From the Big Bang to the Big Crunch: Ultimate World History
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Presented by Craig Benjamin, PhD, AssistantProfessor of History, Grand Valley State University
About the Speaker
A native of Australia, Craig earned his PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney, and moved to Grand Rapids in 2003 to take up his position at GVSU. Dr. Benjamin’s twin areas of academic specialization are ancient Central Asia and world history theory and practice. He is the author and editor of numerous published articles, chapters and books, and teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate history courses at Grand Valley.
About the Event
Meeting Minutes and Commentary for September 13, 2006; #215Announcements
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Presentation
Our topic for today’s meeting was: From the Big Bang to the Big Crunch: Ultimate World History. It was presented by Dr. Craig Benjamin, who is an assistant professor of history at Grand Valley State University. A native of Australia, Craig earned his PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney, and moved to Grand Rapids in 2003 to take up his position at GVSU. Dr. Benjamin’s twin areas of academic specialization are ancient Central Asia and world history theory and practice. He is the author and editor of numerous published articles, chapters and books, and teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate history courses at Grand Valley.
Most traditional history courses are about the study of different individuals, cultures, nations and eras, and of change in the human condition. But by breaking the vast span of history into smaller and smaller fragments, our understanding of the past has become fragmented and almost meaningless. In this presentation on Ultimate World History, Professor Benjamin attempts to construct a more unified account by bringing together many of the answers modern civilization has provided to the great questions from the past into a single coherent narrative. To do this, Ultimate World History looks at the past on the largest possible time scale, beginning with the origins of the universe, of stars and our planet, of life on Earth and the emergence of human beings, before considering the various types of human societies that have existed up to the present day, and the future of our species, planet and universe. Dr. Benjamin provided an insight into the theory and methodology of a new genre of history that attempts to cover the staggering timespan from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch in one interesting evening.
When Ultimate World History, which was first coined as Big History by David Christian—and the name stuck for his semester courses—was first proposed, it was difficult for his colleagues to truly grasp the scope that was being suggested. This was not merely about pushing the historical record back to early European times or other earlier civilizations. Puzzled inquirers would ask: Do you mean looking at Mesopotamia? No! Big History goes to the very beginning—the Big Bang and all that spun out of it! When one first encounters an epic tale of origins starting off with: In the beginning… one naturally thinks of Creation stories. Indeed, our speaker views Big History as a modern Creation story, informed by the best knowledge we have of the universe, the galaxies, our solar system, our planet and all life that has evolved upon it. By the time proto- and modern humans come into the picture, the student’s mind is no longer on her place in a country or thin time frame slice, but her place in the very universe; the birthplace of all that is. Unlike traditional history courses that deal with various conquests, wars and trade routes and such as its primary focus, U. W. History examines the larger themes and great turning points which shaped structures and outcomes. It is not a course that looks at isolated events or even how events within a few centuries are interrelated but about how all of life and pre-life tell us the grandest and most unified story of all.
Professor Benjamin spoke of his own transition from teaching more standard World History courses to Ultimate World History after his encounters with the aforementioned David Christian (who began teaching Big History in 1989) and fellow disciple (so to say), Marnie Hughes Warrington at the Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He imported the teaching methods to Grand Valley State University and has been conducting these exciting courses ever since (for the past three years). With Big History, over 13 billion years of history is examined in 13 weeks! Because major trends can be observed from such a staggering vantage point, one may even posit educated possible outcomes for the future—going all the way to the Big Crunch; the end of the universe itself. One may even entertain theories of serial Bangs and Crunches or multiverses, of which our universe is but one! The reasons for doing Big History are the same as for doing traditional World History courses but on a vastly magnified level. Christian wrote, and Dr. Benjamin echoed, that Big History helps us see familiar aspects of the past in unfamiliar ways. World history does this for nationalistic history, while Big History treats world history in this way in order to clarify the essential nature of it by focusing on the crucial turning points of world history and cultural themes. Professor Benjamin analogized the more conventional approach to World History to that of shining a flashlight beam on tiny pinpricks. Even broader surveys of history at that reductionist level still only provide snapshots. Continuity is largely lost. While moments get illuminated, the surrounding regions are yet cast into darkness. Big History provides a relationship between the individual, culture, politics and geography as well as deeper and larger relationships with the very cosmos.
