Monthly Archives: April 2020

April 30, 2020 – Understanding the Structure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw that one way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks (those associated with the risks brought on by the milieu of our collective humanity) was to better understand the noosphere itself and what part we play in it. In doing so, we are taking Teilhard’s approach which he explains:

“Evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses which all systems must submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.”

   If we’re going to manage the risks, we must better understand the milieu that we are creating as we evolve. Teilhard’s approach to any subject is to place it into the context of universal evolution if we are to better understand it, and the noosphere is no exception.

This week we will continue down this path of looking at the noosphere in an evolutionary context to help situate ourselves in this process of understanding ‘complexification’ as it takes place in human evolution.

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard used the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor for understanding how the expansion of humanity compresses us as it reaches the equator of our metaphorical sphere. As a result, instead of continuing to spread, we begin to press in on ourselves, requiring replacement of those tools that served us so well in the ‘expansion’ phase with ones which will support our ‘compression’.

In the same way, he uses the metaphor of the spiral (Jan 9) to illustrate how ‘the stuff of the universe’ evolves as its components unite to increase their complexity at the same time that they are drawn ‘upwards to more complexity’ and ‘inwards towards closer union’. The spiral that Teilhard envisions isn’t just a simple coil, like a bedspring, it’s a spiral which converges as it rises over time.

Teilhard sees the cosmic energy which powers evolution, active in each element of the universe, acting in three ways:

  • First, he notes a ‘tangential’ component of this energy by which the granules of the ‘stuff of the universe’ have the potential of uniting with each other.
  • Secondly, he notes a ‘vertical’ component of this energy by which such union increases complexity
  • Thirdly he notes a ‘radial’ component of this energy by which the components become not only more complex, but more capable of increasing their unification and therefore becoming more complex .

Hence the convergence of the spiral pulls these components not only closer to each other but also closer to the ‘axis’ of the spiral (Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’). In doing so they become closer to the source of the universal energy by which all things become united in such a way as to differentiate themselves at the same time that they are enriched.

Thus, in this simple graphic metaphor, Teilhard shows the universe evolving as union brings complexity which in turn increases the potential for further union.

A very simple example of this tri-vectored evolutionary force can be seen in the Standard Model of Physics. Electrons can unite to become atoms, which by definition are more complex. The few types of ‘the stuff of the universe’ represented by electrons become the many types represented by atoms. The atoms in turn contain more potential for unification than did the electrons, and therefore become a larger set of granules which are not only more complex but whose potential is increased in such a way that they can unite to become highly complex molecules.

In such successive ‘trips around the spiral’ do we see the incredible simple electron evolving into the highly complex amino acid which is one of the building blocks of the cell.

Applying Teilhard’s spiral metaphor to humanity, we can understand ourselves as the most recent manifestation of such ‘stuff of the universe’, produced as the result of these three components of energy which interact to increase the complexity of the universe. We engage with ‘tangential’ energy when we relate to others; while enhancing and enriching our ‘persons’; we engage with ‘radial’ energy as we become more conscious of, and learn to cooperate with the ‘tangential’ energy which differentiates and enhances us, and in this cooperation both our persons and our ‘psychisms’ become more complete and enriched.

So, to the question of where are we in this universal journey from pure energy to some future state of increased complexity, Teilhard offers a suggestion: We are early in the process of learning both how relationships and cooperation are essential to our progress.

That said, can we quantify how such process can be seen?

Th Empirical Spiral

We are surely very early in the process of building an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them. Even so, empirical science can offer some insight.

While the light which science can show on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights the many ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

  • Matter appearing from pure energy
  • Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter
  • Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms
  • Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells
  • Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into the more complex groupings found in neurons
  • Neurons find ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then to brains
  • Neocortices emerge from limbic brains, themselves from reptilian brains
  • Conscious brains become aware of their functionality.

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which ensues. While science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the increasing complexity that ensues. There is no current scientific explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the undifferentiated level of the big bang to the highly differentiated human which is uniquely capable of an awareness which is aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by science, their increase in complexity following each discontinuity into human evolution requires a look into how the element of ‘consciousness’ can also be seen to evolve.

