Today’s Post

Last week we addressed those risks to continued human evolution that are based on the seemingly inevitable negative consequences of every aspect of human ‘progress’, but noted that, at least thus far, human innovation and invention seem up to the task of maximizing the advances over the consequences.

But can we count on this phenomenon to continue?  What can happen to ‘dry up’ this pool of intellectual energy, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’, which have kept us moving thus far?

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series a few 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.  Take the example of looking for a seat at the airport.  Few will choose to sit near a stranger if a seat can be found next to one which is vacant.  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 hoard, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’; the future seems far less secure than the past.

   Each human innovation that has been cited in this series has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback.  In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism can be undermined.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed) is to be found.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

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 trends which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West.  He goes on to elaborate:

“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.”

   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 knack for problem-solving.  Nowadays, 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 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, such ideological division undermines the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and weakens their power to solve problems.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look 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 continue looking at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.