Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

October 20, 2022 – Why Be Pessimistic About Progress?

Why should so many who profit from progress be so skeptical of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at the pessimism that seems to oppose the insight that, as Johan Norberg documents, ‘the world is getting better’.

This week we will look at three of Steven Pinker’s five possible causes of this pessimism.

Modes of Pessimism

Steven Pinker outlines several ‘modes of pessimism’ In his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented. Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume. As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

And not only does immediate news sell, but negative news also sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant. Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’. For example, we worry more about crime even as crime rates are falling. As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”. He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.””

Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, but also “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias– – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving. This is sort of a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes than it is to imagine it as uplifted, their lot improved, their relationships deepened, or their future made brighter than their past.

Effectively, lack of clarity about the past leads to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work. One reason for such bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains continue to stimulate our modern neocortex brain with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival. Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the limbic and reptilian brains cease to function.

It also doesn’t mean that our 200,000 old skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity. Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution. To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page. Hence Teilhard sees humanity still in an evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Next Post

This week we took note of the first three of Steven Pinker’s ‘modes of pessimism’ which illustrate the currents in contemporary society which reinforce the pessimism common in it.

Next week we will look the remaining two.

October 13, 2022 – With all This Progress, Why All The Pessimism?

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Why should those who benefit the most from increasing global welfare be most suspicious of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion yea rise in the evolution of the human species.

In doing so, we also saw how such a worldview substantiates Teilhard’s insight that humans can be seen to continue to evolve along the same ‘axis of evolution’ that has been universally followed so far: that of increasing consciousness by way of increasing complexity.

We also noted that despite the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it. Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

This week we will take a closer look at this phenomenon.

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature. Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”. Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”. Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person: the “dangerous Id”. Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition. Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger, and Sartre.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand humanity as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions. For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls. Even actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves most Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”. Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation. “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen. On an individual basis, individuals seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large. Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society. Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we began to look at why, with all the data bubbling up in our ‘data-ocracy’ which shows the unprecedented improvement in global human welfare, so many of us fail to factor this information into their view of the world.

Next week we will look into several causes suggested by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

October 6, 2022 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism

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Why does ‘conventional wisdom’ resist the optimistic perspectives of Teilhard and Norberg?

Today’s Post

Last week, we did a brief overview of the third of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species in terms of global welfare. We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

We also saw how, as in Teilhard, the clear-eyed optimism that the data provides is not reflected in the ‘conventional wisdom’ prevalent in the West today.

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to be so poorly reflected today.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

Norberg’s examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front. In addition to the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norberg’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

For example, in the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997. He asserted that

“Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history. Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”

This suggests that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow, and that the resulting gap will increase poverty in poorer countries.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that (the gap) is exactly what has happened. Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually. In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low- and middle-income countries has doubled.”

He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP. Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth. That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism, and protectionism.”

And what’s changing?

“But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour and use of technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how Teilhard’s statement is less a cultural bias that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it. In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere. The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”. As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individuals are “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases. For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame. To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany after its isolation from the West.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years. Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled. Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now clearly seen to be contrary to objective data? More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most. Why should this be true? More to the point, how can such prevalent pessimism undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next week we will look at this phenomenon and its roots in today’s Western culture.

September 29, 2022 – Poverty and Human Evolution

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How does the reduction of global poverty substantiate Teilhard’s insights on human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw statistics from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’ which documented the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’. They point not only to a general improvement in human welfare, but also to a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand generations of human existence. We also saw, once again, how the data of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.

This week we will take a last look at Norberg’s metrics of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records. Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger, and disease, especially in third world and ‘developing’ countries.

Generally, we have become numb to this phenomenon, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted. Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as Matthew cites Jesus claiming that “The poor you will always have with you.”

Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising. As the Economist reports, when asked by the Gapminder Foundation whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”

So, what ‘cogent experimental grounds’ might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with most of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive. The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.

Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity. She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’ Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?

Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’. He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%. This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.

In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP. He puts this into perspective:

“Even if all incomes had been perfectly equally distributed (which they certainly weren’t) it would have meant a life of extreme deprivation for everybody. The average world citizen lived in abject misery, as poor as the average person in Haiti, Liberia, and Zimbabwe today.”

