Monthly Archives: August 2018

August 30 – Why the Pessimism?- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion rise through the human species.  We also noted that in spite of the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides which shows evolution rising through humanity in the form of increasing human welfare (which is the main contributor to survival of the species), ‘conventional wisdom’ as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, sees this as a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norbert, or rejects it outright.

This week we will take a closer look at this phenomenon.

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.  Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.  Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Sarte.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand the human race as in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be protected from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such predictions of future doom.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, showing clearly that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited in the last two posts.  Even actual, tangible and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime, still leaves the majority of Americans to see their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism, and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Progressiphobia In Western Society

Pinker notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, persons seem to be optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the history of pessimism about human progress, through the eyes of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

This week we looked at how such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution  as detailed by Johan Norberg is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

Next week we will take a look a few reasons for such ‘progressiphobia’.

August 23 Summing Up Norberg in the Light of Teilhard’s Vision

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Today’s Post

   Last week, we did a brief overview of the fourth of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing progress of the human species.  We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

This week, I’d like to wrap up this part of the blog, in which we have looked at the data which substantiate Teilhard’s audacious optimism, with a summary of what we have seen in the past four posts.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   These four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that contrary to ‘conventional wisdom’, human evolution can be seen to be advancing on nearly all fronts.  We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

In the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, for example, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997.  He asserted that “Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history.  Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”  He is saying that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that is exactly what has happened.  Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually.  In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low and middle income countries has doubled.”

   He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP.  Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

   And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else.   A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth.  That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism and protectionism.”

   And what’s changing?

 “But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour, and use technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

   As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

   Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply noted that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how this is less a statement that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas have to start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the noosphere, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be added: “When allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where they are not allowed, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.

…And Why Can’t We See it?

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book, with the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

Norberg cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now seen as clearly incorrect?  More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

Next week we will take a look at this phenomena and its roots in today’s Western culture.

August 16 Poverty as a Metric of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the statistics (from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’) documenting the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’, all point to not only a general improvement in the lot of humans, but a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand  generations of human existence.  We also saw, once again, how the agents of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.

This week we will look at a fourth metric of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records.  Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger and disease, especially in third-world and ‘developing’ countries.

Generally, we have become numb to this phenomena,   with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted.  Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as found in the gospel of Matthew, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising.  As the Economist reports, when asked whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half.  This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out:  “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”

So, what data might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes.   Only prosperity has causes.”  By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with the majority of our ancestors spending most of their lives, like the animals they evolved from, looking for food.  The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.

Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to understand poverty is that of prosperity.  She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’  Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?

Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’.  He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%.  This meant that people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.

In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GNP.  He puts this into perspective:

“Even if all incomes had been perfectly equally distributed (which they certainly weren’t) it would have meant a life of extreme deprivation for everybody.  The average world citizen lived in abject misery, as poor as the average person in Haiti, Liberia and Zimbabwe today.”

   So, in 1820, the average percent in poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%.  If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person 2,000 years to double his income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all of Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.  This increase did not emerge as a result of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time period.

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East:  As The United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented:

   Country             GDP Increase

     China                   2000%

    Japan                   1100%

   India                       500%

      The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing.  The following data also shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty.  (source: World Bank):

From     To           Pct Poverty Decrease

1820  1920           From 94% to 82%

1920   1950          From 82% to 72%

1950   1981          From 72% to 54%

1981   2015          From 54% to 12%

   Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years.  The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the other half required only 50 years.

Putting This Into Perspective

At the risk of redundancy, I’ll revisit how all this fits into the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard::

–          Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society.  Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.

–          Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted and globalization is fostered.  Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly.  Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.

–          These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”

The Next Post

This week we took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify how evolution continues through the human species, but even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveal the same trends as outlined above.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

August 9 – Life Expectancy As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post 

   Last week we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the movement of evolution in the human species.  Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, it is clear that the betterment of humankind is occurring: the slope of the curve of improvement can be seen to rapidly increase in the past few generations, and that this increase is spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

   “Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short.  More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.   People died early, as infants or children, and mothers often died giving birth.  The high mortality rate was not primarily because of the prevalence of violence, but because of infectious disease, unsafe water and bad sanitary conditions.”

      Plagues frequently caused massive deaths.  The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population.  Such plagues continued on a regular basis, and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century.  In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640.  Norberg notes,

“Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”

Considering all this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

Neither was it different from Eastern countries.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

   Charts which show the occurrence of data over time are commonly used to illustrate ‘trends’.  Most often, extrapolations from recorded to anticipated data are effected by using previous trends to predict those anticipated in the future.  This is a very effective method of prediction, except when there is a sharp change in the rate of change that could not be anticipated by past data.  These sharp changes are known as ‘knees in the curve’, data points at which past performance no longer serves as a basis to predict the future.

Norberg’s charts show many such points at which past trends in human evolution are significantly interrupted by new paradigms, and his data on life expectancy is no exception.

