Monthly Archives: August 2019

August 29, 2019 – Exploring the ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we began a third look at the subject of ‘happiness’, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’, but noting that we are using this term to refer to what Teilhard called ‘the axis of evolution’: the thread of increasing complexity over time. This distinguishes his use of the term from traditional religious jargon that includes such things as the ‘supernatural’.

In our use of it, we are referring to that which is active in our lives, here and now.   As Patricia Allerbee, author of Evolutionary Relationships, puts it, the latest evolutionary activity in the long history of rising universal complexity, the recognition of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

This week we will explore this a bit further.

The Spiritual Ground of Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

On July 11, we took a look at this ‘Terrain of Synergy’ as the common ground between science and religion, for centuries quite small but as writers such as Jonathan Sacks, Teilhard, Richard Rohr and Paul Davies insist, can be seen today as much larger than originally thought.

The expansion of this ground is one of the consequences of moving the center of understanding of evolution from the biological, Earth-centric scope of the Darwinists to the universal, all-encompassing vision of both scientists and religionists today. Not only does the current scope of evolution expand, but the insight into how science and religion contribute to a better understanding of the human condition increases. As Brian Swimme, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, sees the study of ‘cosmology’ as focused on such expansion.

“The sciences will just separate the human off and focus on the physical aspects of the universe and the religious traditions will shy away from the universe because that’s reserved for science. So cosmology is an attempt to deal with the whole and the nature of the human in that.”

   In exploring this ‘terrain of synergy’ we are really exploring the nature of existence, an integrated understanding of the universe, its unfolding, and if it is to be truly ‘cosmological’, our part in it.

Such understanding is the starting place for placing ourselves into the true context of evolution, which is the same thing as understanding how we fit into the fourteen or so billion years of the rise of complexity: Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

As we have seen, such placement recognizes the consequence of failing to do so, as was recognized by Yuval Noah Harari in his suggestion that we have ‘broken the bond that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment” and have hence doomed ourselves to a future of unhappiness and quick extinction. While Yuval fails to recognize the recent (by evolutionary standards) trend towards increased human welfare outlined by Johan Norberg (19 July 2018), our current levels of anxiety indicate that at the personal level, we still have a long way to go.

Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

How can recognition of the ‘terrain of synergy’ be a factor in human happiness?

Consider that understanding the ‘axis of evolution’, the universe’s tendency to increase complexity over time, offers science a way to begin to address the human person on the one hand, and on the other a way for religion to understand the workings of God in universal evolution.

Quantification of complexity, therefore, is a filter through which western religious teachings can be strained to remove their supernatural, magical and otherworldly content. By the same token, defining it can extend the more advanced subjects of science, such quantum physics, into the study of the human person.

The epicenter of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is therefore the common ground between science and religion. It is the recognition that the human person is the latest manifestation of the ‘complexification’ of the ‘stuff of the universe’. This perspective recognizes both the increase in complexity acknowledged (at least tacitly) by science and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things asserted by Western religion.   This perspective emerges when we come at the understanding of the cosmos from science’s recognition that the ‘axis of universal evolution’ is ‘complexification’ and from religion’s intuition that God exists as the underlying agent of such ‘complexification’.

The journey to such an integrated perception is outlined by Teilhard’s description of his own vision of his roots in the ‘axis of evolution’.

Such ‘rootedness’ is essential to our recognition of how we play into the cosmic sweep of evolution. And this recognition is at the core of Patricia Allerbee’s assertion that we must become aware of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

Such recognition is echoed by Teilhard as he describes his experience of the two hands of God:

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   This echoes one of Maurice Blondel’s ‘reinterpretations’ of Western religion’s understanding of God:

“- that God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a gracious future- God is ‘on our side’”

   To a person who believes that they are being held “In God’s hand”, and that the ground of being “is on our side” the possibility of happiness moves from being a possibility to being a probability.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ can be seen in the idea of the ‘terrain of synergy’. Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it a little further. Next week we will look a little deeper in the structure of this ‘terrain of synergy’ for some signposts to such exploration.

August 22, 2019 – Can There Be a ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s book, Sapiens, suggested that we have dug our own grave due to our unique human characteristics, and because of this, true happiness for us was difficult if not impossible.

In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’.   Perhaps our current state is a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily destined to continue.