So, in 1820, the average percent of poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%. If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years. By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income. (This increase did not emerge because of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time.)

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East: As the United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.

The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing. The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty (source: World Bank). Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.

The reductions over the entire two-hundred-year span show an overall decrease from 94% to 12% by 2018.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years. The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the remainder required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’.

Seeing This Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

This clearly substantiates the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:

Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted, and globalization is fostered. Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly. Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.
These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, but also how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing. Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as seen here.

Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

September 22, 2022 – Life Expectancy and Human Evolution

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How can human evolution be seen in the improvement of ‘lifespan’?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:

– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of improvements in human welfare over time.

– the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing

– these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.

This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg points out:

“Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish, and short. More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.”

Plagues frequently caused massive deaths. The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population. Such plagues continued on a regular basis and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century. In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640. As Norberg notes

“Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”

Considering this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules. Thus, he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state. Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.

At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20^th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.

This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred-thousand-year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees in the curve’. Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’. Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles, and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly. Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

Asia: Increases from 42 to 70 Years

Latin America: Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa: Increases from 37 to 57 Years

We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’.

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

As we saw with the subject of ‘food’, these statistics prove out Teilhard’s insights,

Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this appeared first in the West.
Such innovation and invention require the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted. Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese cultures and early empires of Islam but died still- born because restricted from trade.
These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

September 15, 2022 – How Does the Data on Food Substantiate Teilhard’s Perspective?

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How can Teilhard’s optimistic insights be seen in the human evolution of food?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the phenomena of ‘food’ from Norberg’s perspective, charting the recursive process of innovation, invention and incorporation that underlies the increase of human welfare that he documents.

This week, we will relook at this data to see how it offers an example of the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard suggests is necessary to increase our confidence in the future.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s eight insights into human evolution to see how well they correlate.

Human Invention As we saw last week, history shows humans as capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction. Without increasing crop yield, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now. With the population growth that has occurred, we would have by now required nearly all arable land to feed ourselves.

Dissemination Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace. As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control. The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions. In general, as Teilhard notes, this is nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

Psychisms Innovations and inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ (human groups free to innovate) which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.

Speed. It’s not just that solutions to the problems were found; note that most of them seen in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years. In the estimated eight thousand generations which have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three. Due to Teilhard’s ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading to the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West. For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years in the West, but in the East, it is proceeding today at twice this rate.

Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the ‘end of times’ did not occur. While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially. Even today, there are still those today who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.

Changes of State As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.

Timeliness As we saw in our example of data, each new innovation seems to arrive in time to prevent a critical point after which human evolution would begin to ebb. With enough malnutrition and famine, the amount of human energy need to deal with problems would wane past the point that it could develop a tactic to do so.

Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious, and philosophical resistance. In the yearning for an imagined but attractive past can undermine the practices of invention and globalism. The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith, if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’. In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to reap the crop of fear thought to insure their election. As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.

The Next Post

Having seen the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’, we saw this week how Teilhard’s eight evolutionary insights can be shown to be found in them.

Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Life Expectancy’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in human welfare. As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary insights that we saw this week.

June 30, 2022 – How does Teilhard See The Increase of Complexity In Human Evolution?

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How can the energy of evolution spill over from the ‘material’ to the ‘conscious’ level?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have seen how Teilhard parses the increasing complexity of human evolution into its ‘material’ and ‘conscious’ appearances.

This week we will look into how this evolution not only occurs in the individual person itself, but is interwoven in human collective enterprises.

The Levels of Human Evolution

Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution clearly show the increase in complexity which occurs as granules of matter unite in such a way as to become increasingly capable of future unity. Seen through his ‘lens of evolution’, this phenomenon not only continues to increase in the human species but does so at a more rapid rate.

Richard Dawkins recognizes this ‘new’ (compared to biological natural selection) mode when he says

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture” …and the new replicator “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”.

Such an increase can be seen once the new facets of the human are put into context.

Dawkins’ ‘replicator’ emerges into the milieu of reflective consciousness by way of ‘cultural transmission’ and does so by way of four distinct levels of human evolution which are identified by Teilhard.

