Today’s Post
Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirit’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize the development of matter into increasingly complex arrangements. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides substantiation for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.
This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.
Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context
Teilhard ‘lens’ provides a way to understand who and where we are by placing ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding the roles played by our two great human enterprises, religion, and science in the flow of human history.
As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by ‘right brain’ thinking (instinct and intuition). As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings. Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.
Sacks sees a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking (empiricism and reason) in the Greek development of philosophic thought.
An example of the first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament. Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ as it is active in each of us. While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure than an evolution from it.
Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right- and left-brain thinking modes.
Science is born from such an early application but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the cognitive dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.
Science in its own way is also stuck. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion. Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers. However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for such things as freedom, faith, and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.
As Sacks puts it,
“To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.
This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts, but the component parts make no sense when removed from their integrated context.
The Next Post
This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.
Next week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on where we are today in this process.