Today’s Post
Last week we looked a little more closely at the phenomenon of ‘indignation’. While it might be understood as a normal and frequent response to the vagaries of the world around us, we saw how the rapidly growing new milieu of the internet can amplify subjective thinking as it compounds it by rapid validation of biases and negativity on a near universal scale.
We also saw how such fixation with the internet can lead to an insidious form of addiction, known as ‘motivational toxicity’, which appears as a deterioration in the ability of normal rewards (such as careers and sex) to govern behavior and requires ever increasing cycles of subjectivity, expression and reinforcement to receive the pleasurable effects of dopamine.
This combination of the internet as an enabling device for an addiction which skews our judgement and our increasing addiction to it can be seen as a danger to our continued evolution. As we have seen, continuing our evolution increasingly requires that we understand it and cooperate with it. Anything that undermines our ability to think objectively and cooperate with others bodes poorly for our future.
This week we will move on to looking at how we can understand evolution to be taking place today.
Instinct and Volition in Human Evolution
In this blog we have looked at many facets of both universal and human evolution in the light of insights from Teilhard de Chardin and others (eg Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr) as we have explored a concept of God that is couched differently from that traditionally expressed in the thousands of religions on our planet. We have also seen, however, how Teilhard’s concept, which pursues a different approach to understanding the ‘ground of being’, is not only consistent with that of science but is quite compatible with the ‘basics’ of Western theology. We have seen how such an insight permits the sweep of cosmic evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, to be seen in the context of a single current which raises the ‘complexity’ of its products from that of pure energy to that of consciousness aware of itself.
The existence of this current suggests that, with the advent of the human person, evolution will manifest itself increasingly less as a force which guides the inherent restructuring of simpler entities into those of richer and more complex forms, (such as atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into brains, and brains into consciousness) and more as an ‘axis of evolution’ which must be consciously recognized and cooperated with for human evolution to continue. In Teilhard’s view, human evolution becomes less ‘instinctive’ and more ‘volitional’.
Teilhard sees the first step of such ‘volition’, recognizing, as ‘articulating the noosphere’, quantifying the structure to which we advert as we go about our affairs. Examples of such articulations can be seen in our many religions, philosophies and social structures (our laws). In the several hundred thousands of years since the first ‘homo sapiens’ set about trying to make sense of his environment, human history (and to some extent ‘prehistory’) shows a vast variety of such ‘articulations’, with their underlying assumptions, beliefs and practices reflecting their diverse grasp of the underlying ‘nature’ of reality. Such history also shows the profound ability of humans to ‘learn from mistakes’ as the world has grown more populated with the attendant crowding of people on a planet with decreasing open space. Somehow, in spite of our collectively discordant understanding of ourselves and our environment, we have managed to thus far not only survive but thrive.
Towards a Mature ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’
The past hundred fifty years shows an exponential increase in human welfare, as articulations such as those expressed in the ‘Enlightenment’ have come to be imbedded in our social structures. While perhaps not being conscious of advancing evolution per se, or of even increasing the complexity of the human as a measure of advancing evolution, a simple but key underlying principle of such advance can be seen in the statement of Thomas Jefferson:
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”
This statement is the cornerstone of the increase in welfare that Norberg charts in his book, ‘Progress’. However, Norberg carefully notes the necessary extension of Jefferson’s assertion for such increase in welfare to take place. To achieve such a rapid increase in the level of welfare that he details, personal freedom is required for the innovation and invention that is necessary for understanding and surviving our mistakes.
In effect, while the Enlightenment might be seen as the point in history where our ‘articulation of the noosphere’ began to mature, the increase in human welfare since 1850 might be seen as the point in history that humans began to learn how to ‘cooperate with the forces of evolution’. In this brief time frame, our grasp of our ‘complexification’ has taken a quantum leap.
However, as startling as such a sudden change in our evolution can be seen in Norberg’s nine metrics of recent human evolution, the continuation of this trend is not guaranteed. If we don’t recognize first that such an increase in human welfare has actually taken place and second, that such increase reflects an increase in the evolutionary complexity of our species, we can tend to take a stance in which not only do we ignore it, we dismiss it and fail to recognize it as actual progress. Such dismissal and denial will make it increasingly difficult to cooperate with it and thus extend our evolutionary progress.
The pessimism that we have been addressing in the past few posts is evidence of such disbelief. A critical way to insure continuation of our evolution is to better understand it, but a sure way to undermine it is to ignore, or worse disbelieve in it.
The Next Post
This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.
Next week we will look a little more deeply into how universal evolution continues its rise of complexity through the human species as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.