The first level can be seen in the ‘monad’, the individual of the species that reflects the unique manifestation of the ‘person’. As Teilhard asserts, in each trip around the convergent spiral of evolution (June 2, 2022 – Mapping Teilhard’s ‘Energy of Complexity’ | Science, Religion and Reality (lloydmattlandry.com) the three key vectors of the force of evolution are active in the human person. With the two hemispheres of the unique human neocortex brain, resting on the foundation of two pre-human brains (the ‘reptilian’ at the base and the ‘limbic’ above it), the human person is endowed with a brain capacity which has been significantly increased over his predecessors.

The first of Teilhard’s ‘vectors’, ‘connectivity’ comes into play as the multiplicity of brain activities is brought into a collaborative enterprise to permit an integrated response to the stimuli of an increasingly multifaceted and complex reality. As Teilhard sees it

“the history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

The second vector is that which emerges from such successful integration: the increased clarity by which this complex reality can be understood. This increased clarity can result in the evolutionary value of a more successful interaction with it.

His third vector can be seen in the increased integration and improved comprehension provided by the first two: a human ‘complexification’ step by which the first two results (unity and clarity) are further enriched.

Thus, at the ‘monad’ level of human evolution, the underlying potential for personal evolution is thus activated. Karen Armstrong sees this insight emerging in human history during the ‘Axial Age’.

“By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. They were becoming fully “self- conscious”.

The second level can be seen in the ‘dyad’, the case of close relationships between ‘monads’. No matter what skill we develop in understanding ourselves, further enrichment is always possible from a closer relationship with another person. Our culture abounds with lore which contrasts the danger of isolated, subjective thought with the richness that a close relationship can bring. Teilhard, succinctly describes this as

“closer union from fuller being, and fuller being from closer union”.

He goes a little further when he addresses the ‘personization’ resulting from such unions:

“True union differentiates”.

Karen Anderson when she notes this evolutive insights of Confucius

“..You needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process.”

The third level can be seen in what Teilhard refers to as the ‘psychism’, where a group of individuals is united by a common cause, and thus has two outcomes clearly related to human evolution. The first outcome is the easiest to envision, and which can be seen in the product sought by the group endeavor, such as a design, a vaccine or the underlying meaning that lies beneath the diverse data found in a large database. For such a product to emerge, the talents of each member of such a small group are required.

These talents, applied in collaboration, results in a second outcome: each individual is enriched as the strength of the collaboration is increased. This is another example of how Teilhard’s concept of the dyadic phenomenon of ‘fuller being/closer union’ is active when raised to the level of a group.
The emergence of a new level of consciousness from ‘psychsms’ of course can be found in nearly all religious and philosophical thinking. The motto of the United States recognizes this.

“E Pluribus Unum” (From many, one)

The roots of the evolution of the human species can be seen in these three levels. The blossoming of this energy can be seen as Dawkins’ intuition of ‘cultural transmission’ is present in Teilhard’s fourth level.

Next Week

This week we saw how Teilhard, through his ‘lens of evolution’, guides us through three of the four ‘levels’ of human evolution, leading up to that seen by Richard Dawkins as the level of ‘cultural transmission’

Next week we will address the fourth of Teilhard’s level, into what he refers to as the ‘noosphere’.

May 26, 2022 – Teilhard’s ‘Energy of Complexity’

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What causes complexity to increase in evolution?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been employing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by seeing how he uses it to examine the process of increased complexity at work in the evolution of the universe, even as it spills over into human life on this planet.
This week we will refocus this ‘lens’ onto the aspect of how it does so, by recognizing it as ‘energy’.

Human Evolution in a Universal Context

In his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, Teilhard shows how evolution can be seen to always follow the same pattern everywhere in the universe as it rises from the simplicity of the first manifestation of featureless energy at the Big Bang to the complexity which can be seen today across its broad expanse. In addition to the other ‘energies’ discovered by science, he adds one which is required for this ‘complexification’ to occur. He maps this underlying energy into three different ‘vectors’.

