How can seeing the human person through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ highlight the potential for happiness?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and noting its vagueness, began to place it into Teilhard’s context of ‘universal evolution’.   In this overview, we looked at several ‘material’ aspects from the viewpoints of science (such as surveys of this highly subjective topic as well as genetic influences) and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ still evades us.

This week we will look at human happiness from a second viewpoint, that of cosmic evolution.  If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

• Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
• and this increase of complexity can be measured by the increase of consciousness which leads to the human person.
• then, the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products must be still somehow active in our own personal and social evolution.

Whatever it is that has been at work in the rise of complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ it must be active in each of its products.  As one of these products, it must therefore be active in us.  If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Teilhard summarizes universal evolution as

“Fuller being in closer union and closer union from fuller being.”

   The attribute of ‘fuller being’ itself implies ‘better fit’, and in this ‘fit’ lies the evolutionary aspect of happiness.

Can Humans, As an Evolved Species, Ever be Happy?

Teilhard insists that we understand our evolution as individual persons as well as the aggregate of society   from the context of universal evolution.  This suggests that our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well.  How can our potential for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that, as its latest product, we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Yuval Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, suggests a less optimistic outcome.  From his perspective, humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged.  He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of florescence, on the order of several millions of years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment.  This ‘fit’ with their environment insured, as he sees it, a continuing and long lasting ‘fruitful accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost in their ongoing estrangement.  The result, in his opinion, is the existential unease that makes it almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and the resulting unhappiness will erode our survival instincts, eventually resulting in an untimely extinction.

He notes that in our quest to assure our continued evolution, we are becoming more and more dependent upon technology.  He sees the resulting explosion of technology becoming more damaging to the environment on the one hand, and on the other eroding our natural sense of ourselves.

Where Teilhard saw a ‘convergent spiral’ raising us to higher levels of complexity and ‘fuller being’, Harari sees our increasing reliance on technology as a ‘divergent’ factor which will reduce our sense of ourselves and lead to ‘lesser being’.  With humans, he suggests, ‘evolution’ will lead to ‘devolution’.

In mapping our estrangement from nature, he notes that every step humanity has taken from our animal predecessors’ hunter-gatherer state has come with increased emotional discomfort and dissatisfaction.  As populations increased, culture became sedentary, farms became necessary, requiring laborers, storage buildings, roads, and trade, which in turn saw the rise of cities and soul-less machines leaving us today as anxious, dependent on technology and widely divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

While this dystopian conclusion is clearly orthogonal to Teilhard’s optimism, the observation that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment is unquestionable.  How can happiness be possible if our evolution requires us to abandon our ancestor’s close relationship with nature?  As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it succinctly

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

   It is not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play for eons by the instincts of reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as well as they did for our ancestors.  This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

  Most commentators cite Hopkin’s view of our relationship with the environment in their critique of current affairs, but few follow with his next lines:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

    As we have seen, in Teilhard’s vision of Hopkins’ eternal upward current, he charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, then cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness.  In this upward current, each new product emerges from its predecessors’ state of complexity by way of such a change of state.   With them new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of their predecessors.  Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the increasingly complex assemblies of molecules: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”.  It takes some time before new cellular capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

In this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’.  Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still early in undergoing development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ has been mentioned several times.  The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains.  It is not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’.  It is more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival.  This skill can be further enhanced by balanced use of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain hemispheres as addressed earlier.  These are skills which we are still learning.

Thus, the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about the human person and how it can work (or should work) in the context of an evolving universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it engages harmoniously with the ‘forces of evolution’.  Both humans and their environment have evolved in an evolutionary sweep of over fourteen billion years in which products have steadily increased their complexity.  Most recently this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural selection’ in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’ in increasingly varied combinations.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks, Haught and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person.  As Teilhard points out (and Davies, Haught and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature.  For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history.  For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences.  In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.

In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground to be explored.  While acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond of instinct enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’ we can see how, in Teilhard’s grand vision of universal evolution, these consequences are neither unexpected nor injurious to the potential to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we looked at second of four facets of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.

Next week we will begin a look at a third facet of the subject of happiness as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’ as we address a ‘spiritual ground’.