Big History
08/31/2009 16:11
David Christian, Maps of Time (first look)
Five hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, thirty pages of bibliography. Christian begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang. I’m about 125 pages into the book, and multi-cellular organisms are just starting to appear. In other words, I’m still about 600 million years from the beginning of what we normally consider history.
So far, the text has been interesting and very readable. I’ve read a little about the cosmology and biology he’s covered. Enough to know that he’s covering the high points well, and leaving out a lot of detail. This is inevitable, and while it might not make an evolutionary biologist happy…then again, maybe it would!
The whole thing is about context and communication, I suppose. It’s interesting to me that the genre he’s writing in really goes back a way – at least to Robert Chambers’ Vestiges in 1844! He’s probably exposing a lot of people to this science for the first time. And, depending on what he does once he gets to the “historical” period, maybe he’ll be able to get us to look at that from a new angle.
In the introduction, Christian claims his two major influences are Annales-style longue durée history and Jungian mythologizing. The archetype he seems to want to use to unite the macro (geological/biological) and micro (human social) histories is apparently the image of running up the “down” escalator. The impulse of things (mainly life, but he extends it to stars and cultures) to fight entropy: to build order out of the growing chaos all around.
This is a different archetype from Eliade’s eternal return or Yeats’s gyres. And it’s different from Hegel & Marx’s teleology. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.
Five hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, thirty pages of bibliography. Christian begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang. I’m about 125 pages into the book, and multi-cellular organisms are just starting to appear. In other words, I’m still about 600 million years from the beginning of what we normally consider history.
So far, the text has been interesting and very readable. I’ve read a little about the cosmology and biology he’s covered. Enough to know that he’s covering the high points well, and leaving out a lot of detail. This is inevitable, and while it might not make an evolutionary biologist happy…then again, maybe it would!
The whole thing is about context and communication, I suppose. It’s interesting to me that the genre he’s writing in really goes back a way – at least to Robert Chambers’ Vestiges in 1844! He’s probably exposing a lot of people to this science for the first time. And, depending on what he does once he gets to the “historical” period, maybe he’ll be able to get us to look at that from a new angle.
In the introduction, Christian claims his two major influences are Annales-style longue durée history and Jungian mythologizing. The archetype he seems to want to use to unite the macro (geological/biological) and micro (human social) histories is apparently the image of running up the “down” escalator. The impulse of things (mainly life, but he extends it to stars and cultures) to fight entropy: to build order out of the growing chaos all around.
This is a different archetype from Eliade’s eternal return or Yeats’s gyres. And it’s different from Hegel & Marx’s teleology. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.