The scales involve those of cosmology ultimately and take in so many other disciplines that originally experts from such fields as astronomy, biology, geology, anthropology and ancient history were recruited to help flesh out the courses. Dr. Benjamin believes this would still be the optimal approach for instruction in such a multi-disciplinary course. Because of its sweep and scale and its attempt to embrace all origins, Big History has been referred to as tailor made for historians who enjoy an intellectual rush. Some who early on examined the course structure were appalled to discover that humans did not even come into the picture until the 4th or 5th week out of thirteen! But when one looks at the big picture as is done through the lens of not only geological, but cosmological time, devoting 8 or 9 weeks to our species is still tremendously skewed toward humankind. A way of better comprehending the tiny speck of the human contribution to Deep Time is to condense 13 billion years of cosmological history into 13 years. At this ratio, the Earth itself would have existed for the last five years. Large, multi-cellular organisms would have been around for only seven months. The asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs; a contingent event that is believed to have allowed a group of tiny insectivorous beings to flourish, grow and later produce a lineage that would eventually evolve into the hominids that humans arose from, would have landed only three weeks ago. Bipedal apes (early hominids) would have existed for just three days. Our own species would have come into being for only the last 53 minutes (of the last 13 years, remember) and agricultural societies would not have been seen until 5 minutes ago! The entire recorded history of civilization would be compressed into the last three minutes. And (how’s this for humbling?) modern industrial societies would have sprung up only within the last six seconds!
Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the executive director of the Skeptics Society, often refers to humans as story telling and pattern seeking/seeing apes. With this thought in mind, the ultimate Creation story that Big History offers provides us with the most epic story to tell of all—and one that encompasses the grandest sweep of patterns imaginable. Dr. Christian has written that in his own course, by the time humans are finally in the picture, he usually inserts a lecture on differences between history and science and the nature of truth itself before going on. The underlying theme of the inserted lecture is to examine how we can know whether or not to trust a particular creation story and to be able to discern the different basis for each. After this insertion, Big history turns to the Paleolithic (old stone) era, the origin of agriculture, the emergence of the first cities and states, the evolution of agrarian civilizations and eventually the emergence of the modern industrial world. Dr. Christian’s presentations for possible futures include both dystopian and utopian potentialities. Connections are made for how agriculture ushers in a more fixed or rooted society with wholly new needs, challenges and opportunities. Such a society requires a leadership base, protection against outsiders, a system of exchange and governance, different classes, artisans, warriors, mercantile, etc. Dr. Benjamin noted that while this progression leads to the building of powerful civilizations, it produces a more sedentary one as well with other consequences coming into play that their predecessors did not have to deal with.
Professor Benjamin noted the effect that travel has on a person. We learn by venturing away from the familiar and when we return, after absorbing different ideas and cultures and ways of life, we are filled with fresh perspectives. We see the old familiar surroundings with different eyes and may make new connections as we view life in a wider context as we are now able to make comparisons; seeing both similarities and what makes each unique. The idea in teaching Big History is to do this on a grand scale where the trip takes in the scope of vast time and space before circling back in on our more familiar modern times. This approach utilizes perspectives, comparisons and framing. Perspectives involve seeing things in their own contexts and how nothing exists in isolation. Regarding the US, even the most provincial of Americans encounters others coming here from other lands, bringing their own cultural perspectives and ways. We may explore where they come from and how life is in their country and why their culture formed in the way it did, as well as the changes that occur for both the immigrant and the land immigrated to when cultures intermingle. Comparisons are made about both similarities and differences. The surest way to tend and feed prejudices and animosities is to fail to see what links all people. However, different groups find different ways to meet their common needs and make their way in the world and these should be examined too, as well as the underlying reasons for why different societies came to be shaped as they were. Framing creates sharper distinctions, where what is unique to different cultures comes into sharper focus.
