Clearly written and ambitious, David Christian’s Origin Storymanages to weave a comprehensive narrative about the evolution of the universe and the human species.
Origin Story begins with a manifesto: a defence of Christian’s field. Big History, he explains, is the ultimate interdisciplinary department. It brings together scientists and social scientists — though not humanists — to each contribute their field of expertise, ‘… so we can think more deeply about broad themes such as the nature of complexity, the nature of life, even the nature of our own species!’ The question of how deeply one can think about a subject when you have 300 pages in which to sum up 40 billion years of history is a bit beside the point; it’s true that academic departments can become too fixated on their own methodology, and for the layman, the nitty-gritty specialisation of academic history tells you little about yourself and where you come from.
Teaching people about themselves is Christian’s stated aim. This book is meant to be a new ‘origin myth’. A fictionalised, primordial Lake Mungo community, representing some of the oldest human societies on earth, acts as his reference point. The stories they told, he says, were stories that sought to teach young people about the world. Origin Story will do the same thing, only this time better, because with science.
Certainly, he manages to string together a dizzying quantity of facts into a book that still has an overarching theme and a consistent tone. Elements of knowledge from physics to history are successfully turned into narrative, with characters like entropy taking the place of named leaders. Even for a non-scientific reader, the beginning, a history of the universe that draws from generally accepted theories, is clear and easy to read.
Cutely, humans arrive to the narrative precisely halfway through the book, on page 157 of 305. From there, Christian professes himself uninterested in ‘the wars and leaders, the states and empires, or the evolution of different artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions’. Instead, he focuses on what he calls ‘energy flows’, which mostly means technological innovations from prehistory to the present. The birth of farming gets its own chapter; then he moves at quite a clip through ‘Agrarian Civilisations’, to the pre-modern period and the Industrial Revolution, to today. His perspective is admirably global, emphasising the newness of Europe’s presence on the world stage and the huge impact that just a few centuries of industrialisation have had on the environment.
If Christian was looking only to narrativise a history of humanity starting from the beginning, he has succeeded. But his ambition is bigger than that. Ultimately, he is intentionally blind to culture in his analysis, perhaps because of his science analysis. That leads to a blindness about his own cultural and ideological commitments, resulting in a book that not only misunderstands the purpose of origin stories but also flattens the history of humanity into a materialist, pseudo-Marxist stream of technological advances.
At times, the book reads like a school textbook. The problem with giving the history of the world in 300 pages — of the history of humanity in 150! — is that, necessarily, it obscures idiosyncrasies and moral ambiguity. There’s no time to meditate — to think deeply — about so many of the forces that shape people’s lives today, from art to politics to colonialism. Energy creates, and entropy destroys, and humans try to get more of the former while avoiding the latter.
As an origin myth, Origin Story falls short, largely because of this lack of ambiguity. The most important figure in most origin stories is the trickster, the capricious force that both creates and destroys. From the Raven of Native American origin stories to Loki to Odysseus, tricksters enter origin stories as ‘boundary crossers’ (see Lewis Hyde’s recent Trickster Makes the World) that upset the world as it is to create a new one. Tricksters do irrational things, which have collateral damage but ultimately create something new. Origin Story has no trickster, because in the universe of the book, where everything that happens is a result of biology, physics and material processes, there’s no room for the spark of human imagination that the trickster represents. The trickster defies established categories and even facts, and categories and facts are what this book is most committed to.
Throughout Christian imposes a European, post-Enlightenment view of truth — and its importance — to pre-modern origin stories. Jarringly, in the introduction he emphasises that:
The [origin] stories have great power because they are trusted. They feel true because they are based on the best knowledge passed down by ancestors over many generations. They have been checked and rechecked for accuracy, plausibility and coherence.
Here, the lack of humanists on the Big History board feels sorely lacking, but even anthropologists agree that myths and origin stories describe the people who tell them and what they value: they’re about culture, not scientific truth.
