How do we proceed from ‘articulating the noosphere’ to capitalizing on it to effect our evolution?

Today’s Post

Beginning several weeks ago, we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on the noosphere. 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 this boundary, 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 the effect of this new phenomenon on human evolution, and the need for developing new skills to turn ‘compression’ into ‘assimilation’. We started with a focus on its manifestation in our lives, then to address the lack of recognition of it in society at large. We ended up last week by addressing Teilhard’s concerns that pessimism presents a specific risk to our continued evolution.
This week we’ll begin to address how all this falls into an integrated context as it is seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

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 its structure. He proposes his ‘lens of evolution’ to take in the warp and woof of the ‘noosphere’, the ‘milieu’ 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 evolution’s continuation 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 noospheric stage as it was in those of Physics and Biology. This observation, then, is the key to using his ‘lens’ 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 the previous spheres, can be understood as active in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.
As we saw last week, Teilhard recognizes 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 the classical duality, “the one vs the many” is resolved as we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’.
– 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 lead to ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties which result in new arrangements)

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 increase in 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 either used as steppingstones to yet newer arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.
This should come as no surprise 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 the rearrangements suggested by Teilhard.

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 today. We’ve looked at both examples and risks. While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?
Next week we will train Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on science and religion, our two great modes of human thought, to explore how they can be revitalized to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

How is human evolution more risky than cosmic evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the underlying agency of ‘increased complexity’ in universal evolution can be seen as ‘risky’, and how introduction of yet a new requirement, that of ‘choice’, adds yet another risk to its continuation.

This week we will look at Teilhard’s assessment of this new ‘risk’.

So, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

If, as Teilhard asserts, 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’. Confidence is required when making choices that affect our evolution toward the ‘fuller being’ that both Jesus and Teilhard cite as our goal.

We saw in Pinker’s survey on ‘pessimism’ 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 social dangers as can be found in 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 in his book, “Open”, can be shared globally and hence contribute to worldwide progress. The wall which separates us from the rest of the world may well shut us in, but it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ (identified 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’s projections, 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, recognition of and 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 certain to lead to an early (by evolutionary standards) extinction of the human species. While his book shows ignorance of evolutionary history (as seen in Teilhard’s ‘lens’) and recent human history (as documented by Norberg), the fact cannot be denied that human consciousness is a two-edged sword.

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.

What kind of risks to our evolution do we incur when fail to believe in the future?

Last week we began to address the risks that can be seen when we focus Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on human life. We looked at those that could be considered as ‘structural’, such as those addressed by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This week we will move onto a second category of risks, those that appear with Teilhard’s identification of the ‘noosphere’, the realm of human thought that emerges as humans find new ways to express and retain their cultural and technological insights.

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series several weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over. Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil. The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.

This recoil from increased compression is an indication of the fear that in the future we will be subsumed into the horde, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person. There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’, resulting in a future which seems far less secure than the past.

The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ that we have addressed in the past few weeks is directly related to this fear.

Each human innovation that we have cited has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance. In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism, clear ‘fruits of evolution’, can be undermined.

The fact that they have historically prevailed over the institutionally entrenched pessimists is evidence of the strength of such beliefs., but what happens when such optimism ‘runs dry’ in the well of human evolution?

The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the danger to such faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics, McHale’s forecasts and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed).

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

With this insight, penned some eighty years ago, he correctly forecasts the fault lines which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West. He goes on to elaborate:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time (we are) becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of (our) future on earth, what (we) need before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species. As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented, historically proven knack for problem-solving and lead us down a “a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.” Today, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as ‘even more unreasonably dogmatic’ (Pinker) than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, as David Brin points out,

“..the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

And exactly how does this jeopardize our continued evolution? Again, Teilhard explains how human evolution is shifting from the neurological increase in brain size to the cultural ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:

“.. as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation. Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

In short, significant evolutionary risk can be seen in sharp ideological divisions as they undermine the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and as a result weaken their power to solve problems.

To continue our evolution, he insists, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

This week we took another look at risks to our continued evolution. We saw how the (so far) successful ‘fix-break-fix:’ cycle of ‘structural’ evolution can be weakened by the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.

Next week we will look a little deeper at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.

How do Teilhard and Norberg see risks to continuing human evolution?

Today’s Post

As we have seen Teilhard’s unique but increasingly comprehensive insights into evolution, he acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of humanity is nonetheless balanced by a recognition of its risks. As we saw in in Norberg’s comprehensive analysis, there is considerable data to justify optimism, but Steven Pinker showed that there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.
This week we will address some of these risks and see how they could impede the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks To Human Evolution

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic projection for the future of human evolution. But even as he goes through the numbers which show exponential growth in human welfare in nine distinct and critical categories of human existence over the last two generations of human evolution, he also notes that every such aspect of ‘progress’ comes with an unplanned and unwelcome consequence. A few examples:
– Humans learned to replace wood with coal for fuel, which avoided the deforestation of the planet, and probable human extinction, but at the same time led to the near asphyxiation of those living in cities as population increased along with density.
– Advances in sanitation, agriculture and medicine exponentially lowered the death rate of both mothers and children in childbirth, which then led to a huge growth in human population, which then threatened to overtax food production and lead to widespread famine.
– And today we see the threat of global warming (at least partially) caused by dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping heat, possibly leading to the rising of the seas and the drowning of millions.
However, as Norberg and many others note, forecasts of the effects of such consequences have historically failed to materialize as predicted. Such forecasts, such as those of Malthus, who predicted population growth overwhelming food production and leading to global famine by now, did not factor in the human ability to innovate and invent. Even though improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.
Why didn’t such dire consequences happen?
As Norberg points out in the example of overpopulation, the reduction in childbirth deaths actually led to a decrease in the rate of population growth as parents no longer felt the necessity for large families when such a large percentage of children began to survive the vulnerable early years.
And, as we have seen, the introduction of coal did indeed lead to deaths caused by foul air, but of course, once again, innovation and invention produced methods of cleaning coal smoke, and new technologies to produce more BTUs with fewer side effects, such as the extraction and management of gas.
But what about global warming? The CO₂ content in the air may take centuries to dissipate naturally, and by then humans may well have effectively caused their own extinction. Again, such a forecast fails to factor the ability of humans to invent. Considering the number of initiatives under development today, such as wind, solar and nuclear power, and Hydrogen power, such prophesies may well be premature. There are also studies underway to not only extract CO₂ from the air, but to market it as a source of fuel as well. All these, of course, are optimistic forecasts, and all subject to unplanned consequences which will set off new rounds of invent-pollute-clean up. Can humans win this war, or will the inevitable consequences rule out in the end?
John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes
“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

While this point of view definitely suggests optimism, the question can legitimately be asked, “What costs are we prepared to pay for progress?” This is followed by the more significant question. “How can we be sure that we will continue, as McHale suggests above, to find fixes for the things we break?”
These are ‘structural’ risks. One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the risks that can be seen as we apply Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to human life, beginning with those that he and Norberg saw as ‘structural’.
Next week we will refocus this lens on the deeper risks that occur when humans, as ‘evolution become aware of itself’, begin to lose faith in its ability to bring us into a fuller realization of our potential.