Western Civilizations: Three Million Years in 60 Minutes

Lerner et al. (1998) open the eleventh edition of Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture with an image of a pocket watch, from a parallax angle, illustrating the incredibly long history of humanlike creatures on planet Earth. Most humans have difficulty imagining the wide-open spaces in our universe, the actual size of huge numbers such as trillions of dollars, and the expanse of history as calculated by archeologists and other scientists.? Werner et al. provide an analogy to help us envision the incredible expanse of time since our first ancestors inhabited our fragile planet.? Taking one hour as the unit of measure. from the early beginnings of humankind to our present day in 2025, “humans biologically like ourselves have been on earth only for the last minute” (p. 2).? The authors account for the other 59 minutes as follows: Homo habilis appears at minute zero. Homo erectus appears 12 minutes later and endures until minute 51.? Homo sapiens claims the next 5 minutes.? Neanderthal claims 3 minutes of the pie and modern man is still occupying the last minute of our pocket watch analogy (used to represent approximately 3 million years).? In retrospect, planet Earth was essentially untamed and unspoiled by overuse of resources and pollution of water and air during the realms of erectus, sapiens, and Neanderthal, but modern man has made incredible technical advances; however, many of these advances have been employed to conduct war, deplete fossil fuels, and emit carbon chemicals that lead to climate change and other challenges.

Worldwide Challenges

Two books that address the challenges humankind has been dealing with during minute 59 of our earthly environment include The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington.

Orestes and Conway (2014), simulating the ability to step into the future and then look back into the past, observe and bemoan that we, “failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold (for example tragic wildfires in California and a recent head-on collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane in Washington, DC (with risky Army training exercises in the same air space as a busy airport and a long-standing shortage of overworked air traffic controllers).? Samuel P. Huntington (1996) summarizes his article and book with the following words in his book’s introduction, “clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war” (p. 13).

Lerner et al. (1998) highlight many of the bright spots during our 59-minute view of the world as we know it.? In one related discussion, Alexander the Great, once asked Crates (a disciple of Diogenes) whether “the city of Thebes, recently destroyed by war, should be rebuilt” and Crates replied, “Why? Another Alexander will surely tear it down again” (p. 158).

References

Lerner, R. E., Meacham, S, & Burns, E. M. (1998). Western civilizations: Their history and their culture, 11th edition. W. W. Norton.

Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order. Simon & Schuster.

Oreskes, N. & Conway, E. M. (2014). The collapse of western civilization: A view from the future. Columbia University Press.? https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Collapse_of_Western_Civilization/3HjeAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+collapse+of+western+civilization&printsec=frontcover

Link to another mini essay about Western civilization:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/making-europe-story-origins-traditions-many-nations-ma-ms-dba-yujie/