Today’s Post
Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize matter into increased complexity. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides ‘proof of the pudding’ for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.
This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.
Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context
As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding how our two great human enterprises, religion and science, occur in in the flow of human history.
As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by such ‘right brain’ activities as instinct and intuition. As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings. Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.
As we saw in posts on The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking can be seen in the Greek development of philosophic thought.
The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament. Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ in each of us. While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure from it than evolution from it.
Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right and left brain thinking modes.
Science is born from such an early application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.
Science in its own way is also stuck. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion. Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers. However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for freedom and such things as faith and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.
As Sacks puts it,
“To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.
This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts which make no sense when removed from their integrated context.
From the Religious Side
One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’. We saw in last week’s post how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome. We have seen many other examples over the last many posts
Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than we could in the past. Teilhard saw such an enterprise as
“A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”
So we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition. We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.
This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John puts it, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.
Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the World”. It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine and emerged in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.
From the Empirical Side
By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which show how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.
The facets of empowerment which he documents: personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion. This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.
Something else is necessary as well. Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.
Considering that the human species is some two hundred thousand years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’. The morphing of such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago into a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, stomped out) in human society.
Thus the pace of evolution must be appreciated. Certainly it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions. On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.
The Next Post
This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context, and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.
Next week we will take a look at where we are today in this process.