While traditional history courses may look at trade routes and exploration that brings different peoples together or has groups encountering different types of landscapes with varying resources and exploitable fauna and flora, Big History also examines paleolithic migrations that are based on comparisons of mitochondrial DNA. Incidentally, one of the Intelligent Design arguments is based on how something as complex as the cell could not have formed its various parts by an evolutionary (naturalistic) route but could only have come about as a sudden creation by an Intelligent Designer (since they do not factor in alien beings, they of course mean Yahweh). Actually the cell is an excellent example of how nature constructs complexity, since its organelles were once independent organisms that came together to produce the more complex cell. Mitochondria are the energy plants of the cell and there is no design sense in having two (nuclear and mitochondrial) of them in the same cell body; the one is a vestige of an earlier entity. Mitochondrial DNA is traced back only on the female side. This is why one may read about what has been called Mitochondrial Eve—or the female progenitor of our species, based on this form of tracing back in the DNA book of life. Indeed, the religious appellation (Eve) notwithstanding, that our lineage may be traced back through evolutionary history (not to mention that we share an extraordinarily similar genetic number and sequence with creatures going way down the evolutionary scale) alone shows our common descent with modification—or evolution—and how all life is unified by common ancestry, not separately and specially created.
The Big History approach of traveling not just to different lands on the Earth but to different timescales and through space itself calls into play very different perspectives. Seeing Earth from space may trigger a strong perceptual paradigm shift. This writer, during this portion of Dr. Benjamin’s presentation that examined our planet from space and how we regard it and the life sustained on it from this vantage point, thought of the late Carl Sagan and his book: Pale Blue Dot as well as the film by director Lawrence Kasdan: Grand Canyon. The first Arab astronaut, Sultan Bin Salman Al-Saud (who flew in the ’85 Discovery flight) gave this reaction to seeing the Earth from space: The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth. End quote. The things that we share in and on our fragile world are far more valuable than those which divide us. Dearth and dear are related words—things that are rarer are more precious. Our planet is the only known (and probably the only one we are capable of ever knowing) to contain complex, sentient life in the Universe. It is fragile and isolated in space and our only home. When seen in this way, life is not as easily expendable as it is when we fail to embrace this perspective and engage in wars and divide people into artificial groups; where some more worthy of our attention and concern than others.
The galaxy that Earth inhabits, the Milky Way may be considered our stellar city. We are but one planet circling billions of suns/stars in this galaxy. Not only are we not the center of everything, but rather johnny-come-latelys in geological and evolutionary time, but, also, our Earth is not the center of a system (geocentrism) but rather one of several ringing the Sun. The sun is an average size, middle aged ball of gas that is, again, but one of billions in the galaxy and it has no central nor special location, but is rather in just one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Our stellar city, too, is but one of countless other galaxies and is neither specially located nor of special prominence relative to any other one. The Andromeda galaxy, for instance, dwarfs ours. Galaxies must be of a certain size, however, to contain sufficient stars to be born and to die. This stellar death causes nuclear reactions that transforms helium and hydrogen to be forged into the stuff of life, and then to be flung into space to seed a planet such as our third one from our own Sun. Our Earth, far from being a ready made Garden of Eden was a violent and noxious place for a great swath of time and even after things settled down a good deal, could only support anaerobic life. Sufficient quantities of plantlife had to come into being to give off oxygen as a waste product before air breathing beings from the animal kingdom could exist. Multi-cellular life was slow to emerge and not until the Cambrian explosion did Earth see a wide assortment of body plans and an emergence of more complex life forms. Mass extinctions occurred long before humans came into existence to dream up Deluge stories that tell of life being wiped out through the agency of an angry god because of Its sinful people. And as noted earlier, were it not for the demise of the true rulers of the Earth’s air, land and seas-—the dinosaurs—stemming from a bollide from space at the C-T boundary some 65 million years ago, large mammals would not have emerged, including our own ancestors. We would not have come to be.
