The Traps of a "Grand" History

My wife often complains that my writing is not concrete enough. To her, my articles always seem to be circling around concepts and theories, with a dearth of concrete details that can make those abstract ideas grounded in the realities and experiences of day-to-day life. It is a point that I have to grudgingly concede on multiple occasions. Ideas are great to think about as mental exercises of "why" and "how come," but if they have any relevance as grounds for actionable plans, supplementing them with the "what" and "how" is imperative, and frankly, quite difficult.

It is an issue that many thinkers seem to struggle with. Many a philosopher draw inspiration from their everyday experiences, spawning groundbreaking mental processes from the smallest activities that happened to or around them in real life. Yet, as the mental processes become ever more complex and all-encompassing, they quickly outgrow the scope of the original activities that inspired their very creation. The result, for the intended audience of the ideas, is an unavoidable need to bend one's mind in a way that builds in and accepts assumptions and suppositions that seem unnatural in daily life.

A genre that is particularly prone to ideas that start out in real life but often end up too far from reality is the study of "grand" history. This genre looks not at particular historical events but at human history as a consistent flow across centuries and millennia, with incessant attempts to decode fundamental forces that drive developments forward. Individual people, wars, and political/economic decision-making are not interesting to grand historians, because to them, they are just the results of much larger forces that are beyond the control of great leaders and nations.

These forces mentioned by grand historians are often highly fatalistic and reductionist. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Prof. Jared Diamond argues that different levels of human development around the world originate in different geographical and environmental conditions. The fact that humans had no control over which landmass had more temperate temperatures, flatter lands for easier transport, and more diversity of plants and animals for domestication means that they had little to do with the relative strength and power of the civilizations that grew out of those environments. 

In the highly acclaimed Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Noah Harari almost falls into the same reductionism, using (very, very) brad strokes to sketch out the leading principles of human development. Attributing the spread of agriculture, empires, religion, and money all as forces that were originally creative but then quickly got beyond human control, Harari argued that it is the results of superhuman trends that enable humans to go from roaming small bands of extended family members to collaborations of complete strangers by the millions that forged lasting economic and social institutions.

At the first sight, that all makes sense. There is no denying that groups with more arable land and larger populations have come to dominate smaller ones with larger resources, and they leveraged globalist ideas, from the ambition to conquer the entire world to a hunt for some sort of universal truth, in both physically and mentally subjugating others. The resulting global conglomerations, whether they be political entities, religious movements, or economic systems, are seen as the dominant movers and shakers of the modern world.

Yet, by stressing that global ideas control everyone through their physical manifestations, grand histories also ignore valuable insight that can be gained from empirical evidence. Just like my writing that my wife criticizes, they use broad strokes that, with each paragraph and page, become ever more detached from everyday reality. In the end, it becomes difficult to envisage how the unifying concepts of grand history are relevant to the mundane everyday of the average citizen, who is much more likely to spend his or her entire life living and developing a career in a single state while adhering to a single religion and a single set of local, ethnic cultural concepts.

Of course, both Diamond and Harari make plenty of efforts to pause their free-flowing theorizing to bring them more in line with real-world examples, both at the collective and individual levels. But given the diversity of everyday experiences of their global audiences, many examples are undoubtedly unrelatable without extensive explanation of their background information. Grand historians refrain from doing that, likely because the limits of their pages require prioritizing ideas rather than events, or that the trap of overgeneralization makes it impossible to specify the ideas further down to a more microscopic level. Either way, the average reader of grand histories should be conscious of this issue.