Two more facets of pessimism in human society today.
Today’s Post
In answering the question, “Why isn’t Teilhard’s optimism better reflected today?”, we have noted how the seemingly existential need for pessimism in human society inhibits the holistic view of life from which Teilhard derives his great optimism.
Last week we looked into three aspects of such pessimism that Steven Pinker sees in human culture today: the Ubiquity of News, Miscalibration and the Negativity Bias. In all three could be seen trends today which tend to color our outlook on life in dystopian ways.
This week we will look an additional two facets that he saw at work in this ‘existential’ outlook.
Progressophobia, Part Two
The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”. This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”. The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere that can be seen to confirm the prediction.
Pinker also notes that
“Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.”
As we saw two weeks ago, the affluence of the children of Billy Graham, popular Protestant speaker of the last century (and many Evangelicals today) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.
Not that all pessimism is bad. The fact that there are more of us concerned about evils that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail. The danger that Pinker sees is that
“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.
The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last facet of existential pessimism comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli. In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities. They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate. It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases a pleasure not unlike that from eating chocolate. In a nutshell, indignation feels good. As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”
Pinker summarizes Norberg when he cites that
“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”
But he goes on to cite an underlying cause of pessimism due to the fact that
“Almost no one knows about it.”
The fact that there clearly exists such ‘fruits of evolution’ as seen in Norberg’s facets of global welfare at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so rare presents us with yet another ‘duality’. When Teilhard addresses what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list. Like Pinker, he remarks on what there is to be seen once we have the proper perspective.
“.. 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.”
Pinker presents us with six distinct examples of such ‘scales’ and how they prevent us from seeing the astounding rate at which our personal and cultural evolution is rising.
The examples that we have seen illustrate the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors. It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’, is needed to provide a compass for navigating them. Failure to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to the ‘greater consciousness’ which is necessary to the ‘more completeness’ required by the future.
Next Week
This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will address a more universal aspect of Teilhard. As noted many times in this blog, Teilhard proposed using the ‘lens of evolution’ to view reality from a single integrated and comprehensive perspective. From his perspective, the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.