All of this is just one tale among trillions in the universe, a universe that Einstein said had no edge and no center. S. Hawking (and others) have used the example of a balloon with tiny dots affixed to its surface to help us understand how the universe expands. Each dot on the balloon moves away from each of its fellow dots instead of flying out from a central source point. Observations by E. Hubble regarding the red shift in the light spectrum of the light from galaxies showed how they were all moving away from each other and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation further supported these observations and the Hot Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin and stellar evolution. All this shows, once apprehended, that we are part of something inconceivably larger than ourselves. This writer notes the common human need to believe in something bigger and more powerful than us and that has no limits. When humans could only dimly see all of reality as a few tribes sprinkled upon a flat plane with only two main celestial bodies, both of which they believed to orbit the Earth, not just our moon, then a god was required to fill the bill. While the biblical creation tales (there is more than one in Genesis and they conflict with each other) are satisfactory for many, the scientific account is a far more spectacular one and one that unites rather than divides. Our very bodies contain the evidence of evolutionary descent linking us with every surviving life form that has ever existed on our planet. It also contains the materials of forged elements from stars in their death throes from beyond our planet, and those stars were in an enormous galaxy (100,000 light years in diameter!) that is related through cosmological evolution to all other galaxies and all other materials and energies in the universe. Now there’s something grander, more powerful and infinitely more wondrous to contemplate as a modern creation story!
It is incredible to me that a mythic tale about a talking snake and a frugivorous woman can be more interesting to anyone than the stunning truths of nature and its laws, forces and manifestations. As noted, while creation myths place humans at the center of everything, they (certainly the Judeo-Christian one) also are divisive. Man is wholly different from woman; tribes are disparate to the point where genocides are fine and dandy; humans are special and separate creations from all other animals—and each animal kind is created separately from all the rest; the Earth is not linked to the rest of space, etc. Space is a small place anyway in this sort of tale and even heaven may be attained by a good sized ladder (just be careful not to bump your head on the inverted bowl-shaped firmament!) Neither Professor David Christian in the writings I encountered nor Dr. Craig Benjamin in his presentation to us, discussed the relative paucity or merits of the various creation stories specifically, so these comments should not be associated with them. In fact, what Professor Benjamin did say was that he pushes absolutely no belief system or personal interpretation of the evidence provided. By the end of the 13-week course in Ultimate World History the student will have no idea what his own religious beliefs are.
His course is one in which the student does not require a prior college level historical background to be enrolled in it. In Western Michigan, he found that there is not only an impoverished grounding in large scale historical understanding among his students, but even a rudimentary comprehension of evolution (biological, let alone cosmological), so his course exposes many of them to all sorts of ideas that they were innocent of. He also mentioned that even though it is a Freshman course, he has older students as well who may have procrastinated until later, and only in order to meet their educational requirements. He noted that his own observation was that the older students were, in general, more conservative and less open to new ways of thinking about the matters that come up in the course than the younger students. For the older students, countenancing evolution and a naturalistic unfolding of processes throughout time and space, were concepts they came to with resistance. He also found that many of the West Michigan students he encountered already felt that they had all the answers to the Big Questions (based on their faith training). For many, the college experience was the first time away from their insular community and home that had a common worldview. Faith tenets were tested, often for the first time. The purpose of the class was not to tear down preconceived notions but to expose the students to new ideas and ways of approaching them. Some would find their faith shaken but others would find that they could articulate their beliefs for themselves better and more thoughtfully and have more to base them on.
In taking this exceptionally long view, one discovers how bands and tribes gave way to chiefdoms and states with religion developing as a principle social institution to accentuate amity and attenuate enmity. But this religious codification of societal rules was still immersed in the older tribal traditions. Outgroups were still fit subjects for slaughter or at best to not include within the parameters of reciprocal altruism, good conduct or regard that one was to give to one’s own group. And we still see this today. Religious ideology still fuels much of the global animosities one sees, especially when it is tied to nationalism—the tribe writ large.
