What kind of risks to our evolution do we incur when fail to believe in the future?
Last week we began to address the risks that can be seen when we focus Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on human life. We looked at those that could be considered as ‘structural’, such as those addressed by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.
This week we will move onto a second category of risks, those that appear with Teilhard’s identification of the ‘noosphere’, the realm of human thought that emerges as humans find new ways to express and retain their cultural and technological insights.
The Noospheric Risks
As we saw in our series several weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over. Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil. The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.
This recoil from increased compression is an indication of the fear that in the future we will be subsumed into the horde, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person. There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’, resulting in a future which seems far less secure than the past.
The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ that we have addressed in the past few weeks is directly related to this fear.
Each human innovation that we have cited has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance. In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism, clear ‘fruits of evolution’, can be undermined.
The fact that they have historically prevailed over the institutionally entrenched pessimists is evidence of the strength of such beliefs., but what happens when such optimism ‘runs dry’ in the well of human evolution?
The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the danger to such faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics, McHale’s forecasts and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed).
Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:
“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”
With this insight, penned some eighty years ago, he correctly forecasts the fault lines which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West. He goes on to elaborate:
“At this decisive moment when for the first time (we are) becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of (our) future on earth, what (we) need before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”
And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species. As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented, historically proven knack for problem-solving and lead us down a “a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.” Today, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as ‘even more unreasonably dogmatic’ (Pinker) than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, as David Brin points out,
“..the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”
And exactly how does this jeopardize our continued evolution? Again, Teilhard explains how human evolution is shifting from the neurological increase in brain size to the cultural ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:
“.. as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation. Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”
In short, significant evolutionary risk can be seen in sharp ideological divisions as they undermine the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and as a result weaken their power to solve problems.
To continue our evolution, he insists, we must continue to believe in it.
The Next Post
This week we took another look at risks to our continued evolution. We saw how the (so far) successful ‘fix-break-fix:’ cycle of ‘structural’ evolution can be weakened by the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.
Next week we will look a little deeper at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.