I came across the term “big history” a few months ago while browsing for books online which told the story of the world or universe from the beginning of time. I was intrigued by this term, even though I was aware of the term’ world history’ and its equivalents. As a history buff and someone who started an ambitious reading project in which I intend to read the entire history of the world and humanity from the start, the term big history instantly attracted me towards it.
The first book I picked up on big history was “Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History” by David Christian. David Christian is the person who coined the term ‘big history’. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and is a historian trained in the Soviet Union and Russian history. In the late 1980s, he pioneered a Big History course at Macquarie University, collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from social sciences, astronomy, cosmology, humanities, and more.
Over the years, his course and this term have gained traction, and now, as the inaugural president of IBHA and director of the Big History Project, Professor David Christian oversees a global initiative that was initially financially supported by Bill Gates. This course aims to teach the Big History course to students online all over the world.
What is Big History?
The International Big History Association defines it as “the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.”
Big history has been around for centuries in the form of origin stories and myths of different human societies. These origin stories helped communities and societies in the past to find their place in time and history, and give a complete picture of how they emerged and where they are headed.
Big history responds to the fragmented knowledge we acquire today. It reveals patterns and relationships that remain invisible through narrow disciplinary lenses. According to Professor Christian, ‘It aims to construct a modern origin story.’ This modern origin story has been made possible by substantial scientific advancements such as plate tectonics, astronomy, and evolutionary biology, as well as radiometric dating.
The Need for Big History
How did Professor Christian come to realise that teaching Big History is important?
As stated above, Professor David’s academic career included teaching Russian history during the 1970s and 1980s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, he felt that we needed to move towards teaching history on a grand scale so that people could learn a lesson from the Soviet collapse. This eventually led Christian to start teaching big history, which includes how our universe or cosmos came into being and how stars, galaxies, planets and life materialised in this universe.
According to his essay “What is Big History?” in the Journal of Big History, the notion of big history has been around for a while, aligning with E.O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience,’ which seeks to reintegrate knowledge and counteract the fragmentation in modern education and research.
Modern scholarship’s trend towards specialisation has yielded immense depth in fields like evolutionary biology and neuroscience, but at the cost of breadth. The explosion of information since the 19th century has exacerbated this issue, making interdisciplinary understanding more challenging.
Common Origin
It provides context for our 13.8-billion-year story. Humans started to fully colonise planet Earth only 10,000 years ago, which is approximately the same time when the Neolithic revolution took place. If we do a rough calculation starting from 13.8 billion years to around 10,000 years ago, this comes out to be around 99.99993% of years where there was no human colonisation of our world. This shows how insignificant humanity is in the face of our cosmos, and we have been present in this universe for such a brief period.
The last living species of the genus homo is us, homo sapiens or humans. All of us share the same common origin, which should inculcate a sense of togetherness and empathy for our fellow human beings.
Dealing with the Great Transition
In the current age, where most of our challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, public health crises, etc., are not regional or local but global, we need to zoom out to understand how we got here in the first place and how we have impacted Earth during this time. This is only possible if we know how life emerged and need to study it with a wide lens instead of getting bogged down in different subjects. Big history can provide students with an integrated and holistic understanding, which will be crucial for becoming more informed citizens and fostering a sense of global citizenship.
In short, big history can help us to learn and cope with the Great Transition, which is taking place around us.
Big History in Education
A remarkable initiative by David Christian was to start a Big History Project online course with the financial help of Bill Gates. This online course is developed for middle and high school students to help them better understand 13.8 billion years of history divided into eight thresholds.
Our education situation is already in a dismal state. Research indicates that 25.3 million children in Pakistan are not attending school. Coupled with poor learning poverty rates at 75%, according to a World Bank brief, this is a recipe for disaster in the coming years.
Furthermore, social sciences are an underdeveloped area in Pakistan. This is due to several reasons, such as a lack of funding, neglect of interdisciplinary approaches, and a shortage of teachers with academic excellence and dynamism. Social sciences are necessary to promote tolerance and pluralism in a society. A person who is well aware of social sciences is less prone to gravitate towards extremist and militant ideologies and thoughts. This problem plagues Pakistan, where we have seen highly educated urban youth become involved with extremist organisations.
A brief search of the courses offered by Pakistani high schools, colleges and universities shows that such a unique course does not exist at any level.
As mentioned above, big history serves to bridge the gap between highly specialised academic disciplines and offers a unified, interdisciplinary narrative of our world. The addition of a big history course is very important in Pakistan’s context since our education system fails to produce curious, critical students who can think and solve problems on their own. It also helps in making informed global citizens who are aware of their place in the world. Such a course can become a part of our educational reforms and aid the students to understand vast timescales and human development over time.
Conclusion
I end this article where I started, my curiosity with this concept. As I delved deeper into this genre, I discovered the works of formidable big historians such as Fred Spier, Eric Chaisson, and Walter Alvarez, as well as Lewis Dartnell and, of course, the father of big history himself, David Christian. The books written by these gentlemen show the structure and storytelling power of big history. It shows how, after each threshold, the Big Bang, the formation of stars, life, humans, agriculture, our cosmos and Earth have become more complex, and energy use has increased.
It helps students to develop much-needed skills like collaboration, creativity and systems thinking, which are essential in the 21st century. Big history teaches students the importance of long-term thinking and helps them to understand trends and consequences by studying the past.
It gives us a common story which belongs to all of humanity and can help reduce the current division, polarisation and narrow world views with which we are confronted.
Big history is not just about our 13.8-billion-year-long history, but is a means to understand the future by examining the present. It is a universal story.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Waqar Ahmed has over 8 years of experience spanning diverse roles in the development sector. He has successfully implemented and completed donor-funded projects across a wide spectrum of themes, including SDGs, climate change, women empowerment, humanitarian response, institutional development, and countering violent extremism (CVE).
