You Should Be Very Happy You’re Here, Now – Part 1
The scale of universal time and us.
Ever get upset about what someone else said? You did? You got upset for something as petty as that? Fugetaboutit! Think instead about how wildly wonderful it is that you live in the here and now at all.
That subject is often called “Big History,” which is the study of things on a very, very large scale, over a very long period of time. Thinking about that puts our current moment (whatever that moment is) in the largest context of all: human and universal history. If we just took a few moments to think about that every once in a while, that context would often bring contentment, along with a deep appreciation of what we all have – not relatively, but absolutely -- and where we all are -- not geographically, but temporally.
Let’s start with looking more closely at the scale of human development, which is itself an almost unimaginably small portion of the history of the universe. (For some interesting facts regarding time spans, see this article in RealClearScience.)
Charles Murray, in his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, begins by setting out some of the vast contours of that that human history (Murray uses a minus sign (-) to indicate years before the birth of Christ, and a capital C to indicate “Century”):
The first task then is to try to acquire a sense of time: to grasp the how long that separates the actors and events in the pageant from one another—Aristotle from Newton, Newton from Einstein, the first tunnel under the Euphrates from the first tunnel under the Thames. If we continue to take –8000 as a rough starting point, we have a span of 10,000 years to hold in our heads. The measuring rod I will use for this exercise is a four-century packet of time that I hereby designate a unit, and the device for making a unit meaningful will be the events that fill it. By “events that fill it” I mean a counterpart to the landmarks on a map that enable us to maintain an intuitive grasp of geographic distance, or at least earth-size distances. You may not know the mileage from Shanghai to New York or even from London to Paris, may never have traversed those routes, but built into the experience of most of us is a sense of how far those distances are. We have that sense because we have grown up with a visual image of the globe, and the space on that globe is filled in our mind’s eye with the continents and oceans that give a context to how far. To understand how long ago something occurred requires us to fill time with events, just as the globe is filled with oceans and continents … It is commonplace for older adults to have an intuitive sense of how long ago events throughout 20C occurred—our memory fills 20C with events. How long ago was the Korean War? The year was 1950, but it is not simple subtraction of 1950 from the current year that tells us how long ago it was. An American of a certain age is likely to recall Eisenhower’s election, then perhaps Sputnik, or Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN. Then follow the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the first lunar landing, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Gulf War, and 11 September 2001, all filling up the space between 1950 and today and thereby configuring our sense of how long ago the Korean War occurred.
Murray then proceeds to describe “the First Unit,” that is, a unit of 400 years moving back from the 20th Century to the 16th Century:
The First Unit. As we move back even just 100 years from 20C to 19C, distortions begin to set in. The period from, say, 1812 to the Civil War is an undifferentiated lump for many Americans who don’t enjoy history. But two centuries is still manageable, because most people can use a sense of their own national history to grasp how long it was. If one isn’t able to think of exactly what happened from 1812 to 1861, most Americans are nonetheless likely to know in at least a vague sort of way that the nation expanded westward and engaged in a debate over slavery. Move back another 200 years from 1800 to 1600. As of 1600, American history hasn’t really begun. The only resident Europeans north of Mexico are a handful of Spanish in Florida and a handful of French fur traders on the St. Lawrence River. In Rome, the Renaissance has drawn to a close. Elizabeth I is on the English throne. Julius Caesar and As You Like It are the current attractions at the newly opened Globe Theatre. Already, it is hard to hold a sense of elapsed years in one’s head—the two centuries from 1600 to 1800 seem blurrier than the two centuries from 1800 to 2000. For many of us, naming even a dozen events that occurred between 1600 and 1800 requires some thought. But we are still not completely bereft of anchor points. Louis XIV, Charles II, Cromwell, the Restoration, Frederick the Great, Isaac Newton, Peter the Great, the settlement of the American colonies, the Revolutions in America and France—each of us will recall different specifics, but enough big events loom through the mist to give some sense of the length of 1600 to 1800. It stretches most of us to the limit, but the combined four centuries from 1600 to 2000 thus remain a comprehensible period of time—the 400 years during which the world we know was mostly built. This constitutes the first unit, and with it we will measure our way back to –8000 and see if we can hold a sense of 10,000 years in our heads.
Murray then proceeds to give us a sense of human history back to the year 1200:
Two Units. Two units back from 2000, one unit back from Shakespeare, take us to 1200 and a Europe working its way free from the intellectual desolation of the Dark Ages. Venice is the commercial capital of a Europe that is being introduced to the mathematical concept of zero recently imported from the Arabs (who in turn had borrowed zero from the Indians). Siena and Oxford Universities have been founded in the last few decades. A campanile recently built in Pisa is tilting alarmingly. Halfway across the world, the Chinese are near the apogee of more than a thousand years of development, with a culture that makes Europe look primitive. In England, Richard the Lion-heart reigns and dies, and stories begin to be told about a man named Robin Hood. Consider how our sense of time has already collapsed. Unless you really know your history, the England of Robin Hood is likely to be part of a generalized image of castles and kings jumbled into a picture of an old England that also includes Shakespeare. Yet as many years separate Richard the Lion-heart from Shakespeare as separate Shakespeare from us.
Then back to the year 800, and then to 400:
Three Units. One more unit takes us back to 800. Charlemagne is crowned head of the western Roman Empire on Christmas Day. Japan’s seat of government has just been moved to Kyoto, where it will remain for almost 1,100 years. Within the last decade, the Norse have conducted their first raids on the British Isles, beginning a century of terror that will spread from the British Isles to parts of Northern and Eastern Europe. As many years separate the first Viking raids from Robin Hood as separate Shakespeare from us.
