Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week I’d like to sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and lonely. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied is denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the need for isolation.

As Yuri Harari points out, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

• Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than that it is highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.

• Happiness from the evolutionary perspective

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still active, then some optimism in the future can be merited. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.  As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

• Happiness from the ‘spiritual’ perspective

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, and spent more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion overlap. As we have seen many times in this blog, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended this segment by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifested in every step of evolution from the big bang to human persons, can be seen as active in human persons in reinterpreting Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we continued reinterpreting Paul with his ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of eight facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the nine facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer a scaffolding for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

Then Haught,

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it. .

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.

Next week we will do another ‘wrapup’, this time of the overall blog, “The Secular Side of God’ over its five year run.