How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us place our evolution into a wider context?

This Week

   Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at human history through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  This week we will look a little more closely at how the universal rise of evolution can be seen to be active in the evolution of the human person.

A Second Look At Human Evolution

Teilhard’s vision permits us to see human evolution as powered by the same energy by which the universe has increased its complexity over time.  He begins by stepping back and observing human history through his ‘lens of evolution’.

First, a simple look at the history of humans on our planet shows that a key attribute of humans has been to expand into every possible nook and cranny of the biosphere.  In Teilhard’s graphic metaphor of the development of human society, humanity starts out from the Southern pole of an imaginary sphere, and ramifies into many threads: races, tribes, and nations.  In its expansion Northward, it spreads into an ever-increasing space. Because of this it is possible for many centuries for an arm of the ramification to remain unaware of the others.

 Second, it is obvious from this simple graphic that as humans reproduce and expand, eventually the threads will reach the midpoint, the ‘equator’, of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere.  As it does the threads begin to encounter each other.  (The resonance of this imaginary sphere with our own very real planet is obvious).  When we eventually expand into space occupied by others, we cross the imaginary equator where expansion begins to give way to compression and hence from divergence to convergence.

As is obvious from history, new tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation emerge as the stage of compression begins.  A belief persists to this day that the dire consequences of these tactics are simply an unwanted but inevitable consequence of population increase.

However, as seen in the ‘Axial Age’, (800 BC), early in this new compression stage, new paradigms of societal evolution begin to emerge.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Great Transformation”, sees civilizations across the globe beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”.

The adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift.  While certainly less religious than political, it nonetheless reflected the same rethinking.  Constantine saw the integrative potential of Christianity as a political paradigm for ensuring the smooth assimilation of the new Northern European Celts and Franks as they were incorporated into his empire.  While not abandoning the ‘compression’ tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation, Rome was beginning to adopt tactics which would add a social level of assimilation and accommodation to its tactics.

Third, that this new paradigm was slow to take hold is obvious, considering the ensuing two thousand or so years of human conflict, particularly in the West, frequently among those espousing the new religion.  The success of the new tactic, however, could be seen in the emergence of the new paradigm of democracy, underpinned by the belief in human equality first envisaged in the Axial Age.

In this three millennia of world history, we can see the ‘crossing of the equator’ and the gradual transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’.  This transition from one to the other also maps the evolution of human relationships from ones in which the individual is reduced by the contact to one in which the individual can potentially become enriched by it.

This is truly an astounding paradigm shift, first asserted by Confucius in the Axial Age, and a tactic necessary for human survival as it compresses itself:

“Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”

“In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others”.

   These simple adages are not only reflected in nearly every religion, but they also offer the earliest use of self-reference as a hermeneutic for understanding the nature of human co-existence.

Teilhard recognizes that as humanity enters the compression stage, the historical relationship between conquerors and conquered, common in the early compression stage, will no longer satisfy the need to continue evolution. The paradigm of ‘enrichment of the conqueror by diminishment of the conquered’ must give way to a different paradigm if the universal rise of complexity is to continue by the enrichment of the human person so essential to the survival of the species.

An approach more in line with Confucius than with Caesar is required.  Teilhard suggests that the tactic required is one which can unite human persons in a way in which their potential is increasingly realized.

Next Week

This week we saw examples of how Teilhard’s ‘lens’ provides a wider context for seeing our own evolution on this planet.

Next week we will expand this context to better understand how the ‘complexity’ of the human person can continue to rise even as the forces of compression increase.