While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’. But when looking at evolution from Teilhard’s perspective, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution. Perhaps we need to see it as transitory, or as Patricia Allerbee, author of Evolutionary Relationships, puts it, the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

This week we will take a third look at happiness, a look which involves such ‘seeing’. This week we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality’

What is Spirituality?

I have deliberately framed the word ‘spirituality’ with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its overtones of ‘the supernatural’ and the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the lives we live and the ‘ideal’ life which lies far above us.

A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time. What term do we use to discuss it? Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he prefers the term ‘spiritual’. From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agent which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to take on more complex characteristics. Without it, evolution could not proceed. To him, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.

We have seen in this blog how this concept can be found outside of religion. We saw on July 11 how Paul Davies understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.

But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic scientist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless states that the idea of a “first cause of everything” which was the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” was entirely viable. In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.” He is suggesting that there’s definitely something afoot in universal evolution, but that we have to address it from a secular perspective if we want to make anything of it.

As we have seen many times in this blog, Teilhard would have agreed at this level. His take on spirituality also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood Dawkins’ ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

By identifying spirit as the phenomenon, and affirming its existence neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to the observed fact that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution. This fact assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which energizes every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness. As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of new product, not just aggregated properties of the individuals that comprise them.

Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify’. As Teilhard goes on to say

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘cosmic spark’ in all things offers us a perspective on how our being fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it is different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors. If, as Patricia Allerbee asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.

Using Teilhard’s definition, spirituality is therefore indeed a third ground of ‘happiness’.

The Next Post

This week we began a third look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’, but took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.    Given this understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our happiness could be due to how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us and hence, as Patricia Allerbee suggests, can open ourselves to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’. In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves. But as Allerbee recons, we have to first learn to ‘listen’ to it.

“Easier said than done’, goes the old adage. Humans may well be now at their most advanced stage of evolution so far, but where in this stage can be found first the methods of finding this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life? Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment (better aligned with evolution), and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take another step in this exploration of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.

August 15, 2019 – The Evolutionary Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, as we began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.   We began with the ‘material’ view of happiness, and looked at several aspects from the viewpoints of psychology (such as surveys of this highly subjective subject) and biology (especially genetics), and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ is still evasive.

This week we will look at human happiness from the viewpoint of cosmic evolution. If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

  • Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
  • and this increase can be measured by the increase of consciousness,
  • then the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products can’t be ignored.

Whatever it is that has effected the rise of complexity in the ‘stuff of the universe’ must be active in each of its products. As one of these products, it must be active in us. If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Can humans, An Evolved Species, Ever be happy?

If we are to understand our evolution as persons and as of society from the context of universal evolution, our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well. How can our capacity for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Allerbee, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Last week we saw how Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, believes that humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged. He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of flouresence, on the order of several million years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment. This insured, he thinks, a continuing and long lasting ‘accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost. The result, he goes on to opine, is the existential unease that makes is almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and hence will result in untimely extinction.

While I disagree with his conclusion, the idea that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment has some merit. This week we will take a look at this aspect of the potential for happiness.

It’s not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play by our reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as fhey did for our ancestors. This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

   As we have cited several times, Teilhard charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, than cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness. With each new change of state, new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of the precedents. Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the molecule: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”. It takes some time before the new capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

It is in this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’. Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still in development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ was addressed earlier in this blog. The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ was addressed last June, but can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains. It’s not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’. It’s more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival. This is a ‘skill’ which we are still learning.

Thus the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about human nature and how it works (or should work) in the context of an evolved universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it fits harmoniously into the ‘forces of evolution’. Both humans and their environment have evolved over billions of years in which products have increased their complexity, and most recently when this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural’ selection in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person. As Teilhard points out (and Davies and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.   In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s pessimism suggested that humans could never be truly happy due to the wide chasm that they have created with their environment. While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’, but is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution.

Next week we will take a look at evolution from a third perspective as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’.

August 8, 2019 – The Material Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we continued our exploration of the ‘middle ground’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the efforts of science and religion overlap as they continue to address human life. We saw how the aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will take a closer look at this slippery subject, to see if Teilhard’s hermeneutic of placing a subject in the context of universal evolution will help us to see it more clearly.

