Matthew Slaboch: Big History and Global Futures

Matthew Slaboch
PhD in Political Science, with specializations in Political Theory & Comparative Politics
Professor, School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University

Big History and Global Futures: Complementary Investigations of Origins and Ends
In The Future of the World (2018), Jenny Andersson provides the intellectual history of Global Futures as a field of inquiry. Her research presents the main figures in this field, discusses their agendas and arguments, and describes the tools that they use to reach their conclusions. Of the first of these –actors—she writes that they are “an eclectic and somehow curious group,” with backgrounds ranging from academia to business to journalism and beyond (pp. 5, 7). In their approaches to the future as an object of inquiry, this “eclectic” group blends “technological utopianism with social and political critique, a kind of hippie language with new notions of management and rationalization” (p. 6). Their research output contains “optimistic notions of world development,” but also “catastrophist discourses of nuclear war and ecocide” (p.5). Whether hopeful or pessimistic, they regard the contemporary world, “more than any previous historical world,” as one “marked by the idea of human influence.” They use instruments of prediction –experiments, surveys, statistics, simulations, and models—to forecast the future, with an eye toward not only anticipating changes, but also shaping them (p. 3). Their detractors regard them as “hucksters” (p. 7). But even if they are sincere in their motives and earnest in their endeavors, with their varied starting points and approaches, futurists have “failed many times in their attempts to turn future research into an academic discipline” (p. 11). Much of what Andersson says about Global Futures applies just as well to Big History. Eclectic and interdisciplinary? Check. At once alarmist and aspirational? Check. Attuned to human impacts on non-human things? Check. Not fully recognized as an academic discipline? Check. I propose to write a paper that examines in tandem the nascent and changing fields of Global Futures and Big History. This paper would explore similarities and differences, looking at the major personalities, groups, ideas, and activities associated with both. Aiming to be more than descriptive, it would be prescriptive, as well, proposing areas for collaboration between the two fields where there is consensus and grounds for it. Andersson argues, and practitioners of Big
History would acknowledge, that “historians need to reengage with the future” (p. 12). How can historians and futurologists help each other in this task and others?

https://bighistory.org/