   In the early 1800s, the trend of globalization, in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, such a startling reversal began to happen.  Norberg’s statistics quantify the trend and clearly show this ‘knee in the curve’ of human life expectancy:

   Time Frame                              Life Expectancy

Prehistoric times                              18-20 YRS

500BC                                                    20-25

1830                                                       30

1910                                                       32

1990                                                       60

2012                                                       70

   As we saw last week, in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, these startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.  Life expectancy can be seen to increase by 40 years in the short span of one hundred years, a blink in evolutionary time.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such a ‘knee in the curve’.  Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’.  Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

Further, as Norberg notes, such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results.  As they have been applied to developing countries, such improvements are being seen much more quickly.  As Norberg notes,  Life expectancy in the ‘developing countries’ has seen such an increase.  These figures represent the period of 1950 to 2010:

Asia:  Increases from 42 to -70 Years

Latin America:  Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa:  Increases from 37 to 57 Years

  We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the increase in human stature as measured by human height increase in developing countries to nearly equal to the West in only sixty years.

Putting This Into Perspective

Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, I’ll just summarize:

–          Innovation and invention are natural characteristics of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society.  Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.

–          Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted.  Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese and early empires of Islam, but died still-born because restricted from trade.

–          These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed:  the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, ‘The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of evolution, with the topic of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

August 2 – Food As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a cursory look at an aspect of human activity that provides a basis for assessing Teilhard’s forecasts for human evolution.  Without going into statistical details, we saw how well Teilhard’s insights are borne out by this cursory look at the topic of ‘Fuel’.

This week we will extend our search to the topic of ‘Food’ but, using Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, this time we’ll include some key statistics that will sharpen the point even finer

Norberg’s Statistics on Food’s impact on Human Evolution

First off, let’s take a look at some of Norberg’s statistics.  In this first look at his evolutionary metrics, he cites over thirty-three statistics which quantify how food, its availability and its production and distribution have increased human quality of life over the span of known human history.  Obviously, we won’t have room go into details on each, but there’s no question that each one is an example of the exponential rise in human welfare.

Famine   Few metrics are more pervasive than the incidence of famine in human history.  Norberg notes that in just four years in the fifteenth century, famine claimed the lives of one out of every fifteen people, just in Europe.  This wasn’t a unique period, with the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century.  The death toll was horrendous.  Between 1870 and 2015 there have been 106 episodes of mass starvation.  With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, it was not unexpected for Thomas Malthus to predict, early in the 18th century, that in a few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail.  However, statistics show an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now.   27M died from 1900-1910.  Then several million due to wartime famine from 1930 to 1943, then several more in the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, with just one major area today, and that is North Korea.    Further, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, it is now based on poor government.  Norberg notes that “No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because, “Rulers who are dependent on voters to do everything to avoid starvation and a free press makes the public aware of the problems”.

Product Yield   So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic.  One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods.  Norberg notes that the discovery that ammonia could be synthesized led to the production of artificial fertilizer which immediately increased crop yield.  The invention of automated product extraction added another boost, such as harvesters and milkers:

o   In 1850 it took 25 men, 24 hours to harvest 1,000 pounds of grain.  In 1950 one man could do it in in six minutes

o   In that time frame, it took one person 30 min to milk 10 cows.  By 1950 it was down to one minute.

As a result, in the same timeframe, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours.  Further, from 1920 to 2015 the cost of this supply was reduced by fifty percent.

Better strains of wheat have also led to increased yield.  In the last fifty years the production of Indian crops has increased by 700%; in Mexico by 600%, moving these countries from importers to exporters of wheat.

The combination of better crops and improved extraction has led to a slower increase of land dedicated to growing crops.

Malnutrition   Not surprisingly, increased production has led to decreased malnutrition.  The average Western caloric intake per person increased by 50% in the last hundred years; in the world by 27% in the past fifty years.  This has resulted in world malnutrition dropping from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

This has also increased human stature.   In both East and Western countries, average height was about the same until about 1870, when it began increasing in the West by 1cm per year to the present day.  The same level of increase did not begin in Asia until the forties, and is still continuing to this day.  However, in countries with poor governments, such as in Sub Saharan Africa and North Korea, it has slightly decreased.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s Projections to see how well they correlate.

Human Invention As we saw last week, humans are capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction.  Without increasing crop yields, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now.   With the population growth that has occurred, we would by now have run out of arable land to feed ourselves.

Globalization Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace.  As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control.  Where the effect of globalization comes in is where such innovation can transfer to other countries where governmental overreach is being reduced by the installation of democratic institutions.  In general, this is nearly always occurs in a West-to-East direction.

Inner Pull  Such amazing inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.

Speed.  It’s not just that solutions to the problems were effected.  Note that most of them found in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years.  In the estimated eight thousand generations thought to have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three.  Due to the ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading in the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West.  For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years, but in the East it is proceeding today at twice this rate.

Failures in Forecasting  As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the end of the times did not occur.  While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially.  Even today, there are still writers who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.

Changes of State  As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time (eg molecule to cell).  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play inhuman evolution, as the innovations we have seen this week clearly show

Risk  Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for a non-existing but attractive past, the practices of invention and globalism can be undermined.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the paucity of faith which can be seen today.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

 The Next Post

This week we took a look at the first of Norberg’s evolutionary characteristics, that of ‘Food’ to see how his statistics show a general improvement in human condition over a very short time, and how Teilhard’s evolutionary forces can be shown to active in them.

Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Sanitation’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in humanity.  As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary characteristics that we saw this week.