Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

Europe’s economic, political, and military conquests encouraged a sense of European or Western superiority, and many Europeans began to see their conquests as part of a European or Western mission to civilize and modernize the rest of the world. To them, industrialization was a sign of progress. It was part of the transformative mission, first advocated in the Enlightenment, to “improve” the world, to make it a better, richer, and more civilized place for humans.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan began to challenge Britain’s industrial leadership. As rivalries intensified, the major powers tried to protect their markets and sources of supply and keep out competitors. International trade declined. In 1914, rivalry turned into outright war.

Innovation, propelled by cheap energy, was the main driver of change. Innovations created steeper gradients of wealth and power that encouraged competition, which drove innovation, in a powerful feedback cycle.

It improved on Newton’s understanding of the universe by showing that matter and energy warped space and time, and this warping was the real source of gravity.

always, there were losses, too. Just as memory skills probably declined with the spread of writing, so calculating skills declined with the spread of computers and calculators.

The governments of revolutionary France and the United States began to mobilize the loyalty of their subjects through democratization, which brought more of the population into the work of government, and through nationalism, which appealed to people’s sense of a shared national community.

Through schools and the rapidly developing news media, governments tried to reach into the minds of their subjects and generate new forms of loyalty.

Even harder to grasp is the staggering increase in the complexity of modern

societies, the way every detail of your life is enmeshed in networks involving millions of other people who supply food and employment, health care, education, electricity, the fuel for your car, the clothes you wear.

Thomas Piketty estimates that in modern European countries, 40 percent of the population controls between 45 percent and 25 percent of national wealth.

Thomas Piketty estimates that in most modern countries, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population controls between 25 percent and 60 percent of national wealth, while the bottom 50 percent controls no more than 15 percent to 30 percent. This represents a decline in inequality in comparison with the era just before World War I.

In 2005, more than three billion people (more people than the total population of the world in 1900) lived on less than $2.50 a day.

And though it is tempting to think that the modern world has abolished slavery, the 2016 Global Slavery Index estimated that more than forty-five million humans today are living as slaves.

“I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.”3

As Mill wrote, a more stable world need not be a static world. Indeed, it will offer rich opportunities for new forms of art, expanded and enhanced social life, and new and less manipulative ways of engaging with the natural world. Here, modern societies will have a huge amount to learn from those who have preserved

traditions from the past, from societies that lived for thousands of years in a more stable relationship with their surroundings. And is it unreasonable to hope that in such a world, even if average consumption of resources does not increase, the quality of life may improve for large numbers of people?