Teilhard is often criticized for his optimistic view of evolution.  How does Norberg substantiate it?    

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have seen examples how human evolution can be placed into the context of the unfolding of universal reality as well as how details can be seen in both science and history.  Teilhard was one of the first to attempt this as he encapsulates in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”. His insights, however, were criticized as ‘too material’ for the Church and ‘too spiritual’ for science.  A criticism found in both milieus found his insights of ‘holy matter’ and ‘a God of Nature’ to be idealistic and naive, and thus unfit for either making sense of reality much less of our place in it.  A particular critique common to both was that, considering the unending evils which surround us, his pervasive optimism was distinctly unwarranted.
Having seen how evolution proceeds through the unfolding of the universe, and how universal causality increases its complexification in the human, how can Teilhard’s optimism, echoed by Norberg, be not only justified, but emerge in human life as a ‘current to the open sea’?

What can we see?

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

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

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

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individual freedom is “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Korea where it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.  To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature in East Germany following its partition after WW II.

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

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

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

   But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?  More to the point, what is the risk that such prevalent pessimism will undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next Week

This week we began to explore the curious denial of progress that seems strongest among those who have benefited from it the most.  If Teilhard’s optimism, backed by Norberg’s data, is correct, this should be a time for rejoicing in our progress instead of lamenting that ‘we’re still not there yet’.

Next week we will look more closely into why this seems to be the case.