Next Week

This week we took a first step toward ‘understanding the noosphere’ by following Teilhard as he situates the noosphere in an evolutive context.   To begin this phase we saw how Teilhard used the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ to map out the manifestations of energy which power our evolution, and how their manifestations can be seen in the ‘discontinuities’ which have occurred in the history of the universe.

Next week we will look further into the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ as we carry it forward into the realm of consciousness.

April 23, 2020 – Managing The Risks of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize matter into increased complexity. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides ‘proof of the pudding’ for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding how our two great human enterprises, religion and science, occur in in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by such ‘right brain’ activities as instinct and intuition. As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

As we saw in posts on The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking can be seen in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament. Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ in each of us.  While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure from it than evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right and left brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.

Science in its own way is also stuck. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion. Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers. However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for freedom and such things as faith and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.

As Sacks puts it,

“To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

   This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts which make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’. We saw in last week’s post how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome. We have seen many other examples over the last many posts

Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than we could in the past. Teilhard saw such an enterprise as

“A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”

   So we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition. We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.

This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John puts it, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the World”. It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine and emerged in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which show how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.

The facets of empowerment which he documents: personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion.  This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.

Something else is necessary as well. Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some two hundred thousand years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’. The morphing of such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago into a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, stomped out) in human society.

Thus the pace of evolution must be appreciated. Certainly it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context, and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will take a look at where we are today in this process.

April 16, 2020 – How Do We Insure Our Own Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species. We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.”

   But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence. Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore compromise progress in favor of superficial improvements . They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’. From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken-ness’. We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’. This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…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.

   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, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally prized by secularists. In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality. Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved. From his perspective, it can be seen as active in every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness.

Thus the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed. However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (eg: matter, eg: us). With this understanding, the idea of spirituality rises from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter to one in which matter is dependent on spirituality for its evolutionary rise in complexity.

With this new approach, human welfare is not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, it is actually a result of it. And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported in the free press. However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future. Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t just not in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.   Seen thusly, Teilhard’s extension of spirituality from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a third look at this new perspective so we can better understand the difference it can make in where we go on from here.

April 9 – We’re Evolving, We’re Pessimistic, What’s Next?

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Today’s Post

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues. We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, Initially experiencing an age of expansion, but as the ‘equator’ is crossed, leading to a new age of compression. He notes that as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself. In Teilhard’s words, “The noosphere begins to compress.”

We then went on to address how this new phenomena is effecting a change in human evolution.   We started with a focus on evolution as it manifests itself in our daily lives, then went on to see exactly how we can see such manifestation, then to question the lack of recognition of this manifestation in society at large and finally to look at the risks of such pessimism.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’: the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human. Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stage of biological life (Natural Selection), he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the workings of the stages of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’, the stage of human thought.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology. This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’. To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how the ‘complexification’, so clearly seen in these spheres, can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles (human persons) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires ever more “harmonious interrelations”. Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” is resolved as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can now see more clearly why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution. Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward. Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s three essential elements of human evolution:

  • New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)
  • A rise in interiority (our personal maturity) and liberty (our autonomy)
  • Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

But as we have seen, these teachings all require ‘reinterpretation’ to uncover their relevance and focus to these three elements. Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species (which is the same as continuing its evolution) we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to more clearly understand and cooperate with its ‘laws’. As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past hundred fifty years we have seen distinctive examples of both. Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’ is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also articulate the evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously renew their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us when put it into these terms. For the past hundred fifty years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products. They may not have been explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups

contributed to their personal growth, but nonetheless grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit. They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out. We’ve looked at both examples and risks. While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Richard Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

April 2, 2020 – What Risks Undermine The Continuation of Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, although there are risks to the continuation of human evolution in our perennial (but so far successful) break-fix-break cycle, faith in our ability to manage this cycle is more important than the expertise we develop to invent fixes to those things we break.

This week we will take a second look at these ‘Noospheric’ risks from the perspective of our place in the upsweep of cosmic evolution.

