Abstract
The interdisciplinary field called ‘Big History’ has grown tremendously in the last few decades. The number of classes taught, the number of countries with Big History classes and numbers of classes, the number of self-identified Big Historians, and the number of Big History publications all increase annually. Yet, this field seems to have made little impact on sociology, even in those subfields in which it would make the most sense: the interrelated fields of global sociology, historical sociology, and macrosociology, plus environmental sociology. Nevertheless, Big History has much to offer sociologists. Big History is a field that ‘seeks to understand the integrated history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods’ (Kutter, I, p. 24). Although the subject of sociology, ‘humanity’, seems to constitute only one-quarter of the now-traditional topical sequence, the real usefulness of Big History for sociologists is how it sets humanity as a whole within its (much) larger environment.
The three-volume From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology provides a comprehensive introduction to this field. Each volume develops a specific theme. The first introduces Big History and related issues, the second focuses on Big History education and art, and the third uses the ‘big’ past to speculate about the human future. In addition, the editors organize each volume by sub-themes.
In their overall introduction, editors Rodrigue, Grinin, and Korotayev trace the history of using intellectual synthesis to think on a universal scale and how the development of knowledge occurring in the natural and social sciences after the Scientific Revolution accelerated such big thinking into the twentieth century. They also trace how the discipline of Big History itself came together between 1980 and 2010. They deplore the ‘compartmentalization’ of knowledge and argue for a ‘syncretic worldview’. Early in the first volume, Kutter provides the basic fourfold structure of Big History for those unfamiliar with it. He thus lays out the basic knowledge – a history of the universe, the formation of this planet, the development and evolution of life, and the biological and social evolution of humans – to understand the anthology as a whole. The rest of the volume introduces basic issues and applications of Big History. There are articles on understanding geological history, the nature of time, what existed before the Big Bang, evolutionary thinking on multiple scales, systems theories, links between geology and biology, and others, plus articles applying Big History thinking to ‘smaller’ issues, such as the city of Jericho, Tiananmen Square, and Asian philosophies.
There are a few personal accounts in the first volume, and many more in the second, which addresses Big History education across the world, plus its application to the arts. This volume stays close to its charge; the contributions reflect a variety of topics, countries, and experiences. The geographic coverage is tilted to the global North, paralleling the global structure of academe, but the editors clearly worked to address education and art around the world. There are many personal accounts of teaching Big History, some for primary school, others for universities, and a few advice pieces for first-time Big History instructors. At least three authors raise the simultaneously epistemological and pedagogical issue of teaching something based on scientific evidence to deeply religious students. Administrative support for teaching Big History clearly varies greatly across institutions. Nevertheless, all are glowing about how students respond to Big History, especially how integrative and synthetic it is. There are also many personal pieces on artistic and other applications of Big History thinking: on place, Qigong, collective learning, tree carving, Indian and Somalian archeology, Caucasian embroidery, and others.
The third volume again operates at multiple scales and offers a variety of topics, ending with speculations on the future. Some articles are still human-historical, such as the origins of China in the Paleolithic or the origins of the Anthropocene in the Little Ice Age. There are, again, personal accounts, while others develop analyses of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself. The last four articles focus on humanity’s future in the cosmos. One reinterprets the ‘Fermi paradox’ (since Earth cannot be the only planet with life in the universe, in 1959 the famous physicist Enrico Fermi asked some friends, ‘Where is everyone?’) as an ‘astrosociological’ paradox, a creative characterization. Two entries ponder the potential existence of, and social implications of, interstellar, and perhaps intergalactic, civilizations (or ‘communicative’ civilizations, or CCs).
Such speculation, which to some sociologists may seem ridiculously science-fictional, but to others well-reasoned, is part of what makes this anthology so interesting. It is difficult to express the richness and diversity of the over 100 contributions in these volumes. Consequently, evaluating the anthology is also difficult, and even more so for sociological purposes. The writing is always good, but the link between some articles and Big History varies immensely. The intention was clearly to make Big History accessible to as wide an audience as possible. The volumes appear to reflect purposely the diversity and the range of knowledge on which Big History is based, and to illustrate the interconnection of issues that Big Historians emphasize. One does not simply read this work cover to cover for a coherent argument; it was clearly never intended to be such. The tactic of sprinkling personal accounts (first-person and otherwise) through all three volumes also seems to be a conscious choice.
There are a few obvious patterns. First, the interdisciplinarity (or multidisciplinarity), is extreme, though comprehensive only in aspiration. Sociologists who read works of anthropologists, historians, economists, and political scientists may find the many contributions of physicists, chemists, biologists, and geologists startling. Physics may be the most-represented discipline, and often manifests as a preoccupation with thermodynamics and energy (though this is understandable). Depending on the sociologist, this disciplinary mélange may be stimulating or off-putting.
Second, the topic is still new enough that it is usually taught, around the world, as a first-year, introductory class. Some contributors claim this positioning means that its tracing of interdisciplinary connections early in their higher education career excites students in a way that bounded majors do not, making their experiences much more integrative. If one were to teach a Big History course, which Northrop and Gibelyou call a ‘daunting’, even ‘monumental’, task, this anthology would be a critical supplement to one’s textbook, since it provides many resources, activities, and conceptual frameworks for teaching Big History. The second volume, taken as a whole, indicates that it is critical to offer multiple points of view to students; the entire anthology does just that.
Finally, many authors deal with the issue of scale, for both time and space, directly or indirectly. Christian’s piece on the socially constructed aspects of time in the first volume is very useful, but often the pieces analyze or refer to the sheer size of the universe. Sometimes the topic itself becomes somewhat mind-boggling.
Several aspects of the anthology could be better. First, the interspersing of different types of articles, while demonstrating the diversity of the field, may annoy readers used to topical clustering. Second, too many articles rely on a familiarity with concepts in the natural sciences, the three laws of thermodynamics in particular. One can look them up, but the first volume’s geology article provided good background to its subject; not all other articles that needed this did it. Finally and more substantively, many of the articles speculating about the Fermi paradox, intergalactic civilizations, and so on rely on Nazaretyan’s argument that any civilization leaving its own planet will have probably solved its self-regulation problems, that is, tendencies toward self-destruction, and will thus be peaceful other forms of life. This may strike the average macrosociologist as naïve and even utopian – if life even exists beyond Earth at all.
Perhaps this last criticism simply highlights the need for interested sociologists to contribute to this new discipline. Readers of International Sociology are more likely than sociologists in other fields to find the topic of Big History worth engaging. Various authors mention Durkheim, Wallerstein, and Goudsblom; multiple authors cite Spencer, despite sociologists’ rejection of his ideas. Big History could clearly use the insights of sociologists such as Sassen, Lechner, Sanderson, and Collins. Enough articles directly address issues common in global or historical sociology, social evolution in particular, as entry points for sociologists into Big History, and they offer stimulating, multidisciplinary points of view. Many constructionist sociologists may find the ‘hard’ sciences off-putting, but that is the nature of Big History. Still, the anthology would certainly be a serious contribution to any academic library – well worth having it to stimulate both one’s own thinking and interdisciplinary conversations on one’s campus.