First, he notes a component of this energy by which the granules of the ‘stuff of the universe’, even in their undifferentiated state at the ‘Big Bang’, have the potential of connecting with each other to form new granules. Science is still discovering the ‘laws’ which govern how these interconnections take place, and as its scope of the universe expands, these laws expand with it.

Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” was one of the first attempts to articulate these laws. Later, Einstein’s expansion of them into the realm or ‘relativity’ recognized Newton’s laws as ‘subsets’ of a much larger realm of mathematics. Today, science struggles with how Einstein’s relativistic perspectives can be seen to square with the new insights enabled by quantum theory.

Secondly, he notes that thus far, none of these laws delve into the scientifically uncovered phenomena of complexification. While the Standard Model of Physics addresses the forces by which subatomic particles come together to effect the configurations seen in atoms, it does not address the source of the atom’s increased potential for future reconfiguration into more complex entities.

Science’s ability to understand the energies at work in the assembly of components from subcomponents increases daily. Since it does not acknowledge that this assembly is accompanied by the potential for increased complexity, this force that Teilhard recognizes has been simply, up until now, ‘off the table’. As a result, the absence of the most important process in the universe, that of complexification, renders the Standard Model of physics as ‘incomplete’. Without it, the universe would have remained at its initial simple state.

This potential has only recently begun to creep back onto the table with the new approach seen in ‘Information Theory’. This new branch of inquiry sees the ‘information’ contained in a particle of matter as the ‘instructions’ which define the potential of the particle to connect with other particles of the same order to result in a new particle (such as protons, neutrons and electrons uniting to become atoms). Paul Davies in his book, “The 5th Miracle”, suggests the analogy of such information as the ‘software’ contained in the ‘hardware’ of matter. In our example, the three components of the atom utilize this ‘software’ as ‘instructions’ for their unification from discrete components into unified products.

Davies is referring to the fact that the enriched ‘information’ or ‘software’ of such new ‘product’ of evolution endows the new product with increased potential for not only new structure and functionality, but for the eventual production of even more complex products (such as atoms grouping into molecules). Thus, not only does the structure of the product become more complex, but so does its information.

Teilhard addresses this novel phenomenon, this new and enriched component of ‘information’ by which such union not only produces an ‘offspring’, but one whose complexity has been increased from that of its ‘parent’. In terms of Information Theory, the ‘complexity quotient’ of this new product can be seen in the increase in information resulting from the connections of the precedent components, such as the increased ‘information’ seen in the DNA molecule resulting from the combining of simpler molecules of amino acids.

Thirdly Teilhard identifies the characteristic of this higher degree of information by which the new components are not only more complex themselves, but more capable of future unifications which result in still further increases in complexity. In the example above, the DNA molecule is not only more complex in structure than its amino acid components, but this increased complexity also allows it an unprecedented power: to guide the RNA molecule in the production of proteins which provide energy to, and define the functionality of, future products: ‘cells’. DNA therefore can be seen as an example of matter’s capability of ‘instructing itself to make itself’, a stunning step up the ladder of increasing complexity and evidence of the presence of Teilhard’s ‘energy of evolution’.

Thus, Teilhard recognizes a unique type of energy which powers this creative enterprise as the universe evolves: unification, complexification, and increased potential for further unification. With the addition of this energy to the Standard Model of physics, the universe’s undoubted evolutionary increase in complexity becomes clearer.

Next Week

This week we moved from seeing how Teilhard’s seven attributes of increasing complexity can be observed as active in the human species, to addressing the unique ‘energy of complexification’ by which it occurs. We also saw that, although it has been ‘ground ruled’ from the ‘lens of physics’, Teilhard’s addition permits science to expand their field of view to address the entire universe.

Next week we will look a little more closely at how Teilhard’s recognition of the ‘energy of complexification’ can be distinguished among the clutter of science’s ‘energy of matter’.

May 19, 2022 – How Are Teilhard’s Facets of Complexity Active in Human Evolution?