What Is Happiness

The long string of human thinking in our literature, philosophy and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life. At one end of this wide spectrum lies simple acceptance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end the ‘joyous embrace’ of cycles, which may well recur, but also rise over time, as envisioned in the West . Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center. Most approaches to happiness contain both some level of acceptance of those things over which we have no power mixed with some level of confidence that whatever our lot, it is capable of some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is the name we apply to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down. Circumstances which might depress one person might be shrugged off by another. Personal welfare that might cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others. Our news is filled daily with stories of people unconsoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

Where do we get the information that underpins these stories? The answer is that states of happiness are reported by those who experience them. Their subjective stories are reported, with no small measure of bias on the part of the reporter, and interpreted according to the mindset of the receiver.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery, its basis in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continue. Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith. Does this level of contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said? Let’s look at a few aspects:

  • Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process of conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, religious and racial bias. Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
  • Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry. They state that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin are direct causes of the sensation of happiness, and minimize those things that lead to their secretion in the brain. Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view, nurture doesn’t have a chance.
  • Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose glass is always ‘half empty’. From this view, we are all predisposed towards some level of happiness or unhappiness.
  • Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace. Their hermeneutics and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, science doesn’t have a good handle on happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more subtle approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures. For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation. They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a rich person, even a large amount of money will not have anywhere near the impact as did the poor person. In the case of the person less well off, the impact will likely be longer lasting, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future. In the other case, the money will most likely not affect the person’s well-being, much less that of his family.

A curious take on this subject involves generally happy people who are nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution. This ‘dualism’ occurs when individuals are relatively well-off and well-educated, known as ‘the middle class’. As referred to in a recent article (July 11) of the Economist, this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly contented people vote for angry political parties.

This paradox can be seen in the dissociation between longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties. As the Economist relates, the common election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well off’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist traces one possible cause of this phenomena, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations. Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in rapid changes. As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught, as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone. This same group, in many cases, are being taught how to use ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habit’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, is becoming a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be more prevalent. The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable intellectual nest for today’s turbuolence.

This certainly leads to an increase of indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others. We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Consciousness aware of itself speeds up evolution in an environment highly subject to our influence. This ‘upset,’ not unlike weather (static air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns: a complexification/change to a new organization with new attributes).   Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who themselves are rapidly changing have such a future? Is it possible that the process of harmony-disharmony-change of state that we see today result in a new harmony?

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic mileu?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy by which human persons unite is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion year upwelling of the cosmos, then how can we not recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal and the level of society?

More specific to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s perspective be applied to each of us?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’, its vagueness, and began to place it in Teilhard’s context of universal evolution. If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

 

August 1, 2019 – Human Life: Dealing With the Pain of Convergence

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring the ‘terrain of synergy’, the area of fruitful coherence between science and religion. In the past two weeks we have seen how Jonathan Sacks looks at this terrain from the middle ground, the terrain in which we live our daily lives.

As Sacks, Davies and Teilhard all avow, both our personal and collective evolution requires us to both better understand this phenomenon in which we are enmeshed, and our need for this understanding to guide us in cooperating with it.

This week we will take another step into looking at this phenomenon as we address it from its influence on our inner, personal life. It’s time to address the slippery phenomenon of ‘happiness’.

If We’re So Evolved, Why Ain’t We Happy?

It’s not difficult to find references to ‘existential anxiety’ in the current press. In spite of the recent increase in global human welfare reported by Johan Norberg, the persistence of pessimism and even depression among our contemporaries seems to be increasing. The causes underlying this phenomenon are certainly not clear, but the effect seems universal.

In his bestselling book, “Sapiens”. Yuval Noah Harari takes a unique position on this. He sees the cause of our ‘existential anxiety’ rooted in the speed of human evolution. In his view, the speed of our human unique evolution has a considerable impact on how we feel.

Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

From his perspective, in the (relatively) glacial speed of pre-human evolution, species could ‘grow up’ with their environment, changing no faster than their environment changes. As a result, ‘Natural Selection’ in turn could ‘select for accommodation’, insuring that each species evolved in concert with its environment. In keeping with his Darwinist perspective, such an ‘evolutionary coherent pace’ insures not only better coherence between these ancestors and their environment but insures their ‘survival’. He cites science’s study of the past as showing ‘life cycles’ of our immediate ‘homo’ genus ancestors (egaster, rudalfensis, and others) to be in millions of years, and believes that these lengthy spans are the result of the more harmonious relationship between them and their environments. It’s not that their environments didn’t change, but rather that when they did change, such as in global warming and cooling cycles, the groups simply migrated, like the other animals, to different areas.