Michael Shermer in his recent book Why Darwin Matters (Times Books) wrote, in response to the human capacity to generate spiritual experiences: People have and share such spiritual experiences, and impart larger significances to them, because we have a cortex large enough to conceive of such transcendent notions, and an imagination creative enough to concoct fantastic narratives. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made—our genes, proteins, memories, and personalities—then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of our cosmos. End quote. He writes later at how moved he is when dimly viewing the Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. He is moved by its haunting beauty but even more so because he knows (is informed by science) that the photons of light landing on his retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the plains of Africa. Sagan was a master at giving a sense of awe and wonder to what science tells us—a sort of secular spiritualism—and Dawkins too, most strikingly in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, was able to show that rather than reducing the mysteries that drive religious ideology to a dreary listing of facts, science expands those mysteries to ever deeper quests and intellectual adventures. As just one minor example this writer recalls from that book—while religious thinking finds something special in the rainbow as a small colorful arc in the sky—a message of hope from the deity, Dawkins commented on how the full spectral frequency range actually extends deep into space and how humans are able to (unaided) perceive only a tiny slice of the spectrum that other, supposedly lesser, beings experience. If it was all made for us, should we not experience the infrared and ultraviolet that guides the snake and the insect? But science and technology allow us to not only see the environment and contemplate the universe in ways our ancestors could not, but even to peek into the metabolic workings of our brains, to see thought, or the universe within each human skull—and since there are roughly the same number of neurons composing the brain as there are stars in our galaxy—this comparison is not too forced.
Regarding the rhythms of societal lifespans it may be noted that often societies that fall or weaken suffer from a sense of exceptionalism as a harbinger of their downward cycle, whether they believe a deity grants special blessings upon them or that they are of a superior national type that is somehow invulnerable to what has befallen other civilizations. If they can perceive the commonalities and how certain things tend to universally cause certain outcomes, they might avoid such pitfalls. Kevin Phillips’ book American Theocracy explores (among other things) how the historical blinders of exceptionalist hubris has led to the downfall of different cultures at different times.
Some students, Dr. Benkamin told us, would initially complain about all the science involved in the course; some even took a history course to avoid the science! But one cannot investigate cosmology or how geography affects human migration patterns or evolution, or plate tectonics, etc. without employing the explanatory power and findings of science. The course gets to human history quickly but the whole point of Ultimate World History is that nothing occurs in isolation—all is connected and that what comes before is pertinent to what next transpired. The late Stephen Jay Gould lamented the intellectual dichotomy seen where people were enthusiastic about genealogy but were turned off to ultimate genealogy—evolution! As noted earlier, this pulling back to the ultimate beginning of timespace and then coming to land again on once familiar territory creates immense perceptual changes. American history becomes conceptually linked to European history which links to other continents which formed from natural processes on a dynamic planet that formed via cosmological processes that are seen throughout the galaxy and other galaxies and celestial bodies in the universe. To think that as we peer back further in space we are simultaneously gazing back into deep time as well is an almost dizzying thought. To know that we are all part of this infinite fabric of time and space is staggering. Even local events begin to take on a slightly different color palette after such a conceptual journey.
Because human history is so complex, no neat general laws have been generated. But the complexity of history itself has been studied and compared to other things. It follows that the more complex an entity is, the greater the energy flows that are needed to maintain it. This may be used as a way of ranking entities by their level of complexity. Dr. Benjamin discussed the work of Eric Chaisson (the author of Cosmic Evolution) where Chaisson showed the amount of energy (in ergs) that flows through a given mass (in grams) in a given time (in seconds) and how things may thereby be ranked as to their complexity. The flow of energy he depicted was: A galaxy (such as the Milky Way) is represented as 0.5; stars (such as our Sun): 2; planets (the surface of the Earth) achieve a value of 7.5; animals (the human body): 20,000; brains (human cranium): 150,000; and society (modern culture): 500,000. This may seem counterintuitive. The explanation given regarding the disparity between the Sun and the Earth’s surface was that the mass of the Sun is so much greater than the mass of the Earth’s surface regions that this more than compensates, so that the density of energy flows at the Earth’s surface turns out to be greater than the density of energy flows for the Sun as a whole. Since space itself is mostly empty, by this view, it has a very low complexity value as a whole. This all comes to show the extraordinary complexity of human societies. Indeed, as Professor Christian suggested: ...perhaps modern human society counts as the most complex thing that the universe can create! That puts humans back near the centre of the universe, where they were in Ptolemy’s universe. End quote.
Complexity, however, has its trade offs. The more complex something is, the more difficult it is to make and maintain and the rarer it is and shorter its normal life span is. Individuals and societies will expire before simpler systems such as the Earth and Sun will, accordingly.
