Getting started with Big History

I've always been interested in what is now being called "big history" -- from the Big Bang to the evolution of cognition. One of the most compelling aspects of the recent spate of books, lectures, and videos is that research from a dozen different disciplines have converged to challenge and replace  current narratives of how we became settled, agricultural, tool-making, civilized homo Sapiens through a kind of progress from a more primitive state toward a more, well, civilized condition. Most people today think of the phenomenon of civilization as a progression, an evolution, from the hunting and gathering way of life that our species observed for twenty times as long as we've raised crops and lived incities, into a state in which human freedom, comfort, and meaning have improved. One of the foundations of the Big History counternarrative is that archaeological and anthropological observation that empires with emperors, high priests, granaries, irrigation, and taxation did not evolve directly or quickly from hunting and gathering -- and that hunter-gatherers often resisted the call of urbanization, mechanization of labor (Mumford's "megamachine"). Most disturbingly, some Big Historians question whether life in civilization is better than life as a hunter-gatherer or nomadic herder.

One of the ur-texts of today's Big History was Marshall Sahlins' 1972 Stone Age Economics, which used archaeological and anthropological evidence to assert that many hunters-gatherers were not "primitive" or "savage," but in fact were, in Sahlins' terms "the original affluent society." Now, Sapiens by Harari asserts that the multiplication of (a much smaller variety) of food resources enabled a larger population of our species to lead diminished lives -- less individual liberty (including large scale slavery and forced labor) and poorer diets. Also recently, Wells' Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Costs of Civilization uses DNA dating techniques to focus on the transition to agriculture -- and its costs in terms of health and well-being.

The question of how civilization came about, and whether (and how) that was a good thing is only a part of Big History. To me, the zoom out to look at significant transitions -- from nothing to something, from hot plasma to planets, from elements to organisms, from cells to species, from one way of life to another -- provides a panoramic view, marshalling knowledge from astrophysics and plant genetics.

Here are links to a few resources

This Coursera course on big history, emphasizing the major transition points I mentioned, consists of a series of video lectures (which are usefully transcribed for those who want to skip the lecture and read it instead).

This 1996 book focuses on the evolution of the human mind.

This blog post from the useful Sapiens blog asks how close modern civilization is to the kind of collapse suffered by the Romans, Mayans, and Anasazi.

Stewart Brand's summary of David Grinspoons Long Now talk (which is accessible as a video) looks at what is now called the "anthropocene" era in which human activity is reshaping planetary forces.