Christian thinks that we don’t have enough origin stories any more because there’s too much communication between different people. That seems ahistorical at best; origin stories once lived side by side because they were not about empirical truth. But the modern world, like Christian, insists on science, on experiments and replicability. Origin stories don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny because they aren’t meant to. Origin stories aren’t under threat from each other, they’re under threat from empiricism that insists that scientific fact and scientific truth are the only things that can be trusted.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Blind faith in the stories of our elders isn’t always a recipe for success. But a critique of Christian is one that is often ascribed to Marx and other Hegelians: he underestimates the effect and importance of culture. This perhaps makes sense: intentionally or not, Christian’s analysis of global history owes much to the intellectual tradition of Marx. The evolution of human society is dependent on material conditions, and follows an inevitable path from the disorganisation of pre-history to feudalism to capitalism.
Again, this isn’t inherently a bad thing, discounting a somewhat cavalier description of European chattel slavery as an inevitable outgrowth of the early colonial period. But the lack of attention to ideology, even his own, that he betrays throughout the book becomes increasingly obvious when, in his most impassioned chapter on the future of the planet, he advocates for ‘zero-growth capitalism’, which he claims is:
… an economic tipping point at which the quest [for a more stable world] itself turns out to be profitable and compatible with an evolving global capitalism. If that happens, the colossal innovative and commercial energies of modern capitalism and the power of governments that depend on the wealth generated by capitalism may swing behind the quest and give it the sort of boost that capitalist governments gave to the industrial revolution.
It’s hard to not feel as though this stance intentionally contributes to the popularity of the book with do-gooder billionaires like Bill Gates, who are certainly happy to be placated with a history of the universe that ends up with them doing exactly the right thing.
One of the great advances made by history as a discipline over the past 30 years is to abandon the myth of non-ideological history. Christian is interested in Western science and feels urgently that climate change is the biggest risk facing today’s world, that much is clear. But he’s not creating, as he hoped he might, a universal origin myth, precisely because his is so rooted in the European-style empiricism that has run rampant over other cultural traditions for the past 500 years. The scope of his analysis is global, but the analysis itself certainly isn’t. (Perhaps it’s not unfair, in this context, to point out that of the 17 epigraphs that begin the book’s 11 chapters, only one is by a non-Western [or non-male] author: a quote from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things opens ‘Big Life and the Biosphere’.)
Origin Story functions well as a scientific history that brings together a variety of disciplines to explain humanity and its effect, particularly its environmental effect, on the earth. But a fundamental misunderstanding about culture and the purpose of history lies at its heart. I hope the author won’t be disappointed when no one is reading it around a campfire.
Origin Story begins with a manifesto: a defence of Christian’s field. Big History, he explains, is the ultimate interdisciplinary department. It brings together scientists and social scientists — though not humanists — to each contribute their field of expertise, ‘… so we can think more deeply about broad themes such as the nature of complexity, the nature of life, even the nature of our own species!’ The question of how deeply one can think about a subject when you have 300 pages in which to sum up 40 billion years of history is a bit beside the point; it’s true that academic departments can become too fixated on their own methodology, and for the layman, the nitty-gritty specialisation of academic history tells you little about yourself and where you come from.
Teaching people about themselves is Christian’s stated aim. This book is meant to be a new ‘origin myth’. A fictionalised, primordial Lake Mungo community, representing some of the oldest human societies on earth, acts as his reference point. The stories they told, he says, were stories that sought to teach young people about the world. Origin Story will do the same thing, only this time better, because with science.
Certainly, he manages to string together a dizzying quantity of facts into a book that still has an overarching theme and a consistent tone. Elements of knowledge from physics to history are successfully turned into narrative, with characters like entropy taking the place of named leaders. Even for a non-scientific reader, the beginning, a history of the universe that draws from generally accepted theories, is clear and easy to read.
Cutely, humans arrive to the narrative precisely halfway through the book, on page 157 of 305. From there, Christian professes himself uninterested in ‘the wars and leaders, the states and empires, or the evolution of different artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions’. Instead, he focuses on what he calls ‘energy flows’, which mostly means technological innovations from prehistory to the present. The birth of farming gets its own chapter; then he moves at quite a clip through ‘Agrarian Civilisations’, to the pre-modern period and the Industrial Revolution, to today. His perspective is admirably global, emphasising the newness of Europe’s presence on the world stage and the huge impact that just a few centuries of industrialisation have had on the environment.
If Christian was looking only to narrativise a history of humanity starting from the beginning, he has succeeded. But his ambition is bigger than that. Ultimately, he is intentionally blind to culture in his analysis, perhaps because of his science analysis. That leads to a blindness about his own cultural and ideological commitments, resulting in a book that not only misunderstands the purpose of origin stories but also flattens the history of humanity into a materialist, pseudo-Marxist stream of technological advances.