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How does Teilhard understand ‘complexity’ as underlying human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a closer look at how, through the ‘lens of evolution’, Teilhard’s ‘complexification’ can be seen to continue in the third of his three stages of universal evolution, at least on this planet (matter, life and thought). Following Richard Dawkins’ recognition of human culture as the ‘vehicle’ of the transmission of ‘memes’ (“units of cultural imitation and replication”, AKA, ‘ideas’), human evolution can be expanded from the simple Darwinist “survival of the fittest” into a new and unique ‘re-instantiation’ of the cosmic principles which have guided ‘the stuff of the universe’ through its first fourteen billion years of evolution via ‘complexification’.

This week we will apply Teilhard’s seven facets of this ‘complexification’ to what we can see happening as the universe continues its evolution in the human species.

A Common Metric

In Richard Dawkins’ identification of a ‘causality’ for the third phase of evolution, ‘thought’, he addresses the question raised last week:

“What remains in charting the rise of ‘complexity’ through the evolution of the universe is to understand how such a thing as ‘human consciousness’ can be seen as a new ‘vehicle’ which can continue the fourteen billion rise of evolution into the future. How can this ‘new vehicle’ be understood?”

And in providing insight into evolution as it continues into this third phase of ‘thought’, Teilhard’s concept of ‘complexification’ as the common denominator in universal evolution is complete (at least thus far on this planet).

For those who know how to look, Teilhard’s seven characteristics of universal complexity can be seen as alive and well in the continuing drama of human evolution.

An underlying characteristic of nearly every cultural and social mode of organization can be seen in the unleashing of fanciful creations. The ‘Natural Selection’ of biology, as Dawkins sees it, manifests itself in a new form as the human species continually explores new ways to not only maintain itself, but to increase its success in furthering itself.
Both society and human activity, when fostered, burst forward in waves of spontaneity. Those branches of human organization which foster the ability of its constituents to exercise their potential for ‘spontaneity’ are always rewarded with increased potential for action.
The expansion of the human species across the globe is unprecedented. And the unrest that accompanies the waves of human expansion as they collide are offset by the emergence of new insights on coexistence.
Human social experiments are exceedingly improbable. These new insights are not always obvious, and do not occur spontaneously. The idea of democracy, for example, required a long history which culminated in placing a risky trust in government in the hands of collective wisdom.
Humans find ever new and innovative ways to organize, tap into, and assure the continuation of their collective wisdom. The social norms and civic mandates (laws) that emerge over time are constantly evolving.
Governments, at least in the West, have developed more supple and better centered organization and use of their resources. Those governments that put a priority on in the importance of the human person (as seen in the fostering of their spontaneity) and on the necessity for ensuring their relationships have evolved cultural norms which have led to a measurable global increase in human welfare. We will later address the many ways that this increase can be seen, as well as its dependence on the values of human personal freedom and insurance of human relationships.
Historically, each new cycle has been accompanied by an onset of a new type of conscious activity and determination. In the rise and fall of great societies in the spiral of humanity as it evolves, a continuation of insights can be traced.

We will see later how the wheat of human evolution can be distinguished among the many elements of chaff when we later address specific objectively-derived examples of these seven characteristics.

Next Week

This week we not only saw how Teilhard’s seven characteristics of complexity are active in human evolution, but how the human person and his culture serve as the ‘vehicle’ for Dawkins’ ‘meme’ as it replaces the cell as the essential building block of evolution

Next week we will look a little more closely at how this phenomenon of ‘complexification’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.

May 12, 2022 – How Does Teilhard’s Concept of Complexity Show up in Human Evolution?

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How does universal evolution continue in human life?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been exploring Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as a tool which would help us see the whole of existence in a single context so that we could better understand ourselves and how we fit in. Starting with Teilhard’s unique insights into evolution itself, we have gone on to see how he saw the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ as the underlying characteristic of this evolution, and how he quantifies it.

In the last two weeks we saw how Teilhard’s seven characteristics of ‘complexification’ can be seen in each stage of the evolution of the universe, leading to the essential characteristic of ‘consciousness’. As a necessary step to understanding evolution holistically, we saw how these characteristics appear in each new step as the universe evolves to each new stage.

This week we will return to the second, ‘biological’, stage of universal evolution (at least on this planet) to take a closer look at what can be seen in the action of ‘biological complexification’ as it increases the ‘coefficient of consciousness’ to that level which distinguishes the human from its ancestors.

