Big History as the Study of All Existence

* Article: Rodrigue, Barry H. 2022. “Big History—A Study of All Existence: Part 1: A World Connected.” Journal of Big History 5 (1): 1-47.DOI | doi

URL = https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582

"This is a brief overview of the field of big history and my personal reflection on its significance."

Excerpts

The Great Drying

Barry Rodriguez:

"Then another period of aridification began 8000 years ago—the Great Drying. In North Africa, wetlands evaporated as grazing herds compounded the climate problem. Prairies degraded into Sahara dunes. Some adapted to desert life, such as the Bedouin, but oth-ers relocated to new areas of water: the Mediterranean, Lake Chad, and the Niger and Nile rivers."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)

The Prehistory of Big History

Barry Rodriguez:

"Far from just a European phenomenon, the new global engagement had grown from the silk-road system into a planetary sphere of interaction that is more properly designated as ‘global civilization.’ Neo-Confucian scholar Miura Baien (1723–1789) merged Japanese concepts with Chinese and Euro-pean ideas to develop a new vision of the world and existence, as in his masterpiece, 玄語 [D e e p Wo r d s]. Miura’s work has been compared favourably with the later studies of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Anthropologist Keiji Iwata, for example, sees Miura’s work as an expression of Eastern cosmology / existence, with Humboldt’s studies expressing Western perspectives. Humboldt had studied at the University of Göttingen, where his professors sought to unify knowledge and deploy it so individuals, society, and nature could coexist. His five-volume study, were big histories, since they began with cosmology (as it was then understood) and subsequently linked in the human genealogy.”

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)

The evolution of 19th-20th Century Cross-Disciplinary Studies

Barry Rodriguez:

"Despite growing institutional resistance to universal models of knowledge, holistic frameworks continued. Geographer Peter Kropotkin’s Siberian natural his-tory fieldwork in the 1860s and 1870s contributed to his theories of global social responsibility, as in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. The next year, biogeographer Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin, released his syn-thesis of existence, Man’s Place in the Universe. Such macro-thinking percolated widely through popular and ecumenical culture. Author H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920) was updated with new scientific breakthroughs over the next fifty years. Engineer Hiram Maxim composed Life’s Place in the Cosmos (1933), which considered the existence of life beyond Earth, based on the latest scientific knowledge. Scholar, artist, and Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore encouraged the global-networking of science and philosophy, ideas that he collated in Bengali essays as विश्व परिचय हैै [Our Uni-verse] in 1937. Christian scholars like palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and astronomer Georges Lemaître advanced science and how it related to the human condition.15By the 1940s, universal notions entered primary education, as in Maria Montessori’s pedagogy of cosmic education, adopted from an English model and developed while she was interned in India during the Second World War.16 Similarly, ecologist Kinji Imanishi composed his thoughts of life’s commonalities in 生物の世界 [The World of Living Things] in 1941, on the eve of his military deployment. He survived the war and expanded on his concept of 自然学shizengaku or ‘deep nature thought’ as an integrated view of ex-istence.17Each rendition incorporated the latest discoveries of science and considered how they could be applied to society. In industry, cross-disciplines arose in new fields like astro/physics and bio/chemistry. The scientific and technological ferment of the World War and Cold War eras led to new data, which required ever-larger frames of reference, from aerospace and oceanography to medicine and computer science. It was a time of new frontiers. In 1949, the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) set up a commission to assemble a history of all humankind, producing a multilingual, multi-volume series: The History of Humanity (1966, 2009).

The Space Race also galvanized efforts for new interdisciplinary discoveries, while so-cio-historical scholarship struggled to understand the post- colonial world through its many disciplinary and social lenses. Soviet scholars developed an integrated pedagogy that spanned the natural and social sciences.

Astrophysicist Josif Shklovsky wrote an early book of this new view of existence: Вселенная. Жизнь. Разум. [Universe, Life, Intelligence] in 1962. Four years later, an expanded English adaptation was produced with US astrophysicist Carl Sagan as Intelligent Life in the Universe. This international co-operation was not accidental as a similar macro-study had developed in the Unit-ed States. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Harlow Shapley had promoted cosmography, a study that examined the interlinked nature of stars, the Earth, life, and humanity at the Harvard College Observatory. In the 1960s, Carl Sagan offered his rendition, and, in 1974, astrophysicists George Field and Eric Chaisson began a course on cosmic evolution.