At times, the book reads like a school textbook. The problem with giving the history of the world in 300 pages — of the history of humanity in 150! — is that, necessarily, it obscures idiosyncrasies and moral ambiguity. There’s no time to meditate — to think deeply — about so many of the forces that shape people’s lives today, from art to politics to colonialism. Energy creates, and entropy destroys, and humans try to get more of the former while avoiding the latter.
As an origin myth, Origin Story falls short, largely because of this lack of ambiguity. The most important figure in most origin stories is the trickster, the capricious force that both creates and destroys. From the Raven of Native American origin stories to Loki to Odysseus, tricksters enter origin stories as ‘boundary crossers’ (see Lewis Hyde’s recent Trickster Makes the World) that upset the world as it is to create a new one. Tricksters do irrational things, which have collateral damage but ultimately create something new. Origin Story has no trickster, because in the universe of the book, where everything that happens is a result of biology, physics and material processes, there’s no room for the spark of human imagination that the trickster represents. The trickster defies established categories and even facts, and categories and facts are what this book is most committed to.
Throughout Christian imposes a European, post-Enlightenment view of truth — and its importance — to pre-modern origin stories. Jarringly, in the introduction he emphasises that:
The [origin] stories have great power because they are trusted. They feel true because they are based on the best knowledge passed down by ancestors over many generations. They have been checked and rechecked for accuracy, plausibility and coherence.
Here, the lack of humanists on the Big History board feels sorely lacking, but even anthropologists agree that myths and origin stories describe the people who tell them and what they value: they’re about culture, not scientific truth.
Christian thinks that we don’t have enough origin stories any more because there’s too much communication between different people. That seems ahistorical at best; origin stories once lived side by side because they were not about empirical truth. But the modern world, like Christian, insists on science, on experiments and replicability. Origin stories don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny because they aren’t meant to. Origin stories aren’t under threat from each other, they’re under threat from empiricism that insists that scientific fact and scientific truth are the only things that can be trusted.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Blind faith in the stories of our elders isn’t always a recipe for success. But a critique of Christian is one that is often ascribed to Marx and other Hegelians: he underestimates the effect and importance of culture. This perhaps makes sense: intentionally or not, Christian’s analysis of global history owes much to the intellectual tradition of Marx. The evolution of human society is dependent on material conditions, and follows an inevitable path from the disorganisation of pre-history to feudalism to capitalism.
Again, this isn’t inherently a bad thing, discounting a somewhat cavalier description of European chattel slavery as an inevitable outgrowth of the early colonial period. But the lack of attention to ideology, even his own, that he betrays throughout the book becomes increasingly obvious when, in his most impassioned chapter on the future of the planet, he advocates for ‘zero-growth capitalism’, which he claims is:
… an economic tipping point at which the quest [for a more stable world] itself turns out to be profitable and compatible with an evolving global capitalism. If that happens, the colossal innovative and commercial energies of modern capitalism and the power of governments that depend on the wealth generated by capitalism may swing behind the quest and give it the sort of boost that capitalist governments gave to the industrial revolution.
It’s hard to not feel as though this stance intentionally contributes to the popularity of the book with do-gooder billionaires like Bill Gates, who are certainly happy to be placated with a history of the universe that ends up with them doing exactly the right thing.
One of the great advances made by history as a discipline over the past 30 years is to abandon the myth of non-ideological history. Christian is interested in Western science and feels urgently that climate change is the biggest risk facing today’s world, that much is clear. But he’s not creating, as he hoped he might, a universal origin myth, precisely because his is so rooted in the European-style empiricism that has run rampant over other cultural traditions for the past 500 years. The scope of his analysis is global, but the analysis itself certainly isn’t. (Perhaps it’s not unfair, in this context, to point out that of the 17 epigraphs that begin the book’s 11 chapters, only one is by a non-Western [or non-male] author: a quote from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things opens ‘Big Life and the Biosphere’.)
Origin Story functions well as a scientific history that brings together a variety of disciplines to explain humanity and its effect, particularly its environmental effect, on the earth. But a fundamental misunderstanding about culture and the purpose of history lies at its heart. I hope the author won’t be disappointed when no one is reading it around a campfire.
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