The Fragility of Evolution

Consider that the enterprise of cosmic evolution is itself a risky business. Science sees evolution occurring when the ‘stuff of the universe’ which emerges from the ‘big bang’ seemingly thumbs its nose at entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics by which each unification of particles of like matter comes at a cost of available energy. Such unification may well, says science, contribute to evolution by an increase in complexity, but at the same time is accompanied by a small loss of energy. By this understanding of Physics, the universe begins with a certain quantum of energy, and as soon as it begins it starts running down.

In seeming opposition, not only do things evolve while this is happening, but they evolve from simple configurations to more complex ones. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, since there are obviously many more ways for things to be un-complex (disorderly, even chaotic) than there are for things to be complex (more orderly), the very existence of evolution seems counter to the Second Law. According to Pinker, “Evolution occurs against the grain.”

Worse yet, complex entities are clearly more fragile than simpler ones. In the example of DNA molecules, which contain the ‘data’ which guide a living entity toward its development, it employs such a stunning magnitude of components that it is more susceptible to cosmic radiation and random fluctuations than a simple molecule. Any ‘rise in complexity’ clearly is in opposition to the ‘rise in chaos’ potentially resulting from such effects.

Still worse yet, As Teilhard observes, while nature seems to have a built-in ‘agent of complexity’ by which its elements can unite to increase their complexity, (and without which evolution could not proceed) this factor becomes secondary to continued evolution when it enters the realm of the human and now requires ‘cooperation’. As Richard Dawkins sees it, “Genes are replaced by ‘memes’ as the agent of evolution in humans”.

Once humans acquire the capability of ‘reflective consciousness’, by which they are ‘aware of their awareness’, the rules change once again. In the human person, evolution must now be chosen if it is to continue.

So What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

But if evolution needs to be ‘chosen’ to continue, what’s involved in choosing it? Restating and simplifying the Teilhard quote from last week:

“(we need) to be quite certain… that the (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.

We saw in the last three posts how common it is to engage in denial of progress and how such denial reflects a fear of the future. We also touched on the fact that such fear can be (and so often has been) seized upon by populists who offer themselves as bulwarks against the woes of the future if only we would trust them. Their first move is to insist that there is much to be feared, then to begin to use this fear to undermine trust in the Western structures of society (effectively a grouping of ‘memes’) which they claim to have unleashed such woes as the free press, individual freedoms and open immigration.   Other Western liberal practices are also denigrated, such as the development of a global infrastructure by which every advance, such as those reported by Norberg, can be shared globally and hence contribute to worldwide progress. While walling off the rest of the world may shut us in, it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ (identified last week as not only one of the fruits of these norms but an essential component of continued evolution) will become less efficacious and over time will begin to fail to mitigate the inevitably unwanted side effects that result from future inventions such as new sources of energy.

So, while Norberg’s quantification of human progress is in optimistic agreement with Teilhard, the risks are nonetheless substantial and cannot be overlooked. Evolution is in our hands, and stewardship of its continuation requires a clear-headed knowledge of the past, a commitment to the energy of evolution as it rises in the human species and confidence in the future. In the words of Teilhard:

“..the view adopted here of a universe in process of general involution upon itself comes in as an extremely simple way of getting past the dead end at which history is still held up, and of pushing further towards a more homogenous and coherent view of the past.”

   Yuval Harari opines in his book, “Sapiens” that consciousness is an “evolutionary mistake” and is certainly sure to lead to an early (by evolutionary standards) extinction of the human species. While his book shows ignorance of evolutionary history (as documented by Teilhard) and recent human history (as documented by Norberg), the fact that human consciousness is a two-edged sword cannot be denied.

 

The Next Post

 

This week we took a second look at the second and more serious category of risks to human evolution. Recognizing the ‘fragility’ of evolution, we acknowledged the ongoing risks of fixing what we have broken (the ‘structural’ risks). But we also noted the greater risk, the ‘Noospheric’ risk, which lies in the possibility of losing faith in our historically proven ability to, as Teilhard says,

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   In short, the interruption of this “rise in interiority and liberty” will stifle the flow of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will sum up where we’ve been in tracing Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ through Norberg’s enumeration of the articulations and arriving at the risks evolution introduces as it enters into the realm of the human.