultural historian and eco-theologian Thomas Berry (Swimme and Berry 1992); another by the astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez and the intelligent design advocate Jay Richards, in which they argue that our planet is so exceptionally well placed in the cosmos, fine-tuned for life as well as for observing our exceptional position, that it constitutes evidence for intelligent design (Gonzalez and Richards 2004); and an edited volume by the scientist-theologian Cheryl Genet, the astronomer Russell Genet, and others, which features contributions from a range of writers including priests, historians and astronomers (Genet et al. 2009).
From its own theological perspective, the Vatican has also actively fostered such discussions within its Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the body formerly directed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). As early as 1952, Pope Pius II declared that the big bang proved the existence of God (Pius II 1952). Since that time, discussions about these themes have been held at the Vatican, perhaps most notably in 2008, when the academy organized a Plenary Session on Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life that featured world-famous scientists including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Vera Rubin, Christian de Duve, Yves Coppens, and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, who all explained modern scientific views (and who each, during the meeting, received the Pope’s blessing). Through such efforts, the Vatican’s motivation seems to be to explore where, in this modern scientific account, there may still be room for God.12
A final example of this development may be found in the fact that my big history Twitter account, on which I post news of developments in science that seem relevant for big history, is followed by a considerable number of fundamentalist Protestants in the United States, including for a while Rick Warren, the pastor who played a starring role in the inauguration of US president Barack Obama in 2009. Perhaps they wish to be kept updated to position themselves in this ongoing discussion. In any case, such interest points to a partial overlap, as well as some frictions between the proponents of traditional and modern origin stories.
While teaching big history from an academic point of view, however, in my opinion it seems wise to stick to the empirical scientific method and acknowledge the limits of our knowledge thus attained, such as the question of what came before the big bang, because we do not have any empirical evidence for such events. Anyone interested in exploring in religious terms what lies beyond the borders of scientific knowledge should, of course, feel free to do so.
Big History Research
Big history research has not yet been institutionalized as fully as other academic approaches, most notably for lack of sufficient funding. Because big history as a result of its wide-ranging interdisciplinary nature does not yet fit comfortably within any established academic slot where research grants can be obtained, big history scholarship has been limited to the work of a few privileged (usually tenured) academics.
Currently, there are at least three different major research themes. First of all, the discovery and analysis of general patterns characterizing big history as a whole, most notably in terms of energy, complexity and disorder, is pursued mostly by Eric Chaisson, David Christian, the Russian mathematician Sergey Grinchenko (2004; 2007), British scientist Robert Aunger and myself. In the second place, a few scholars are studying larger patterns within big history. This includes, most notably, Christian’s work on collective learning and the chronometric revolution (Christian 2009). In the third place, smaller subjects are being placed within a big history framework. In this genre, increasingly known as “little big histories,” researchers are tracing how their small subject can be understood better in terms of long-term processes, as well as similarities and differences with other processes, by placing it within a big history context. This may sound a little ambitious, but it is important to realize that, for instance, the abundance of chemical elements on the Earth of which everything consists (which thus conditions all “little histories”) has come about as a result of cosmic and geological processes. Recent studies include Jonathan Markley’s work on the history of grass (2009) and Esther Quaedackers’s work-in-progress on why people build the way they do.
The Future of Big History: Opportunities and Constraints
Based on David Christian’s illuminating ideas of what the future may bring for big history (2010), I venture a few bold predictions of my own, knowing full well that things may turn out very differently.
