Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present by Cynthia Stokes Brown
254 pages
Published 2007
Read from May 24 to May 27
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Big
history -- the school of thought advocating a holistic, broad-scope
view of history from the beginning of time on through geological history
and into the present -- fits perfectly with my sensibilities. I didn't
know "big history" was an acknowledged methodology until sometime this
year, yet in a way it's been the central principle of my personal
worldview as long as I can remember. The closest I can get to a
"religious" or "spiritual" feeling is the humbling yet awesome sense of
the vast depths of time, the huge processes of geology and biology and
human history (which, after all, is only the subjective experience of
one species produced and influenced by biology and Earth's systems)
operating on a barely conceivable scale.
Big History the
book, as my first introduction to the academic version of this concept,
is really disappointing. The book is riddled with glaring factual
errors; the most egregious comes when Stokes Brown gives a quick sketch
of the solar system and turns Saturn's axis on its side, confusing it
with Uranus, something no 9 year old would mistake. Her descriptions of
evolution are almost equally cringe-worthy. "African descendents of Homo erectus," she writes, "mutated one more time into a fitter species, Homo sapiens."
There are a lot of things wrong with that statement, involving
terminology and "ladder of life" implications at the very least, but
I'll leave that to you to parse out as a fun exercise. The rest of her
overview of hominid evolution is almost as bad, though I don't know
whether that results more from outdated information (our understanding
of human evolution has changed rapidly with new discoveries and new
information since this book was published) or from further
misapprehension.
One risk inherent in the big history approach is the possibility of losing necessary detail in the big picture. Big History
is often guilty of that, glossing over complicated historical questions
and providing me, personally, with practically no new insights or
information. To me, it reads like a freshman syllabus would read to a
graduating senior. It reminds me of those lightweight courses I took to
burn up credits my final undergraduate semester, where I barely had to
show up in order to ace the class. I'm sure such a shallow reading would
be of some value to somebody, perhaps someone with the bare minimum of
historical knowledge, but the blatant factual errors and overly
simplistic narrative make Big History unsuitable for even such a humble task.
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