Today’s Post

Last week we concluded a two week look at crossing our metaphorical equator and progressing into a mileu in which the ground rules of antiquity which seemed to serve us so well as we moved Northward now seem to be less valuable in in this new stage of the journey. The new hemisphere is not seems less favorable to us in our favor but problems seem to mount more quickly as well.

Since it’s Teilhard’s metaphor, it seems reasonable to look at his insight into how the totality of cosmic evolution is playing out on our planet, and his take on what tools we may have available to us in maneuvering among the many rocks into which we seem to be carried.

“Everything Which Rises Must Converge”

This quote from Teilhard (The Future of Man) is rather well known, but given the curvature of his metaphorical sphere, it can now appear as threatening.  The quote we saw last week applies just as well here:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As it is the very basic force of evolution that is compressing us on our planet with its finite surface, does this imply that at the heart of cosmic evolution lies a convergence which threatens to extinguish the very flame of rising complexity that it has, thus far, nourished?

And as Teilhard sees it, the source of the damping of this flame can not only be found in the crushing force of convergence from without, but in our response to it from within.  He notes the danger that looms when humans begin to feel helpless in its wake:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is..) is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

What we need, he is saying, is a hermeneutic to be able to interpret the new and strange dimensions found North of his ‘equator’.  Such a hermeneutic, a lens for interpretation, a context for making sense, is precisely what Teilhard offers.

Teilhard’s Hermeneutic For Understanding Human Evolution

Teilhard firstly restates the need for such a hermeneutic:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

    He then asks us to relook at what is actually happening with human evolution from his expanded and unified context of universal evolution:

“(is it possible that) the individual human brain has, since the end of the Quaternary, really arrived at the limit set by physics and chemistry to its progress in complexity?  Even then, it would still remain true that since that time, 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 this succinct statement, Teilhard  pinpoints the potential of the evolutionary product of the human neo-cortex, which expands the playing field of evolution from the actions of chromosones to the actions of humans.  While the curvature of our planet may well force us into increasingly uncomfortable proximity, the ‘sphere’ of the human ‘psychism’ offers a seemingly infinite surface onto which it is possible to expand:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to continually find new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   Thus, instead of finding danger in the mechanical compression imposed by the Earth’s ‘sphericity’, he sees opportunity:

“…what appeared at first no more than a mechanical tension and a quasi-geometrical re-arrangement imposed on the human mass, now takes the form of a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   He sees a cycle in which human person functionality increases with increasing population compression:

“…This increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power (in which man’s compression upon our planet is ultimately expressed) simultaneously and inevitably increases each human element’s radius of action and power in penetration in relation to all the others; and in proportion as it does so, it has as its direct effect a super-compression itself of the noosphere.  This super-compression, in turn, automatically produces a super-organization, and that again a super-‘consciousisation’: that in turn is followed by super-super-compression and so the process continues.”

   To Teilhard, therefore, this external compression effects an internal complexification in which new levels of both consciousness and relationships are possible:

“Thus through the combined influence of two curves, both cosmic in nature- one physical (the roundness of the earth) and one psychic (the reflective’s self attraction), mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.”

   So, not unlike how the stars compress simple atoms into complex ones more capable of even more complex arrangements in the form of molecules, instead of the impersonal crush of human masses he notes:

“Man is now realizing that this cosmic spindle corresponds, on the contrary, to the concentration upon itself of a force that is destined to find in the very heart released by its convergence sufficient strength to burst through all the barriers that lie ahead of it- whatever they may be.”

   This is the heart of Teilhard’s  great optimism,  that the agency of evolution, the principle by which evolution increases the complexity of its products, steadily increasing its irradiance through billions of years, and is still alive and well and working in the human species.  As he puts it a bit more poetically:

“Like those translucent materials
which can be wholly illumined
by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests to the christian mystic
as bathed in an inward light
which brings out its structure,
its relief, and its depths…
a tranquil, mighty radiance.”.

I Read The Newspapers.  Is Such Audacious Optimism Warranted?

This is a perennial criticism of Teilhard.  Conventional science shows no ‘improvement’ in the human as an evolutionary product with time, so surely evolution, if it still continues, isn’t changing us in any particular direction.  And even the most casual glance at daily news offers any consolation.  So it can be legitimately asked, “is there really anything to such increased complexification via Teilhard’s ‘psychism?”

.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on.  Next week we will continue casting the net for other counter-intuitive perceptions, but this time by looking at current events.