Another startling declaration that Dr. Benjamin made was that world populations have increased 1,000 times in 10,000 years, which has caused the total energy consumption to have increased by at least 60,000 times. Some critics of Ultimate World History are concerned that too much detail will be lost with such an expansive overview. But while Professor Benjamin allows that indeed some specifics go out of focus, others come into view—the larger underpinnings of events can now be seen, such as the significance of population pressures. Our increased ability to extract energy allowed humans to multiply at increasing rates. John Mc Neill observed: We have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before 1900… End quote. Our imprint extends to other consequences from energy extraction and human growth and expansion, however. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment states: Over the past few hundred years, humans have increased the species extinction rate by as much as 1,000 times over background rates typical over the planet’s history (medium certainty). Some 10-30% of mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction (medium to high certainty). End quote. Extinction rates of other species are currently as high as they have been during the five or six periods of the most rapid extinction during the last billion years. Dr. Christian contends that controlling energy (by humans) counts as one of the dominant shaping forces in world history. He also notes that the total amount of energy mobilized by our species as a whole has increased by a factor of almost 50,000 times. 25%- 40% of all energy that enters the biosphere through photosynthesis is in human hands; under human control. The extraction of energy and resources increased our ability to settle nearly all parts of the world. Interrelationships became more complex as a result. Larger concentrations of human populations caused the formation of cities, government, etc. Social relationships grew in complexity far beyond the tribal order that humans were initially adapted for throughout most of our ancestry. The field of study sometimes called evolutionary psychology explores the differential pace of societal change relative to our still operating to a large extent within the cognitive and sociological parameters of our early ancestors.
Big (or Ultimate World) History examines how organisms adapt to the environment and how the human organism has transcended the constraints of fellow beings on the planet. Natural selection has operated on all life forms to optimize environmental fitness. Learning, however, is an exceedingly faster process but there is no genetic transmission and its power decreases when spread into larger scales; it is not cumulative as it is with genetic change. Each individual has to start from scratch. Humans, however, have made use (in relatively recent times) of what is called collective learning, which increases the ability to share and store information in the culture of the community. It combines the advantages of speed from learning, with the faithful recording of successful experiments—as is seen with natural selection. Collective learning, then, becomes the most powerful adaptive mechanism on the planet (and perhaps the galaxy).
Big History looks at these three factors as pertinent to the human career on Earth and in history: Social Complexity—which is what makes us unique; Energy Flows—from the environment, that are used to sustain our rich complexity; and Collective Learning, discussed above, which allows us to constantly find new sources of energy and is a way to build upon past knowledge and experience. Big History regards major themes and turning points at its level of focus, more so than individual events seen up close. Some of the Major Turning Points it deals with include: Human Origins—the ape that spoke—our spoken language communication, which became written and later still digitized, allows us to uniquely store and preserve information and build upon the cumulative knowledge of those who have come before us. It also frees of time and place constraints, where one does not have to hear a spoken message directly from the source at one time in history, but can research the thoughts of those spanning great expanses of human history. Another major turning point was the Paleolithic, with collective learning and the ability to increase control of energy. Stone and bone tools were present and clothing with stitching, ritual artifacts, paint, and evidence of abstract thinking appear; Agriculture, where humans increased the diversion of biospheric energy to human use; Cities and States, which brought about an increase in social complexity and mobilization of energy; The Columbian Exchange: This is where collective learning goes global; and The Modern Era, which saw a sharp acceleration in collective learning, human control of energy, complexity and… perhaps not too late, a renewed awareness of the fragility of, and our ultimate dependence upon, the Earth.
Three linked themes for World History are: Social Complexity; Intellectual Networks (collective learning provides the mechanism that makes increasing complexity possible); and Increasing Control of the Biosphere’s energy and resources. One may wish to check out Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, for further reading into how differential abilities to capture energy flows results in different societal structures. His book: Guns, Germs and Steel also examines the differences in human societies—how they developed—as a result of the intrinsic resources available. Some had no horses to use as draft animals or for warfare advantage, etc.; some had no mineral resources to produce steel; some developed no immunity to the spread of germs that came with invaders (or other travelers), had different agricultural circumstances, and so on.
