Big History is an emerging academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present…
— First sentence from a Wikipedia page about “Big History.”
Not long ago, David Christian, a history professor at San Francisco State, received an unusual phone call. American billionaire Bill Gates was on the line, and wanted to talk to him about ‘Big History.’
Mr. Gates, perhaps the world’s wealthiest college dropout, had seen Professor Christian’s video course on the subject — a course which, unlike nearly every other history course in the world ever since history courses have existed, does not bother to acknowledge the generally accepted meaning of the word, ‘History.’
Some personal background will help explain my interest in this problem.
At around age four, I developed an intense interest in prehistoric animals, focused largely on ‘Dinosaurs’ — although I had no aversion to poring for hours over a book of Pliocene mammals, given a sufficient number of full-color illustrations, and the inclusion of at least a few Saber-tooth Tigers.
I imagine, at some point, I must have asked my father what the word, “prehistoric” meant.
My father, a high school English teacher, was the family’s source for authoritative definitions. He exhibited the admirable patience with children’s questions so common to schoolteachers, and had a way of explaining complex concepts in terms a child could understand, without any hint if a condescending tone. And his explanations were universally believable; sixty years later, I continue to rely with considerable success upon those definitions.
I can see him, sitting in the maroon armchair, hidden behind the evening’s newspaper (probably the sports section). The brass floor lamp spreads an almost religious aura around him, as a curl of smoke from his pipe ascends slowly into the darker ceiling region.
He moves the newspaper aside, momentarily, and smiles down at me.
“Prehistoric? ‘Prehistoric’ means something that happened before humans learned how to write. So we have no written records. We can only guess what happened, by looking at objects we find — like dinosaur bones. The suffix ‘pre’ means ‘before.’ So, ‘prehistory’ means before history.”
I was already familiar with the strange (and to me, lamentable) fact that no human being had ever seen a living dinosaur, because the monsters had all died off long before the first ape dropped out of a tree and began defining words. Even with a four-year-old’s mind, I was quickly able to jump to the logical conclusion that no one had ever written an historical account of dinosaurs — therefore placing dinosaurs clearly within the realm of ‘prehistory’ along with almost the entire span of earth’s existence.
(I assumed, without any real evidence to back up the assumption, that dinosaurs had never learned to write their own histories, considering their pea-sized brains and lack of opposable thumbs.)
Thus I became aware of one of mankind’s most remarkable definitions — the division of the vast span of ‘The Past’ into two discrete eras: History, and Prehistory. The second era, History, is documented (more or less… and often less) by human beings, writing down stories and confessions and bookkeeping tallies on stone tablets, parchment, paper, and computer hard drives.
The previous era, Prehistory, is not documented at all, in the generally accepted meaning of the word: ‘documented.’ Instead, we humans try to understand this more distant segment of The Past by analyzing ‘found’ objects that seem to have something to say to us, but which are, themselves, unable to find the words, so to speak.
Historian David Christian (and here we are using the term ‘historian’ with some trepidation) recently began teaching, in his words, “the history of everything.”
I first heard Professor Christian talk about Big History on my car radio, on NPR Morning Edition. Here he is, describing the History of the Big Bang in his very popular TED Talk, on YouTube:
“Around us, there’s nothing. There’s not even Time or Space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can, and cube it a gazillion times.
“And then, suddenly… BAM… a Universe appears. An entire Universe.”
Professor Christian’s TED Talk on YouTube has had over 1 million views, and college courses teaching Big History are popping up like weeds all across America. (Or so I am told by NPR.) Here’s an 18-minute video posted a YouTube:
As entertaining as David Christian’s presentation might be, however — and I’m willing to grant that the American public loves entertainment much more than it loves logic or scientific rigor, and that we’re willing to pay top dollar for entertainers — as entertaining as Professor Christian might be at presenting Big History, he is nevertheless making a mockery of the word ‘History.’ As presented by the good professor and by NPR, Big History is an example of the academic world living in utter (and unfortunate) confusion about the difference between ‘a documented fact’ and ‘a fanciful theory.’
Here in 2016, we have lost the intellectual distinction, not only between ‘History’ and ‘Prehistory’ but also between fact and fiction, between knowledge and supposition. Our academicians can now conjure for us an “entire Universe” out of “nothing” — a “nothing” where not even Time and Space exist — and we’re willing to stand up and cheer, as for a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
The professors can call this ‘History’… with a straight face.
This is what “academic science” has come to: an arrogance bigger than the Big Bang, where the appearance of Time and Space — out of absolutely nothing — is as real and factual as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Magna Carta, or the Hieroglyphs of Egypt.
What would the dinosaurs think of such nonsense? Sadly, we will never know.