Big History and Great Transition - GTI Forum May 2023

The Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, which arose following the Enlightenment and spread around the world, certainly lifted many people out of poverty, but at what cost? Together with the rise of neoliberalism, it set in motion the exploitation of resources and the production of CO2, leading to the Anthropocene, and specifically to the “technosphere,” first described by Peter Haff.1. [...] From a cosmopolitan outlook, GTI problematizes the abstract and the concrete, the grassroots and the global, the long-term and the immediate—for instance, policies on basic incomes, education, resource allocation, and technology that influence our ability and opportunity for human flourishing, including the space and time needed to comprehend the rather esoteric concepts of Big History and Great T. [...] Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. [...] It carries the ancient double- edge of prophetic rage against the powers and of the improbable “new heaven and earth.” A culmination of Big History? I would decapitalize (in both senses) that construct, acknowledge the temporal depth and multicultural immensity of the life of our species among the others, and recognize in it our gift both to poison (German “Gift”) and to wake up. [...] In my work, the biggest dilemma of the organizer and the educator is to find the key that turns knowledge into action, to transform abstract information into action-knowledge.2 One of the barriers to that transformation, to that strange alchemy that moves a person from knowledge to action, is that even with all the understanding of history in the world, we cannot know the future.