First of all, in the next 20 to 50 years big history approaches may well become common in universities, because increasing numbers of people will experience the physical limits of Earth and its resources while feeling more interconnected than ever before. Only big history provides a coherent academic narrative that helps people to orient themselves in such a situation. As a result, big history could become a standard introductory course for university students and secondary schools in many countries. This development has already started at one institution: Dominican University of California, where Cynthia Brown has been teaching big history since 1994. In the fall of 2010, this university became the first academic institution requiring all incoming freshmen to take a big history course – and then, in 2011, it went on to make big history a multidisciplinary centerpiece for the entire first-year curriculum.13
In addition to the enthusiastic reception of big history courses by students everywhere, signs of these developments can be found in the efforts mentioned above by David Christian, Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin to produce a big history textbook for university survey courses. Furthermore, it augurs well for big history that David Christian was invited to be a keynote speaker at the August 2010 Techonomy conference, where many high-profile US business leaders discussed future challenges, while he also delivered a TED lecture on big history in March 2011 as part of a session hosted by Bill Gates on the Knowledge Revolution, during which the online educational big history project was announced.14
Furthermore, the large patterns that show up in big history are very helpful for constructing scenarios for the future. As a result, the last class session of many big history courses is usually devoted to what the future may bring. A number of scholars, including the Dutch scientist Lucas Reijnders and sociologist Egbert Tellegen, the Australian futurologist Joseph Voros, along with big historians such as Barry Rodrigue and Cynthia Brown, have developed, or are preparing, courses dealing with the big future. I expect that such courses will also become standard over the next several decades. Increasingly, interdisciplinary university courses are addressing the enormous problems that humans will be facing in the immediate future on a planetary scale (see Spier 2009). Some of these courses are directly inspired by big history.
Institutionalizing big history, including research, at universities may prove to be much more difficult, given the stiff resistance from established disciplines in the ongoing struggle for limited university resources. Yet fortunate scholars may be sufficiently well positioned to pursue the big history research agendas mentioned above, most notably establishing a paradigm for big history as well as quantifying all aspects of big history in terms of energy flows and matter consumption, because this is what, in the final analysis, drives everything that has happened, and will happen, in the universe.
Notes
The author thanks Cynthia Brown, David Christian, and Douglas Northrop for their stimulating comments.
1 For a comprehensive overview of big history literature, see http://www.communities.uva.nl/bighistory under Literature (accessed Feb. 2012).
2 Although having enjoyed multidisciplinary education may certainly be helpful for practitioners of big history, it is not an absolute requirement. David Christian, Eric Chaisson, John Mears, Cynthia Brown, and Walter Alvarez, for instance, were trained as academic specialists, while others, such as Siegfried Kutter, Barry Rodrigue, and myself, have multidisciplinary backgrounds. Most important are a wide-ranging curiosity and interest and a willingness to become acquainted with types of academic knowledge that have been produced outside of one’s own discipline.
3 Two, rather random, examples of nineteenth-century specialized naturalists who placed their subject in a large historical perspective include Flower (1891) and Weidman (1898).
4 There may have been similar initiatives that escaped our attention in language areas beyond our reach or by scholars without sufficient access to the internet.
5 Craig Benjamin teaches big history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He edited the October 2009 Forum on Big History, at http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.3/index.html (accessed Feb. 2012).
6 For the Big History Project sponsored by Bill Gates, see http://www.bighistoryproject.com (accessed Feb. 2012).
7 Cosmic Evolution website at https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/splash.html (accessed Feb. 2012).
8 On the Social Evolution and History website – http://old.uchitel-izd.ru/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=51 (accessed Feb. 2012) – many articles can be downloaded for free.
9 Walter Alvarez’s big history webpage is at http://learning.berkeley.edu/alvarez; the interactive time line ChronoZoom can be found at http://chronozoomtimescale.org (both accessed Feb. 2012).
10 Smart and Vidal’s approach is at http://evodevouniverse.com (accessed Feb. 2012).
11 More information on the International Big History Association can be found at http://www.ibhanet.org (accessed Feb. 2012).
12 Pontifical Academy of Sciences website is at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/index.htm; the proceedings of the Plenary Session on Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life can be downloaded athttp://tinyurl.com/yj3jwzy (both accessed Feb. 2012). For Ratzinger’s views, see Ratzinger (1995).
13 This program involves many faculty and a range of big history-infused courses. See http://www.dominican.edu/academics/big-history (accessed Mar. 2012).
14 For the Techonomy conference 2010, see http://techonomy.com (accessed Feb. 2012).
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