Likewise, in the 1970s, astrophysicist G. Siegfried Kutter integrated celestial studies with studies of life and society as part of the cutting-edge, interdisciplinary course structure at Evergreen State College. His synthesis appeared as Universe and Life: Origins and Evolution.

Astronomer Tom Bania taught Cosmic Evolution: Search for Extraterrestrial Life at Boston University, while Earth scientist Michael Rampino had organized The History of the Universe from the Big Bang to the Big Brain at New York University.

This wide thinking reflected the high-stakes competition going on among the respective allies of the Soviet Union and the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of these scholars began to move beyond the technological rivalry of the times in order to look at the possibilities of peaceful coexistence, not just with other humans but with our habitat and other lifeforms. This progress toward assembling a big pic-ture of our place in the vast scheme of things emerged in other parts of the world as well. Hubert Reeves studied physics with developers of the atomic bomb and became an astrophysicist at France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique. He brought his studies down to Earth in popular books like Patience dans l’azure: l’évolution cosmique [Patience in the Azure: Cosmic Evolution] in 1981, where he explained the stars, along with the significance of water, Einstein’s dog, and jazz. His work has become a main-stay of the environmental movement and a youthful audience seeking to change the world.

In the 1980s, Chinese scholars, including the celebrated rocket scientist, Qian Xuesen, began studies of complexity. They developed a paradigm that served as a meta-synthesis of scientific knowledge, 开放的复杂巨系统 [The Open Complex Giant System].

Such global awareness took place in many fields and began to produce a wealth of integrated knowledge about our existence. Other works included bio-geologist Preston Cloud’s Cosmos, Earth and Man (1978) and astro-physicist Erich Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe (1980). Mathematician Antonio Vélez in Colombia began a trilogy on universal history with Del Big Bang al Homo sapiens [From the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens] in 1984.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis developed a universal view of existence via microbiology, which led her into collaboration with chemist James Lovelock to study self-regulating global systems; Lovelock’s friend and neighbour, author William Golding, helped to name this the Gaia hypothesis. 26 Some works became very popular. The television series, Cosmos, with Carl Sagan (1980), was viewed by over 500 million people in sixty countries, while the book, A Brief History of Time (1988), by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, sold over nine million copies.27This search for meaning also found expression in various faith traditions. Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti generated an understanding that embraced humanity, nature, and the cosmos, as in his Beginnings of Learning (1975). A global movement of ‘Teilhard as-sociations’ sprang up, based on Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking in Le phénomène humain (1955). One of these activists, cultural historian Thomas Berry, expounded a ‘new story’ that integrated a global narrative of hu-manity and nature, as in his The Dream of the Earth (1988). Both Krishnamurti and Berry set up organizations that developed education programs, multimedia productions, and converged with the new science and scholarship in the global articulation of holistic thinking.

Parallel to this activity, social and economic studies coalesced with international relations in an effort to comprehend the many faces of global development. Economic historian Andre Gunder Frank moved global studies outside Cold War frameworks to describe a one-world system, while social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein envisioned interlocking subsystems. This socio-historical work began to merge with larger paradigms, as when economist Graeme Snooks moved his Theory of Global Dynamic Systems to encompass Earth history."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)

Macro-Sociology as Big History Approach in China

Barry Rodriguez:

"Physical scientists still use the term, cosmic evolution, while the other designations remain in use, such as open complex giant system among cybernetic scholars in China and the story among progressive Chris-tians, or under no special name whatsoever, when seen as just an extension of a discipline, as in mac-ro-sociology. This holistic trajectory continued, arising elsewhere quite independently and often acquiring regional identities. In China, some social scientists began to adapt ideas for an integrated view of history from their physical science colleagues. Historians Qi Tao (1991) and Cheng Ming (1994) each argued for interdisciplinary and holistic interpretations of ancient history. In 1996, science historians Dong Guangbi and Tian Kunyu published The Origin of Heaven and Earth—Natural Evolution and the Birth of Life. Three years later, historian Ma Shili, at Nanka University, extended his text on world history to include cosmic origins and the evolution of life. In 2000, historian Huang Liuzhu called for uniting natural science and human histories, urging his colleagues at Northwest University (Xi’an, Shaanxi) to initiate such a program."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)