Four Units. Another unit takes us to the year 400 and a Roman Empire nearing its death throes. Among the other events attendant to the fall of the Empire, Roman military forces are preparing to leave Britain. If medieval England is to many of us an undifferentiated lump of time, our loss of perspective on Roman Britain is far greater. Most of us remember that Britain was a sort of frontier outpost for the Romans. And yet, as the Roman legions evacuate Britain in 407, Britain has been ruled from Rome almost 150 years longer than today’s United States has been in existence. Roman Britain as of 407 has ancient and prominent families, with lineages going back for a dozen generations—every generation of which spoke Latin. Some of them live in magnificent villas that are older in 407 than many of the venerable stately homes of today’s Britain.
Five Units. One more unit brings us to the year one. Jesus of Nazareth is about seven years old, perhaps learning the rudiments of carpentry. It is less than half a century since Julius Caesar was assassinated. Virgil is only a few years dead and Ovid is alive, scandalizing Roman society with Ars Amatoria. China institutes formal civil service examinations as a requirement for holding public office.
Six Units. One unit back from the birth of Jesus takes us to –400. It marks a special point for the people of the West, the earliest moment from which we can yet see unbroken links reaching to our present day. In the year –400, Socrates still meets with his students in the Athenian agora. In a few centuries—mostly, in a few decades—immediately before and after –400, the city-state of Athens lays down the foundations of Western art, literature, music, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and science.
Seven Units. If –400 is the frontier of the West’s direct link with its past, –800 is its last outpost. Only three remnants of that world, albeit glorious ones, will still be an important part of our culture today: The Iliad and the Odyssey are already being recited, though they have yet to be written down, and parts of the Old Testament are already inscribed. With these exceptions, we are in an alien world as of –800. We are also in a world that is increasingly barren of remembered events. By –800, it is getting difficult even for a specialist to fill up the years with events, to talk with confidence about what happened in –600 versus –700.
Eight Units. Another unit takes us to –1200, where only a handful of landmarks can be discerned—and no wonder. The world of –1200 is as remote from the Roman Empire as we are from Charlemagne. The Trojan War occurs sometime around –1200, but it is fought between small Mediterranean fiefdoms, hardly more than glorified tribes. There are no topless towers of Ilium, just a small walled town on the Anatolian plain. The great civilization in –1200 is Egypt, which is in the middle of the sequence of pharaohs named Ramses—one of whom, Ramses II, is the pharaoh of Exodus. We are only eight units back, but remembered events have by now all but ceased to exist. The Egyptologist knows the dates for the markers of a pharaoh’s reign and can reconstruct some aspects of society, government, and the economy from the archaeological record, inscriptions, and the occasional papyrus, but when it comes to describing intellectual, artistic, and technological accomplishments, scholars are required to talk about fragments of evidence from which they try to infer the whole. We now use the word circa to describe a range sometimes measured in decades, even centuries.
From there, because records are so scarce, Murray takes us all the way back to 1,600 B.C., and then to 8,000 B.C.:
Twelve Units. Recorded events are so sparse that I will forgo moving back just a single unit. Instead, we leapfrog back four more units—1,600 years, the length of time that separates us from the fall of Rome. This brings us to –2800. Egypt is the dominant civilization in –2800 as it was in –1200 (a breathtaking fact when one stops to think about it), but in –2800 it is a civilization in full flower, not in decay. In fact, Egypt in –2800 is on the verge of becoming technologically more advanced than the Egypt of four units hence. It goes without saying that the intervening 1,600 years have been filled with events that we cannot recover. One of the first literary documents in the world’s library comes from this era, a pharaoh’s instructions to his son. That we have this papyrus is a freak of preservation, but it is a reminder that fathers are giving instructions to sons during these intervening 1,600 years, just as mothers are giving birth, marriages are being celebrated, and deaths are being mourned. Families rise to fortune, become a local aristocracy for generations, and then fall into obscurity—a cycle repeated many times over within those four units. Local heroes perform deeds so heroic that people sing their praises for centuries—deeds that, by –1200, have been forgotten for centuries. Individual humans experience life as intensely in those 16 centuries as we do. But if one asks after the events with which we can fill out our conception of those centuries, there is little to offer except the barest records of wars won and lost and dynasties rising and falling.
Twenty-five units. Only a few other way stations remain to guide us along the path back to –8000. Sumer got its start earlier than Egypt, although trying to assign a date to the time when Sumer stopped being a collection of villages and started being a civilization is difficult. Some take that point back as far as –6000, others put it 2,000 years later. Just knowing that the differences can be so great indicates how trackless the plain has become. So I will bring the exercise to an end. At our last outpost, we were at –2800. Contemplate how far we had come from 2000 to –2800. Twelve units altogether—twelve times the distance that separates us from Shakespeare. Get as firm a grasp as you can on that 4,800-year package. Tack on 200 years. Then double it. Double that immense span of time—and we have arrived at –8000. It is not possible to hold 10,000 years in one’s head for long, but to have done it for even a few minutes will serve two useful purposes as we proceed. Understanding that 10,000 years is actually a very long time is an antidote to the tendency to think of human civilization as a figurative nanosecond relative to the history of human evolution, the history of the earth, or the history of the universe. Those perspectives are valid for their purposes, but it is also true that we are part of a pageant that stretches back a very long time indeed in human terms, brief as it may be in the time scale of the cosmos. Understanding how long 10,000 years really is also serves as an antidote to the all-eras-are-equal mindset. Just one unit out of the 25—a mere 400 years—got us back to Shakespeare. We of 21C are the beneficiaries of recent centuries that have been spectacularly unlike any others.
In the next essay, we’ll go much further back, to the beginning of the universe.
