Today’s Post 

    Last week we looked at the ‘dualism’ between a positive assessment of the human person, as taught by Jesus and ‘politicised’ by Jefferson on the one hand, and the contrasting negative assessment asserted by Luther and promulgated by Freud and Nietzsche.  We noted that, unlike the other dualisms we have examined in this blog, this one can’t be reconciled by putting the dualism into Teilhard’s ‘evolutionary context’.

We also noted that such a chasm between beliefs undermines the future of human evolution, in both the human person and society.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, those societies built upon the negative perspective of Nietzsche have now been unequivocally shown to be anti-evolution: under them the human person is crushed, and therefore the society collapses on itself.  The boon in human welfare as documented by Johan Norberg in the West not only fails to happen, human welfare at the personal and societal level is degraded.

However, in the post- Enlightenment period, even with the successes chronicled by Norberg, we also saw how Nietzsche’s negative hermeneutic still endures.  This week we will look a little deeper into this persistence.

Quantifying the Divine Spark

One of the gifts of the Enlightenment has been the rise of importance of ‘empiricism’ over that of ‘intuition’.  In short, our adherence to a belief becomes more a function of how such belief can not only be quantified, but grounded in proven fact.  One of the reasons for the success of the ‘scientific method’ has been its insistence on objective verification of postulation.  For a belief to be worthy of our adherence, it must first be objectively tested.  This obviously works in most cases, especially those in which human consciousness is not itself the subject of such a method.  It is critical to the ‘innovation and invention’ so well chronicled by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This was (and still is) considered to be a leap forward in human thinking, as it seemingly eliminated the need for religion as a source of beliefs.  Since religion, especially in the West during the period preceding the Enlightenment, was seen as the cause of much turmoil, even to the point of human slaughter, with religious beliefs seen to be at the root of such carnage.  This same religious-based carnage can be seen today in the middle East.

The rise of Atheism is one product of the Enlightenment, with its insistence of the lack of God’s provable tangibility mixed with the history of Western religious wars.  This is compounded by the huge disparity of understanding of the concept of God, immense across the spectrum of world religions, and huge even within the loose category of ‘Christianity’.  Such an unprovable God, especially one of seeming amorphousness, belief in which is the basis of such chaos in humanity, is not worthy of adoration.

That said, even the fathers of the Enlightenment did not take this need for provability of tangibility so far as to undermine their confidence in the human person’s ability to ‘articulate the noosphere’, even if such confidence was beyond the scope of empirical reason.  Their belief in the potential of the human person to make sense of his surroundings and act accordingly to move society forward was quite robust.

Jefferson goes one step further, unequivocally postulating the positive value of the human person as the basic building block of democracy.

However, this still leaves the basis for such postulation in question.  What is the basis for any confidence that the human person is indeed ‘endowed’ with such rights as claimed by Jefferson, or that he is indeed a “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”?  Don’t the examples of failed, illiberal governments around the world, especially in ‘developing’ countries, show many examples of this not being the case?

We have seen that the data presented by Norberg shows an unarguable correlation between human invention and innovation and the improvements in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years.  Norberg attributes this remarkable and unprecedented rise in human welfare to the legally grounded increase in personal freedoms and societal norms for human relationships.

Norberg also goes on to document how these freedoms and social norms have spread into the developing world, and stresses that this is occurring at a rate much faster than they initially came to fruition in the West.

Teilhard, as we have seen, goes even further in mapping this now well-articulated phenomena of increasing freedom and improved human relationships directly to his ‘axis of evolution’.  In the context of this axis, such phenomena is simply the latest manifestation of the universal metric of evolution: ‘increasing complexity’.   Whether we are doing it consciously or unconsciously, Norberg clearly shows that we are collectively pursuing Teilhard’s vision of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and learning to cooperate with it.  Norberg also clearly identifies that one measure of this increasing complexity is ‘increased human welfare’.

Norberg recognizes the risk that we take as we move forward, and the need to insure that democracy is more than ‘the will of the people’:

“Democracy is not a way to sanctify the majority opinion, but to limit the damage any group can do to others, so it has to be combined with the rule of law, rights for minorities and strong civil institutions.”

  Other than acknowledging the need for such articulation of the thread of evolution as ‘the rule of law’, Norberg offers no prescription on how to go about it.  While the ‘rule of law’ is certainly an end result which can channel human activity in the direction of the freedom and improved relationships which Norberg cites as the building blocks of progress, how do we get there?

Virtues: How We Get There 

To talk about ‘getting there’, I’d like to return to the discussion on the ‘Theological Virtues’, which addressed how the virtues (summarized by Paul from the teachings of Jesus) are essential for the conduct of human life which insure our future evolution.  These three ‘virtues’, aspects of human psychological life, are much more than that prized by traditional religion as practices which justify our ‘salvation’, they are attitudes or ‘stances to life’ in which we align our lives to ‘the axis of evolution’, or as Teilhard put it:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   As the reference above addresses, Faith simply becomes the practice of trusting the axis of evolution (trusting that the ground of being is ‘on our side’).  Hope is the expectation of the outcome of evolution (Paul’s ‘Fruits of the Spirit’, Norberg’s ‘”Progress’’), and the most important, Love.

In Teilhard’s view, Love is much more than an emotion shared between individuals, it is the practice of relationship in which both individuals become what they are capable of.  It is the energy which underlays personal evolution, as Norberg later goes on to quantify.  He clearly identifies human relationships, along with personal freedom, as the two essential building blocks of continued human evolution.

By believing that there is indeed a basic, fundamental, principle of increased human evolution, and that by learning to articulate it and acquiring the discipline to cooperate with it, we are advancing our own evolution, we are subscribing to what we have been addressing as ‘The Divine Spark’.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.  We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus continue the enterprise of human evolution,

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.