I just finished watching 48 half-hour lectures of the Teaching Company Great Courses series "Big History," a new historical discipline, with San Diego State professor David Christian. Excellent. Highly recommended. It starts with the big bang 13.7 billion years ago and ends with heat death a gazillion years in the future. In between he discusses the origin of galaxies, stars, planets, life, humanity, and human societies. In the grand scheme of things, the last looks unimportant indeed, but because we are humans it requires some attention.
Interestingly, Christian talks little about science or religion, although they lurk in the background. Life (not mentioned until lecture 12) is characterized as complex systems able to extract energy from the environment. Because of photosynthesis, plants do not have to move but animals do, so they had to get smarter. Humans are characterized as animals that developed collective learning.
For 100,000 year humans were foragers, but were better at it than other animals because of collective learning and so populations grew slowly but steadily. 10,000 years ago they discovered agriculture, which made for faster growth. Agrarian civilizations were characterized by over 90 percent peasants working the land supporting rulers of tribute-taking states, who just took what they wanted and gave little in return. This discouraged innovation so progress was still slow. Malthusian cycles of plenty and scarcity caused populations to oscillate, but they still increased on average.
Then 300 years ago capitalism encouraged innovation and things took off with the industrial revolution. Most governments were still in the tribute-taking mode of thinking, which regarded resources as finite and something they had to fight for to get their share. This led to the era of imperialism that did not end until WWII.
Earlier in the 20th century, however, people like Henry Ford realized that, at that time at least, scarcity was not the problem and, in fact, we had surpluses. More people were needed to buy all the stuff that the economy could produce. So wages were increased and for the first time the majority of people in the developed states could live above subsistence level. Communism crumbled because of lack of incentives for innovation in a state-controlled economy and capitalism won the day. But capitalism depends on unlimited resources, and unless we move to other planets, which I regard as unlikely, it may crumble too in the face of Earth's finite resources.
Although Christian talks about globalization, he does not get into today's politics. That's "little history." However, if I might add my own observation, the current attempts by big-money capitalists in America and elsewhere to reduce wages and stifle unions would seem to result in fewer markets for their goods. However, by shipping jobs overseas they see the global market expanding and more than taking up the slack of lower American consumption with far lower wages to pay.
What about the future? Christian posits two scenarios: (1) Bad. We keep growing and kill ourselves off by nuclear wars or destroying the environment, or both. (2) Good. Population levels off and we control weapons and pollution. Some signs are promising. Birth rates are lowering even in poor nations, as people move from peasantry to wage earning where fewer children are needed. Alternate energies and energy efficiencies are growing. The downside is the huge, foolish effort to undermine the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. It should be clear to everyone that Earth does not have the resources to continue the exponential growth of the past century. How can anyone think that pumping carbon into the atmosphere that took hundred of millions of years to accumulate is harmless? Malthus will appear again. Unless Jesus returns first, as many Americans seem to think will happen.
this mean- if we go on in a business as usual direction, we will cause catastrophic climate change in not 10-20 thousand yeas as in the past, when warming by carbon took place via 'natural tectonic means' but this time through our digging up of fossil fuels, and burning them- 100 years- what a way for a civilization to go- in one huge and quick implosion.
on exponential growth: "If you can get to 1%, you're nearly done."
(And probably Ayn Rand wouldn't either unless of course SHE would be the lecturer)
I think it still exists today, isn't that something that's going on in Libya or North Korea or in other parts of the planet-the tribute taking in some for or other.
I am 64, and part of my education was reading Grapes of Wrath. I was never taught the much more interesting and tragic story of the events leading up to the Dust Bowl -- the U.S. Government-ordered slaughter of the buffalo to starve out the Comanches, the plowing up of 33 MILLION ACRES of native grasslands that had adapted over 20 thousand years to the southern plains, the planting of wheat, and the almost immediate plunge of wheat futures in the depression coupled with drought, and the deadly storms that stripped off the topsoil and blew it as far away as 300 miles off the East Coast. Ships came into port covered in dirt from Oklahoma and Texas.
In my research I am interested in finding out "what was learned" by the people who still live there, who by all accounts should be the most militant environmentalists in the United States. But what I found reminded me that environmental idiocy wasn't the only thinking problem on the Panhandle. I found this quote, written in 1936 during the thick of the Dust Bowl, on a website about the Oklahoma Panhandle:
"The type of population in the panhandle are responsible for its high rank in many respects. There are practically no Negroes and very few Indians. "
*Spoiler* They get lost and begin wandering forward in time to see if someone invent a time machine to get it back. They visit various dystopian and utopian futures while a parody of the song In the year 2525 by Zager & Evans.
Turns out that the universe after the heat death and the decaying of the last proton reboot itself and everything happen again in exactly the same way.
It was really funny.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Stay with physics because history is not your strong suite. Imperialism simply morphed into a cacophony of tools like smoke and mirrors, aid to countries and military invasions to upend economic resources under the guise of human rights.
Rarely have I read something that is so simultaneously sweeping and breathtakingly short sighted as this.
I am moved to make my own sweeping shortsighted comment. Whatever "big history" is - if details are unimportant then the concept and practice of big history is worthless.
P.S. I was about to make the same comment on Imperialism but bccmeteorites beat me to it by about ten hours.
Most decisions are made based on money. Which is remarkable when you consider that the IQ of the average dollar bill is about as close to zero as can be measured.
I personally have come to believe that it is impossible to underestimate the power of human stupidity. Humans will eventually destroy themselves. Unfortunately, they will probably destroy all other life on earth in the process. Destruction is what we do best, we're good at it.
Take away any link in the chain, and things get dicey.
We live in the most complicated system humans have ever had. If things change badly ebnough (environmental pollution, running short of vital resources, global warming, a massive natural or financial disaster), will our system have the resiliency to adjust?
I just don't know. And I fear how bad a "population correction" might be.