08.14.09
Posted in Big History, The Eonic Effect, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:14 pm by nemo
The other day we discussed John Dean’s essay on Big History at Truthdig: ‘Big History’ and World History And The Eonic Effect
It is a great idea, but there should be two complementary definitions: big history in the horizontal sense, and big history in a kind of vertical dimension, macro-history as opposed to micro-history.
The real issue is the idea that ‘Big History’ can resolve the problems with a science of history. But the resolution of that is not so simple and isn’t achieved by applying Darwinism to historical analysis.
In fact, ‘big history’ done right, well, consider the eonic model.
from The Legacy Of Darwinism
A science of history? The question of a science of history provokes a contradiction Read the rest of this entry »
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08.12.09
Posted in 1848+, Big History, Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Ultra Far Left at 2:27 pm by nemo
A critique of G.A. Cohen, who has recently died, http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/articles/sayers/cohen.pdf
Cohen’s work was a great contribution, but it is a bit old by now, the eighties and before!
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Big History, World History and The Eonic Effect at 1:53 pm by nemo
Remarkably, John Dean, at Truthdig, has an article on Big History and the books of the genre: Looking for Great ‘Big History’ Books
By John Dean
Ron had introduced me to the notion of big history many years earlier, when he urged that I read Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” (1997). Diamond addresses big historical questions: “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?”
Big history is a relatively new approach which examines human history in wide frameworks. Like Ron, once I discovered big history, I too found myself looking for these works. They are not that easy to find. The Library of Congress cataloging system, for example, has no entry for big history.
Big history was introduced in the late 1980s by scholars like David Christian, who make a powerful case that to understand human history, we must look beyond our borders and our species and our planet to “the whole of time.” Accordingly, many big history writers begin with the Big Bang, tracing, examining, and compressing the historical record from the beginning to the present as they probe for insights. A well-known explanation of this multidisciplinary approach is found in Fred Spier’s “The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today” (1996).
The idea of Big History is a fascinating one, and in expounding on the eonic effect I have used the phrase (not quite in the original sense proposed: histories from the Big Bang), that is ‘macro’ history, or universal histories, of the type proposed in the eonic model, where evolution as dynamics and history as free activity interact in a two level model.
In the next edition of World History and the Eonic Effect, an explicit treatment in terms of ‘Big History’ will appear, in both senses of the term.
I think that the ‘Big Histories’ so far proposed have all been ‘weighted down’ by false assumptions about Darwinism.
World History and the Eonic Effect also has a methodology of ‘relative beginnings’, allowing one to ‘start anywhere’ (relative to the eonic sequence) and in general to look at ‘big history’ in the sense of examining closely tracked intervals at a century or less: this allows us to see if high-speed changes reveal any kind of dynamic not visible in deep time due to the coarse-grained nature of the data sets (a good example is the Axial Age).
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