The Return to the Grand Narrative: Deep History and Big Data

1. Lecture 10, Term 2 The Return to the Grand Narrative? ‘Deep History’ and Big Data

2. Central questions in regard to the practice and purpose of history writing sinc the Enlightement • How to explain human ‘agency’ • What is human ‘experience’ and how to explain it? • What is historical ‘change’ and what causes it? • What is the relationship between historical ‘facts’ found in the archive/texts etc. and their wider meaning? • What is a historical ‘fact’? Is there such a thing? • What is the role of the historian in the production of history: • Can she be neutral and objective or discuss an historical event? • Is history writing a ‘science’ (in the sense of a natural science discovering ‘laws’) or an ‘art’ (a form of fiction)? Or both?

3. Central claims in this module • Since the Enlightenment ‘history writing’ is part of the ‘Science of Man’; it tells us • something about ourselves in the present; God’s decision? Laws of nature? Moral lesson? critique (Foucault)? • Historians knowledge is not ‘objective’ or neutral’ (nor is scientific knowledge as we have seen!) but at certain moments in time it was believed to be (e.g. positivism, Buckle) • ‘Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment. The historian, being an individual, is also a product of history and of society: and it is in this twofold light that the student of history has to learn to regard him.’ (Carr, What is History? P. 38)

4. The overarching question is: Why this enthusiasm for ‘Big Data’ and evolutionary psychology (Deep history) right now? Are we in search of new ’grand narratives? Jo Goldi ad David Armitage, The History Manifesto

5. Big Data NOW! The History Manifesto, 2014 https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/open-access/the-history-manifesto ‘A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term.’ Claim: Short-term history is an expression of a general short-term thinking (critique of today’s short-term economic thinking) Jo Goldi and David Armitage

6. ‘Administrators, academics, and students alike struggle to face all these challenges at once. They must strive to find a way forward that will preserve the distinctive virtues of the university–and of the humanities and historical social sciences within them. Importantly, they need experts who can look past the parochial concerns of disciplines too attached to client funding, the next business cycle, or the next election. Indeed, in a crisis of short-termism, our world needs some where to turn to for information about the relationship between past and future. Our argument is that History–the discipline and its subject-matter–can be just the arbiter we need at this critical time.’ ‘Our Conclusion ends where we started, with the problem of who in our society is responsible for constructing and interpreting the big picture. We are writing at a moment of the destabilisation of nations and currencies, on the cusp of a chain of environmental events that will change our way of life, at a time when questions of in equality trouble political and economic systems around the globe. On the basis of when we write, we recommend to our readers and to our fellow-historians the cause of what we call the public future: we must, all of us, engage the big picture, and do so together, a task that we believe requires us to look backwards as well as ahead.’

7. The ‘big data’ is now available to do this future orientated history writing: ‘Renewing the connection between past and future, and using the past to think critically about what is to come, are the tools that we need now. Historians are those best able to supply them.’ Is this Big Data enthusiasm the reason for the rise of digital humanities?

8. The Grand Narrative of Human Evolution: Deep History Deep history is a term for the distant past of the human species. As an intellectual discipline, deep history encourages scholars in history, anthropology, archaeology, primatology, genetics, and to work together to write a common narrative about the beginnings of humans,and to redress what they see as an imbalance among historians, who mostly concentrate on more recent periods. Deep history forms the earlier part of Big History and looks at the portion of deep time when humans existed, going further back than prehistory, mainly based on usually ventures, and using a wider range of approaches. Daniel Lord Smail,

10. ‘Deep History’ combined with ‘Big History’ in Sapiens

11. Are we going back to E.O. Wilson’s ‘New Synthesis’ (1975) and its suggestions of ‘sociobiology’? E.O. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" in the 1970s as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind any social behaviour. Hardly new! But daring at the time in view of then rather recent events which were based on ‘sociobiology’ (e.g.Holocaust).

12. Basis for enthusiasm of evolutionary psychology? Our obsession with the brain.... Thesis: Human mind and human brain are one and the same thing. Steve Pinker, a key evolutionary psychologist today: ‘The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors.’ Because the mind is an evolved organ designed by natural selection it will serve precisely those purposes that other evolved organs serve; namely, to increase the probability of the survival of the genetic material expressed in the organism that carry it through its parts in bringing about adaptive behaviour. Richard Darwkins: ‘An animal’s behaviour tends to maximise the gene ‘for’ that behaviour whether or not the gene happens to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.’