Dr. Benjamin’s approach is to make inquiries to get students to contemplate why events transpired as they did; to explore the connections and influences and then to be so armed as to better examine deeper patterns. Some (just a sampling) such queries include: What are the origins of modern industrial society? Why did the origins of modern revolution take a European form? How has the 20th Century differed from all previous periods in human history? Does a study of history on this timescale help us predict the future? The professor encourages all students to participate and creates an environment where they feel free to share their ideas, without fear of ridicule. He guides more than asserts, so that together they travel the intellectual roads of time and place, both remote and familiar. The approach of examining history from the long perspectives used in Ultimate World History contrasted to the more conventional method is somewhat like the difference between being a tiny mite on a gigantic recumbent figure—where the long view causes one to see great patterns, the rise and fall of the chest in respiration, how the limbs are articulated and connected to the trunk and how systems are interconnected throughout—as opposed to picking out a single feature—the nose or finger, for examples, and focusing on what roles these alone played in the being’s history. Returning from this Lilliputian metaphor, Big History does not see the rise and fall of great civilizations as discrete events but rather as rhythms containing discernible patterns that traverse temporal boundaries.
Our presenter decried postmodernism, saying it was like viewing the past without any coherence; all is fragmented without the pieces adding up to anything. It is all about generating separate stories of individuals without showing any connectivity so that all deeper meaning is lost. Using the map idea to help us visualize the rippling out of thought that is implicit in Big History, we looked at how we as individuals fit into our neighborhoods and how these fit into Grand Rapids and outlying communities, what shaped the different characteristics of each area, and how Michigan’s second largest city came to be and how our state is almost eponymously known for its surrounding waters (The Great Lakes State), and the process that brought about these unique features (primarily glaciation), and then how the north and midwest fits into the national character and history and then to erase the artificial boundary lines so as to see the topography and geography of the entire continent in a new perspective. To then move back to processes that broke up the supercontinent (sometimes called Pangea) into its parts and how the collisions formed mountain ranges and the edges betray the past unions and trysts and divorces of the landmasses as well as mineral and vegetation characteristics and how land bridges and both animal and mineral allotment differences figured in on early human events, transactions and warfare… and so on up to and beyond the almost god’s eye view of space that the Hubble telescope has given us.
One mental image Dr. Benjamin gave us to better understand distances (we are still cognitively not so far removed from our Pleistocene ancestors who had a highly provincial and local framework for viewing the universe) involved flying in a standard passenger jet plane and how it might take one about five hours to cross the US. If the same plane and its speed could operate in space, it would take twenty years to reach the Sun (the Sun is eight light minutes from the Earth, so if the Sun were to suddenly wink out of existence, we would still perceive its light until eight minutes had elapsed), and if we were to take a flight to the next nearest star, it would take us five million years (this is among the problems in thinking that we are visited regularly by extraterrestrial beings, especially since the main goal of the incredible journeys upon reaching Earth seems to be simply to mutilate a bovine creature, leave a circular depression in farmer Jack’s field or insert a probe into a human anus here and then head back again to a planet that would possibly have long since have ceased to exist before the return trip had concluded). As soon as we get to such magnitudes of space we simply must incorporate time, as both are fused and this fusion becomes increasingly more significant as we attain something of the vast outside our planetary boundaries.
Human history is unpredictable and quirky and is not subject to simplistic laws. However, beneath the astonishing complexity there are large trends which can be used to help us make sense of the that complexity. These large trends may be best apprehended when using the long (spatial) and deep (temporal) view that Big History provides. David Christian stated: It is my belief that world history can understand the unique details of human history only if it also keeps its eye on the deeper patterns. End quote. Larger trends in history are linked to the patterns of the universe as a whole. Big History illuminates world history as world history can illuminate history at more conventional scales of the nation state or region or area.
After taking a course in Ultimate World History one has overriding reasons to think globally and to see how one’s actions affect events. One is equipped with deeper understandings so as to leave the world a better place. Each of us fits into a scheme of infinite proportions played out ipon a stage beyond full human comprehension.
Secretary: Charles LaRue
