Understanding our evolution as a step towards managing it

 Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been exploring the slippery phenomena of human happiness, concluding that a clearer understanding of our fit into our evolutionary process can bring us into ‘fuller being’ and hence greater satisfaction.

This week we will begin a closer look at how such a clearer understanding of this process can help us to do this.

How Did We Get Here?

We have seen how Teilhard and other contemporary thinkers offer insight into the critical process of ‘making sense of things.’  Very few thinkers from the full spectrum of these insights believe that humans are near the end of their process of becoming what it is possible for them to become, from the materialists who cite the ongoing mutations of the genomes that are the machinery for our future morphological manifestations to those who sense the incompleteness of our understanding of the universe and our role in it.

At the same time, we recognize that there is little agreement between these two poles of thought on what is essential to the continuation of the evolution of our species.  We can paraphrase Carl Rogers’ insight on personal maturity into an insight about the potential of our species to

“… reorganize itself at both the personal and cultural levels in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   This is deeply resonant with Teilhard’s assertion that we must

“…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.”

   While surely a daunting task, we saw in posts from Feb 20, 2020  how Johan Norberg, in one of the first attempts to gather data on such a process as these two thinkers propose offers a relatively unambiguous picture of our potential for evolutionary advancement.  Building the bridge upon which we are travelling is surely risky (as we saw in in the post of March 26, 2020), but if we understand how to put our history into an objective perspective (as Norberg suggests above), we can’t help but be encouraged in its construction.

Therefore, a recalibrated look at the past helps to see how far we’ve come and extrapolate to a future which we can see as one which welcomes us.  We have seen John Haught’s’ insight that such a recalibration helps us to read

“… nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.  It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   For all that, then, how are we to go about Roger’s ‘reorganization’ and Teilhard’s ‘rearrangements’ to ensure Haught’s realization of a ‘richer and fuller’ future?

Thinking With The Whole Brain

We saw in the posts from Feb 20, 2020, how human history can be seen to unfold as humans began to supplement the long legacy of reasoning through ‘right brain intuition’ by introducing the skill of ‘left brain empiricism’.  Jonathan Sacks traces this ‘neurological’ path through the slow reversal from ‘right to left’ writing (primarily written by the left hand) to that of writing in a ‘left to right’ direction (primarily written by the right hand).  He tracks this transformation as seen in the evolution of writing from the Phoenicians in the tenth century BCE to that of the Greeks by the sixth century BCE.   While this might initially be seen as simply a change in custom, Sacks goes further as he correlates this ‘custom’ with the unprecedented rise of empiricism seen in the explosion of Greek thinking with the appearance of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and many others whose empirical thoughts laid the ground for the later emergence of Science.  He cites the neurological aspect of this evolution by noting that not only did the ‘handedness direction’ change, so did the hand commonly used to do the writing.  Right-to-left writing is done by the left hand, but left-to-right writing is done by the right hand.  Since such ‘handedness’ is controlled by brain hemispheres the shift that Sacks notes indicates a shift in the brain activity which controls the writing.

The ‘long’ period from the emergence of Greek empiricism to the first stirrings of Western Science, (approximately two thousand years, a blink of the evolutionary eye) is evidence of the slowly emerging skill of ‘thinking with both sides of the brain’.  The practice of using of the neocortex brain to modulate the stimuli of the ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains predates this relatively new skill, as can be seen in nearly every ‘pre-empirical’ society in their growing awareness that a conscious relationship to both the environment and to our fellow humans is necessary for social stability.  The many expressions of ‘correct’ human relationships can be seen as evolving from the basic axiom of Confucius,

“Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself”.

   However, the many historic examples of human activity which are orthogonal to this axiom offer evidence of how difficult it is to practice.

The Reciprocal Nature of Evolution

Such difficulty is much in evidence as the ability to address ‘self’ emerges in human culture.  In our rapidly increasing access to ‘news’, afforded by the exponential growth in communication technologies, we are constantly inundated with evidence of the ills of our times.  As we saw in April 2020, there is a tendency towards a ‘moral lassitude’ which presents itself as a diminishing confidence in the future.  To many (as can be seen frequently in history), belief in an ‘end times’ offers the ‘promise’ of a supernatural intervention in which God will finally be repair the mistakes of his creation.

Such dystopia is clear evidence of the difficulty of practicing Confucius’ axiom.  What’s the alternative?

We can start by recognizing the reciprocal nature of the evolutionary process in which we are enmeshed.  An example of such a phenomenon can be found in Sacks’ example of the relation of thinking to writing.  In his example above, a chicken-egg question arises.  Did the practice of writing change from left-to-right because the skill of using the left brain emerged, or did the left- brain practice emerge because the ‘handedness’ of writing changed?  Either way, we can see a cultural norm and a neurological capability change in concert with each other.  This suggests that the use of a skill supplements its facility, which in turn enhances the use of it.

We can see another example in the common cycle of intuition-to-empiricism activity found in the human pursuit of ‘energy’.  Newton began this cycle with the intuition of the existence of an agency of motion.  He goes on to articulate this agency as ‘force’, framing it in an equation which relates the mass of an object to its rate change of velocity to determine the force.  This in turn leads to other intuitions of how this force can be ‘employed’, which leads to further application of Newton’s articulation into designs of machinery which supplement human work.  This blossoms into standards of conduct for the human activity in which these machines can be employed.

Each of these steps involves a collaboration between states of ‘imagining’ (right-brained intuition) and processes of ‘implementing’ (left-brained empiricism) in a spiral which leads from less complex results to ones that are more complex.

We can see this reciprocal nature of evolution at work in the very essence of universal evolution.  In the post of November 8, 2018  we outlined Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ in which the union of grains of matter can result in new grains whose enhanced complexity further enhances its capacity for future union.  This reciprocity recurs in the convergent spiral of history, with the ‘coefficient of complexity’ becoming larger in each cycle and thus increasing the potential for union all the way up to the evolutionary phenomena of the human person.

The Next Post

Putting our evolution into the context offered by Teilhard, Jonathan Sacks, Richard Rohr and John Haught is essential for ‘making sense’ of things in such a way that we can begin to ‘pay attention’ to how evolution emerges in our lives.  This week we took a first look at how evolution can be seen on a ‘macro’ level.  Next week we will narrow the focus to how these forces play out in human life, and, more importantly, how we can posture ourselves to be become more aware of them.