13. The problem with the concept of human evolution It is NOT coming from nature but Darwin takes it from contemporary social and religious thinkers He did not ‘discover’ evolution; the concept of evolution is a constrution Charles Darwin in the 1840s,

14. Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle 1831-1836

15. Darwin’s Finches

16. He starts to think that species adapt to their environment

17. Darwin collects and observes.......begins to believe that species ‘adapt’ to their place But what is the underlying mechanism of adaptation that pulls all this data together?? Darwin finds this mechanism NOT in nature but in contemporary writings on British society...

18. 1. Darwin relies on Malthus 1798; 1803 edition read by Darwin ‘The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man…’ ‘ongoing struggle of existence over subsistence ’ -- according to Malthus God directed Note: term’ survival of the fittest’ (not from Malthus but Herbert Spencer who read Darwin. Darwin then used it in later editions of his book. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766 – 1834

19. 2. Darwin’s ideas also fitted well to another accepted social and philosophical theory of the time: Utilitarianism Principle: ‘greatest happiness of all’ - which is measurable through measuring ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ in humans ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ..’ (The Principles of Morals and Legislation Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832 It follows: the appropriate mode of action is the one that maximises utility -- maximising total benefit and reducing suffering or the negatives effects of human action

20. Three central elements of Darwin’s argument AFTER he adopts these social ideas: • in every population of organism, there are differences – or variations between individuals. • Such variations ensure that certain organisms are better suited to triumph in the struggle for existence than there are other organisms. • Finally, better suited --or more ‘fit’ – organisms will produce more viable offspring then those which are less suited. And the characteristics of fitter organisms are therefore selectively passed on to the following generation. • Overall: Nature selects certain characteristics without any foresight or conscious design. Over a number of generations the characteristics of fitter organisms comet to dominate population, and hence the characteristics of a species change.

21. 1871 1872 Darwin’s offers his own view on the raging debate on ‘human evolution’ in two, by now, famous publications

22. Inherent problem of such anthropomorphism in evolutionary theory until today: The reading into animal nature, which, in fact, is characteristic of human nature. These ‘results’ from reading animal culture are then used to confirm continuity between humans and animals. Such logic, by the way, undergirds much of contemporary Darwinian discussion of human behaviour of Darwinists today such as O.E. Wilson or and Richard Dawkins .....and all those who use evolutionary psychology for history writing: Central claim: human history and culture is ultimately based on our evolutionary biology; it is a history of the human species

23. We are told that biology is no longer deterministic today ‘Epigenetic processes thus give individuals and populations the capacity to respond biologically as well as culturally to changing historical circumstances and to adapt quickly to new or altered niches in the natural and social world.’ (p. 1497) BUT epigenetic (which is defined differently in science has not yielded convincing results yet for humans (or indeed for animals) ‘Genes are but one of the many players that act and are acted upon to determine how an organism will develop and interact with its environment.’

24. A history of the species? Is this what historians will do in the future? A combination of history and evolutionary biology? ‘Both historians and biologists believe in the importance of culture – in the ability of the member of many species of birds and mammals to learn from one another so they can improve their chances that they, their kin, or their societies will survive and strive.’ (p. 1495) In recent history writings one can observe a bias towards the knowledge of the natural sciences in use of rhetoric: ‘Recent advances in neuroscience, for instance, confirm the intuition of historians who believe that culture, class, and prejudice have a profound impact on the human psyche.’

25. But the problems are: • What is ‘biology’? Only one subjects in over 30 within the ‘life sciences’ and they all depend on each other. • Science is today techno-science • ‘Most of the findings that have come out are essentially driven by the technologies available. So you wouldn’t be able to do brain imaging without the MRIs, the MEGs. So the science and the technologies are inextricable. • The machines both make possible the science and help shape how it is understood…You can’t talk about science apart from the technology anymore. It’s meaningless.’ (Steven and Hilary Rose)

26. Further problems for historians when using scientific knowledge • Unstableness of scientific knowledge (sciences moves much, much faster than history; historians tend to use outdated scientific theories) • Techno-science and capitalism: science is no longer done by people but by machines; it is privatised which shapes what is researched and what not • ‘For the contemporary biotechnological corporation to exist and survive, it is (to search investors, for instance, who would need to sink huge amount of money into a biotech venture to enable it in the first place) credibility rather than truth that is essential to start with. At some fundamental level, it does not matter whether the promissory vision of a biotech company are true or not, as long as they are credible.’ • More investment into PR than into the new scientific developments

27. How to trust scientific results? ‘Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine’, she reports, ‘particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine .’ (Marcia Angell, Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption) ‘Life is big business’ –steep rise of fraudulent research

28. Will we need an Office of Research Integrity (ORI) as the sciences have to check our scientific sources? Will historians be fired – as scientists are – if it is discovered that we used ‘false’ evidence from the natural sciences? Will the bio-turn lead us into a new exciting area of historical research? Will we overcome the ‘lingustic turn’?