Today’s Post

Today, we return to thread we were following before we took a side trip to review the optimistic thoughts of Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer laureate, in Sunday’s New York Times.

In the initial post on the subject of quantifying human evolution, Teilhard acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of the human race is nonetheless balanced by risk. As we saw in the last two weeks, while there is considerable data to quantify optimism, there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.

This week we will take a look at some of these risks and see how they could play out to undermine the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which supports Teilhard’s optimistic projection for the future of human evolution. But even as he goes through the numbers which show exponential growth in human welfare in nine distinct and critical categories of human existence over the last two generations of human evolution, he also notes that every such aspect of ‘progress’ comes with an unplanned and unwelcome consequence. A few examples:

• Humans learned to replace wood with coal for fuel, which avoided the deforestation of the planet, and probable human extinction, but at the same time led to the near asphyxiation of those living in cities as population increased along with density.
• Advances in sanitation, agriculture and medicine exponentially lowered the death rate of both mothers and children in childbirth, which then led to a huge growth in human population, which then threatened to overtax food production and lead to widespread famine.
• And today we see the threat of global warming (at least partially) caused by dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping heat, possibly leading to the rising of the seas and the drowning of millions.

However, as Norberg and many others note, forecasts of the effects of such consequences have historically failed to materialize as predicted. Such forecasts, such as those of Malthus, who predicted population growth overwhelming food production and leading to global famine by now, did not factor in the human ability to innovate and invent. Even though improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.

Why didn’t such dire consequences happen?

As Norberg points out in the example of overpopulation, the reduction in childbirth deaths actually led to a decrease in the rate of population growth as parents no longer felt the necessity for large families when such a large percentage of children began to survive the vulnerable early years.

And, as we have seen, the introduction of coal did indeed lead to deaths caused by foul air, but of course, once again, innovation and invention produced methods of cleaning coal smoke, and new technologies to produce more BTUs with fewer side effects, such as the extraction and management of gas.

But what about global warming? The CO₂ content in the air may take centuries to dissipate naturally, and by then humans may well have effected their own demise.   Again, such a forecast fails to factor the ability of humans to invent. Considering the number of initiatives under development today, such as wind, solar and nuclear power, such prophesies may well be premature. There are also studies underway to not only extract CO₂ from the air, but to market it as a source of fuel as well. All these, of course, are optimistic forecasts, and all subject to unplanned consequences which will set off new rounds of invent-pollute-clean up. Can humans win this war, or will the inevitable consequences rule out in the end?

John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   While this point of view definitely suggest optimism, the question can legitimately be asked, “What costs are we prepared to pay for progress?” This is followed by the more significant question. “How can we be sure that we will continue, as McHale suggests above, to find fixes for the things we break?”

The risks that we are discussing are ‘structural’ risks. One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series several 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. 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 horde, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’, resulting in a future which seems far less secure than the past.

The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ is directly related to this fear.

   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, clear ‘fruits of evolution’, can be undermined.

The fact that they have historically prevailed over the institutionally entrenched pessimists is evidence of the strength of such beliefs., but what happens when such optimism ‘runs dry’ in the well of human evolution?

The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the danger to such faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics, McHale’s forecasts and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed).

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 (we are) becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of (our) future on earth, what (we) need before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of (future) into which (our) 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, historically proven 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, significant evolutionary risk can be seen in sharp ideological divisions as they undermine the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and as a result weaken their power to solve problems. In order to continue our evolution, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the risks to our continued evolution. We saw how the (so far) successful ‘fix-break-fix:’ cycle of ‘structural’ evolution can be weakened by 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 look a little deeper at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.