Video: What does our past tell us about our future?

“Big history” examines our past, explains our present and imagines what is possible for our future. It tackles the biggest questions we face. David Christian, co-founder of the Big History Project and a participant at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014, explains why he believes this multidisciplinary approach is urgently needed.

Here are some quotes from the clip. You can watch the full video at the top of this page.

On what big history is:

“I think of big history as an origin story. All societies have taught their students total stories of everything, so that students can map themselves in time and space. The bizarre thing is that today we don’t teach such a story; yet it’s sitting within modern science. And the modern origin story is based on so much more information than any earlier origin story. It’s fantastically rich.”

“A second way to think about it is as a connecting story. As a story that helps students see the connections between science, the humanities, biology, and all the different disciplines they learn at school. At the moment it’s very hard for students to see connections.”

On the questions big history can answer:

“I think it can answer very powerful questions about humans. For example, it can tell us why we control so much energy, why we’re so powerful. And within big history the core idea is collective learning. Many species can communicate, but we humans communicate with a virtuosity, a precision, a bandwidth that no other species can match.”

On the dangerous power of humans:

“I’d like to argue that we live at an astonishing moment, not just in human history, but in the history of this planet.”

“It’s the first era in the history of this planet when a single species has played a dominant role in controlling the energy flows through the biosphere. Now, that’s clever, but it’s also a bit dangerous, because chucking this energy about is having all sorts of unexpected consequences. It’s affecting other animals on a huge scale … it’s also affecting climate systems.”

“We control so much energy that we’re not really sure we know what we’re doing with it.”

On the big choices we face:

“We have the power to do terrible, terrible damage; and that is the world we’ve created today. And I’m hoping that the big history story can help students gain the perspective they need to see today’s world not just as the world we happen to live in, but a world at a time that is very significant indeed and where there are big choices to be made by the younger generation.”       

Author: David Christian is the Professor of History at Macquarie University, Australia.

Image: Castellers, or human tower builders, Colla Jove Xiquets de Valls, start to form a human tower during a biannual competition in Tarragona, October 5, 2014. REUTERS/Albert Gea