Why is the optimism of Teilhard and Norberg so difficult to see?
Today’s Post
In looking into Johan Norberg’s data on human evolution, Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the human’s place in the universe is clearly substantiated. Norberg documents several objective and fact-substantiated measures of Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, as it rises through the human species, both in the individual person and the cultural edifices that result.
As both Norberg and Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) point out, however, this data, while factually supporting Teilhard’s optimism, seems to be poorly echoed in the opinions of those who benefit from it the most.
Teilhard mentions the inevitability of a positive outlook on life when he asserts that
“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”
But given the amount of pessimism in the world today, it seems evident that either there is little recognition of the ‘universal will’ or that this recognition is not understood as the positive nature of our lives.
This week we will look into what causes such ‘popular dystopia.”
A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism
In looking at the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it. Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.
Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books. The parallel depictions of a ‘vengeful’ and a ‘loving’ God, alongside those of a ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ humanity in the Bible are obvious.
Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature. Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”. Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”. Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person: the “dangerous Id”. Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’ which will doom us to ‘early extinction’.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition. This emphasis was in distinct contrast to that of the Reformation, which Pinker sees in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger and Sartre.
In the Protestant Reformation, the essential positive message of Jesus seen in the New Testament became secondary to the need to understand the human species as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature by the same God which created it.
Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, evolving aimlessly into the future without the need for divine intervention.
There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions. For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.
Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited by Norberg. Even his actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”. Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.
Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation. “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.
Next Week
This week we took a first look at why the positive view of the ‘ground of being’ so clearly expressed in the New Testament and recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Newt week we will explore this ‘headwind’ a little further.