Complexity in Living Things

After addressing the nine billion or so years during which the basic elements of the cosmos continuously structured and restructured themselves into the complex architecture of DNA, in the ‘Phenomenon’ Teilhard turns his insights into the ‘complexification’ of living matter as it increases from the cell to the human.

“The stages of this still unfinished march of nature (can be seen in the) unification or synthesis of the ever-increasing products of living reproduction:

– At the bottom, we find the simple aggregate, as in bacteria and the lower fungi

– One stage higher comes the colony of attached cells, not yet centralized, though distinct specialization has begun, as with the higher vegetable forms and the bryozoa,

-Higher still is the metazoan cell of cells, in which by a prodigious critical transformation and autonomous center is established (as though by excessive shrinking) over the organized group of living particles.

– And still further on, to round off the list, at the present limit of our experience and of life’s experiments, comes society- that mysterious association of free metazoans in which (with varying success) the formation of hyper-complex units by ‘mega synthesis’ seems to being attempted.

This last and highest form of aggregation is the self-organizing effort of matter culminating perhaps in society as capable of self-reflection.”

Evolution: A Rose By Any Other Name…

Most evolutionary scientists ignore the ongoing development of human society, or at least avoid the term ‘evolution’ in dealing with it. This same curious avoidance can be seen in the ‘Standard Model’ of Physics: sciences’ understanding of the development of matter during the ‘pre life’ era.

While the Standard Model maps the phenomenon of universal ‘becoming’, the reference to it as ‘evolution’ seems to be strongly avoided. To most biologists, the term “evolution” must be restricted to living things, and even then, only to their ‘morphology’, the physio-chemical combinations of cells that produce various classes of life.

To some extent, the emerging science of ‘molecular biology’, even though it falls under the first evolutionary stage of evolution (‘matter’), falls close to the second category (life). This is due to the ability of very complex (but so far still inanimate) molecules to self-organize and replicate. The existence of viruses, non-cellular but also containing DNA, also falls into the category of ‘inanimate matter’ but one capable of evolving via Natural Selection. However, the perspective taken by most biologists is that all other process by which pre-living things ‘become’ fall outside of the label of ‘evolution’.

That aside, the question of whether, and if so how, evolution continues in the third stage (‘thought’) remains. Human societies are without the DNA seemingly required by Natural Selection, so how can their development be considered as ‘evolution’?

It seems clear that to the extent that human evolution occurs, it does so in ways quite differently from Darwin’s process of Natural Selection. The state of human society, and the personal acumen both required for and fostered by it, have both evolved today from a degree understood just a few hundred years ago. But by what process has this happened? If humans evolve via their society, what is the human counterpart of the ‘genes’ required by Natural Selection?

The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, addressed this question in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, by proposing that human society evolves via “transmission of units of cultural imitation and replication”. His name for the ‘unit of transmission’ was ‘meme’. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up a ‘meme’ makes treatment by science somewhat problematic, but he recognizes that the concept is sufficient to identify a third aspect of evolution: how it can be seen to proceed ‘non-morphologically’ in the human species. As he distinguishes it from Darwinist evolution, human culture

“… “evolves in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution. but has nothing to do with genetic evolution.”

Thus, with ‘memitic evolution’, we are provided an example of the last of the three phases of the process of evolution in the cosmos:

via the increasing organization of matter in the first, pre-life stage (‘matter’)
followed by the process of Natural Selection through genetic changes in biologic entities during the second stage (‘life’)
and finally, via the transmission of ideas in human culture in a third stage (‘thought’)

Science, in its ‘Standard Model’ shows a strong belief in the underlying unity of the cosmos but thus far has failed to quantify it as it broadens its view to these three distinct manifestations of universal evolution.

Are these, as many claim, three different processes, or can they be somehow seen, as Teilhard suggests, as three manifestations of a common, underlying thread?

Next Week

This week we took a closer look at what can be seen in the second stage of universal evolution, ‘life’, as the ‘coefficient of consciousness’ increases to that level which distinguishes the human from its ancestors.

Next week we will apply Teilhard’s seven levels of ‘complexification’ to this third phase of evolution, ‘thought’.