Big History

I am currently (not at this second, but at this time) listening to a wonderful lecture series from The Teaching Company called Big History. The lecturer is Professor David Christian from San Diego State University. I mention this for three reasons.

First, the lecture series from the Teaching Company are wonderfully interesting lectures on a diverse range of topics and I highly recommend them. I have listened to dozens of these lectures comprising hundreds of hours of informative enjoyment. I listen while in the car or while out walking or hiking. For the enjoyment value alone these lectures are worthwhile. But, that is not all.

Second, exposure to a diverse range of ideas is very important as you never know where important insights may come from. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainly that I have not listened to a single set of lectures that has not provided me with insights well beyond the topics of the lectures. These insights usually apply to things I am currently working on or thinking about and provide me with new ways of looking at problems.

And third, this ties in with what I was saying in my last post. So it is on point to this thread. However, that will take a little explaining. Christian's thesis is that you can unify all of history from the Big Bang to modern times, despite the vast differences in the scale of time and space by looking at history as a process of the creation of great complexity. Further, if we see this complexity as occurring in steps, we can see it line up with our current academic disciplines. Cosmology (Big Bang), Astronomy (Stars and Solar Systems), Geology (Planets), Chemistry (Particles), Biology (Life Forms), Sociology (Societies), and so on. This is a very clever idea and I have not done it justice here, but have sketched out enough to make my point.

Social interaction is the engine by which societies form and evolve. As such, it is on a par with, say Chemical Reactions or Biological Reactions. We have a reasonably good grasp these days on chemical reactions, less on biological reactions, and less yet on social interaction. Tinkering with chemical reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for blowing yourself up. Tinkering with biological reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for poisoning yourself. Tinkering with social interaction must put you at risk for something. But we don't even understand enough to know what we might be risking. Yet we have these powerful accelerants called social interaction technologies. And we have no idea what the consequences of these technologies might be. So, context may be a little more important than we realize.