Yuval believes that with our subspecies, sapiens, our rapid population growth changed this dynamic, forcing the need for agriculture, with its corollaries such as towns, governments and laws, and interrupting the migratory instincts developed by Natural Selection. Thus the speedup of sapiens drove a wedge between us and our environment from which we have never recovered. We are, in effect, ‘longing for the good old days’.

In addition, he notes that humans have had a larger impact on the environment than our ancestors, and impose this impact much quicker as well. This is causing an additional disconnect as both our evolution and these environmental impacts change faster than we, as a species, can become comfortable with it.

Harari goes to great length in his book to call out the significant disconnect between humans and their environment, identifying the point in our history which occurred with the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, in which humans ceased to be nomadic and became sedentary, as a pivot point in human evolution. Prior to this point, while the human evolutionary ‘rate’ was slower, its impact on the environment was much less, and as he theorizes, our ancestors were ‘happier’.
After this point, he notes the rapid rise of human population (in which humans had a more reliable food source), which had the downside of introducing a reduction in the human’s sense of ‘belonging’ to the environment. He cites many ills of post-agrarian society, such as the need for intensive, benumbing labor (to tend the fields), the crowding and ugly by-products of overpopulation in cities resulting in diseases and other ills. He sees this turning point as a ‘decision’ and a huge ‘evolutionary mistake’ resulting in what he sees as the root of widespread unease in human civilization today. In his telling, with the Agricultural Revolution, humans, enabled populations to explode, negatively affect their environment and ‘ruining’ a satisfactory accommodation between humans and their environment which persists to this day.

He sees in this an underlying paradox in human evolution. Our ability to impact our environment impedes our accommodation of it. We are more ready, he asserts, to change it rather than (as our ancestors) live with its perceived problems. Each change that we make produces yet another problem that we believe we have to fix, and so on to the present day. Each of these changes creates yet another degree of alienation from nature, and contributes to an additional degree of anxiety. He extrapolates this tendency to a future in which our negative impact on our environment, our increasing discomfort with it and the incessant necessity for new technology to ‘fix’ it, leads inevitably to a future in which we quickly become totally dependent on automation, resulting in our untimely extinction. Unlike the reign of our Homo ancestors, in the millions of years, he gives us only a few thousand or so.

This dystopian view of human evolution (not the first, as Malthus showed us) provides one answer to the question of ‘if we’re so evolved why ain’t we happy?’

So, Why Ain’t We?

Setting aside the fact that not all of us are unhappy, the issue of happiness shows a long trail of evolution in itself, and can be seen in the immense spectrum of attitudes that represents total fatalism at one end and joyful acceptance at the other.

Teilhard also saw the rise of anxiety as resulting from the rapid rise of human evolution:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   So, we are brought to the point of considering the ‘terrain of synergy’ from the perspective of human happiness as well as that of the continuation of our species. Are we, as Harari predicts, doomed to a future in which we, unlike the millions of species which preceded us, doomed to carry our increased evolution as a burden in which our survival must be paid for by our unhappiness. Is there a perspective, grounded in both material and spiritual tangibility, in which we can see our future otherwise?

In this blog we have consistently followed the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin , supplemented by those of other writers whose vision of the future suggest the answer to this question is an unqualified ‘yes’. Admitting, however, that the general issue of human happiness is very slippery, I’d like to take a perspective on the ‘terrain of synergy’ that continues, as Jonathan Sacks has opened the door, to the ‘middle ground’ of it. Harari is certainly insightful in his look backwards in history, but does this retrospective necessarily lead to the dismal future he predicts? Turning Teilhard’s succinct perspective of evolution, “Everything which rises must converge”, might it be true that “Everything which converges must rise?”

The Next Post

This week we followed up on Jonathan Sacks insights on the middle ground of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap.   In spite of the optimistic tone of Sacks, as well as that of Teilhard and Paul Davies, we saw how Yuval Noah Harari offers a highly negative prognostication.

Next week we will continue our exploration of this ‘middle ground’ from the slippery perspective of human happiness. Not only is it difficult to quantify, but even more difficult to establish causes and effects. We will see if our long journey towards seeing the ‘Secular Side of God’ can offer any insights into seeing this phenomenon more clearly.