Today’s Post
Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks by better understanding it. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuation of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.
As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer based on instinctual, biological and physical processes: it must be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if evolution is to continue through our species.
A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.
One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.
Why Religion?
One of the foundational concepts that the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” introduced was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightment thinkers, and the atheists which ensued, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.
Given the many ills of religion that can be seen today in the Mideast governments infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to legacy religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.
Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noospere’ or is it destined to end up on the dust pile of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical mileu?
One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’. We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ through the eyes of Jonathan Sacks previously in this blog. He, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘human’ vs ‘divine’. In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of a situation, and can be overcome with the proper perspective.
From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of a duality. This viewpoint reflects a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to forget that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.
Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’. In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘points in a single spectrum’. By this method, the continuation and coherence between the ‘opposites’ can now be understood.
So, the question above now gives way to a second question: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us, like the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightment have done, “make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.”
As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turned on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of a single thing that biology shows us that they are.
Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right hemispheres, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.
As the above example from Norberg shows, articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can request from science. Requesting it from religion, as religion is commonly understood, is neither up to the task. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. Extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting the subject into an evolutionary context, for religion to be germane in the answering of questions, it must evolve.
The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion
Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution. There are many concepts that appear with no precedent in the NT, that have been poorly carried forward as Christian theology developed, such as:
– Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Pau) ,and particularly in the human person (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to creation
– Understanding that we are bound together via a force which fosters our personal growth (Paul)
– Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships
– Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the imposition of hierarchy
So a first step toward maturing religion would be to return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms.
The next Post
This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks. Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how the seeds for a more evolved articulation can be found among them.
I have been following your recent posts and I have a few comments. Some will go back a bit.
Let me first begin with this, I have a question in regards to your discussion about Teilhard’s concepts of “energy which induces convergence as ‘radial’, and the energy by which the components of the ‘stuff of the universe’ become more complex in their uniting as ‘tangential’”.
Mathematics is not my strong suit so it is difficult for me to visualize this. I understand radial as emanating from a center point. That is the easy term, but tangential? This I understand as “being on the periphery” or erratic. So, when I put these terms together I think I hear Teilhard saying that convergence or unity or evolution occurs when that which moves out from the center reaches that which is on the periphery there is a rise on the evolutionary spiral to the next energy level. Yes? No? So, to continue with my query, are we talking about say, common beliefs or knowledge converging/colliding with new or uncommon knowledge, akin to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in science?
I appreciate you reminding us that according to Teilhard the ideas that spirituality and progress bring to the world are not apposed but are really two facet of a “single integrated reality”. This is reassuring. I interpret it thusly; Spirituality is the driving force that moves us to investigate and re-connect with what we primordially understand we are part of, made of, that is the cosmos.
Moving forward with Teilhard’s integrated approach to spirituality and progress and the evolution of our modern human brain, the dualistic perceptions of right brain vs left brain function as separate realities which can never be united dooms us to extinction or at the very least stagnation and regression. I think that you make a most important point when you suggest, “We effect our own evolution by use of both modes of thinking”. I wonder if the hinge of evolution of the noosphere comes down to everyone’s individual evolution, the accumulation of mass to a tipping point. But this reminds me of the mechanistic approach to society. Each of us a cog in the machine that keeps moving forward. In the past it led to a very inhumane approach to societal ethics.
Moving on, I particularly liked your discussion on “the continuity beneath the discontinuity” and your statement “Thus, an important step in understanding the noosphere is to recognize that our lives are connected to a cosmic agent which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted ever upward.” I think this is the crux of the matter, which leads me to consider this; The logic of all this is evident to someone who has a handle on who they are in relation to creation. Individuals who are curious, humbled by and grateful for the reality of life in the Cosmos have no difficulty conceiving of a Cosmic life force that pervades all of creation binding everything and everyone together, equal and unique at the same time. However, I feel as if there is still something missing in the equation that is needed to draw those individuals who cannot see the world in this way to change the way that they live their lives.
I hope, that which I feel is missing in the equation is to be found among the “seeds” already planted in current religious ideas to which you allude.
Elizabeth
First off, many thanks for your thoughtful, insightful and thought-provoking comment. Trying to build on Teilhard’s dense and intricate insights of the noosphere, particularly in unpacking his metaphors, can be challenging. So, to your first question on radial and tangential energy:
Given the metaphor of the converging spiral, the ‘wire’ Itself- the ‘winding of the spiral’ is simply a metaphor of our journey ‘upwards’ toward increasing complexity, starting at the base with the pure energy of the big bang, and composed at all points of what Teilhard calls ‘the stuff of the universe’ (at the bottom infinitesimal entities such as quarks and bosons, and at the -so far- top, humans). In between it is always entities which effect increased complexity through unification with other entities.
This journey isn’t ‘linear’, but as Teilhard sees it appears as ‘going round and round’ as it rises, hence the metaphor of a spiral. At any point, entities are acted upon by two forces:
– They are always pulled into union with each other: quark to quark, atom to atom, ultimately human to human, by a force that is in line with the ‘wire’ of the spiral. This is ‘tangential’, so named because the force is tangential to the ‘wire’ of the spiral
– At the same time, this union effects an increase in the complexity of the entity, first in an increased capacity for future union, and secondly in an ‘enrichment’- an increase in the capacity for activity and influence over its environment. This force is what not only pulls the entity upwards, but as the entities are pulled closer together with their increased capacity for union, ‘inwards’ toward the central axis, the ‘radius’ of the spiral. This force is ‘radial’ to the spiral.
I’m sure that Teilhard would agree that ‘all metaphors are false’ in that they only give us a picture to help us understand an otherwise difficult concept. This is no exception, but may help clarify his metaphor.
I agree that there is an issue of this whole picture by which the individual participation in the movement of the whole comes into question. That’s why I spent so much time on Norberg (and really only scratched the surface). He quantifies in great detail how societal cohesion (and human welfare) is emerging from individual insights, and agrees to a surprising degree with Teilhard how the ‘noosphere’ is being articulated. While there are a lot of individuals who cannot (or will not) “see the world in this way”, they are being cajoled into “chang(ing) the the way that they live their lives” nonetheless. The forces of evolution are at work among us even when all of us don’t recognize and cooperate with them. The ‘seeds’ are indeed planted and abounding in human life, it only leaves for us to recognize and cooperate with them. Norberg would say that such recognition and cooperation are in the ascendency at this time in our history, and I agree.