In the book-length elaboration of his influential 2009 essay "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Dipesh Chakrabarty reproduces the original essay, "revised and renamed." Some changes are larger and some smaller, but one of the smaller seeming is large indeed. It involves the very first "Thesis":
Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History
This was the original formulation (2009: 201). Revised (2021: 26), it omits the phrase "Age-old." It might seem no more than a rounding error, it but it betokens Chakrabarty's discovery, over a decade of criticisms and debates, that the "humanist distinction between natural history and human history" isn't perhaps so very old at all. Unchanged is a more cautious claim to long-standing status:
In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force. (206/30)
Chakrabarty's concern is the discipline of history as it developed in Europe, and he traces the distinction to Vico (1668-1744), although he notes Vico's ideas didn't really shape historiography until the 20th century with Croce and Collingwood. Still, it's significant that he casually referred to the distinction as "age-old" in 2009 and then reconsidered.
The much-cited line "Humans now wield a geological force" can be taken in two ways. One, that of the "climate scientists," claims to describe a very recent development: while human beings have shaped our biological environments for thousands of years, we haven't affected the biogeochemical earth system until now. The other way of taking the claim, Chakrabarty's own, asserts that this new status - once recognized - ust scramble all our inherited ways of understanding our place in nature. Never before have we even imagined that the human species might be a "geological agent."
This latter claim turns out not to be true - and the "time-honored" distinction may be no older than, well, the age of the Anthropocene! When did we imagine humanity might be a geological agent before?
A common myth among moderns (who think we make do without myths!) is that premodern people were incurious about the world, chalking everything up to some generic divine plan. But this is how modern people understand divine plans. Early modern and premodern Europeans knew that the divine plan was multifaceted, came in several steps, and had encountered obstacles - and one of these was human. We all know the story that God sent a flood because human sin was too great, and wonder what ancient inundation is recorded in this memory-become-myth. But we have forgotten that the mass of the floodwaters was thought to have reshaped the earth, whose contours and history premoderns, too, used their best available resources to try to understand. It looked disordered to them, and they came to understand it in relation to the human penchant for disorder.
Then as now human beings confronted in geology the sign and effect of their sinfulness. This geological agency was indirect or unintended, of course, but that makes it more, not less, like the agency of which the Anthropocene makes us aware. Perhaps one of the stories we need to tell is how (western) people forgot their potential for wielding geological force! The "age" of this not-so "time-honored" distinction may be that which Bonneuil and Fressoz in ch. 9 of Shock of the Anthropocene provocatively call the Agnotocene, a recent era of produced "zones of ignorance."
Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222; The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021)
