The Big History approach is particularly unsatisfactory when it comes to humans. Because we are a product of nature and also capable of understanding and shaping nature’s processes, humans possess a dual aspect that does not easily fit into the Big History framework. The challenge is further complicated by the moralising dimension of Big History that requires the reader to accept a certain amount of responsibility in shaping the future story of life. Yet when humans enter the story in Threshold 6 as a unique species whose linguistic capabilities lead to what Christian calls ‘collective learning’ (the ability to share knowledge over space and time), humans are presented as largely passive vehicles for the incessant demands of energy flows.
This perspective continues into all the subsequent thresholds. Big History describes the shift from a hunter-gatherer way of life to one of intensive agriculture that is represented by Threshold 7 as the product of three Goldilocks conditions. These are ‘new technologies (and increasing understanding of environments generated through collective learning), increasing population pressure, and the warmer climates of the Holocene epoch’. So, what role did humans play in this shift? One wonders. Aside from the new technologies, it seems that developing large-scale farming was largely unavoidable due to an increase in population and warmer climate, a view that ignores findings that show that the transition to agrarian life involved a lengthy and often violent process that some resisted. In other words, a host of contingent factors led to and shaped the advent of agriculture, based on human relationships and power struggles, and they are far more complex than Big History’s deterministic formula suggests.
Because the scale of Big History is so large, some of the traditional subjects of historical analysis, such as wars, empires, trade and religion receive limited attention unless they directly intersect with the overarching themes of thresholds and energy flows. Threshold 8 or ‘The Anthropocene’, however, offers an example of how these subjects are handled when they are deemed relevant. The Anthropocene is perhaps the most successful or widely known popularisation from Big History, and it overlaps with the present and recent past. As is now well known, the Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch that marks a new phase in Earth’s history that has been primarily shaped by human activity. It includes many of the fundamental events and trends of the past 200 years, from industrialisation and colonisation to the total wars of the 20th century and the rise of mass democracy.