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May 21, 2020 – Religion’s Tools for Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week be began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human. We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’. In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science, which, too, does the same.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, weighted as it is with its historical attachment to such things as found in the radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism in the West? Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from them?

This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Rethinking Morality 

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in terms of the new insights offered by science.   Blondel was one of the first Catholic theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which understood not only the universe but the human as well as ‘dynamic’, as opposed to the medieval worldview which understood both as ‘static Teilhard substantially expanded this insight, understanding how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular, empirical and more relevant meaning to religion’s ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard offers five insights into morality as opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science. Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology. The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human efforts has simply been to ‘make sense of things’. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, it has used the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in no way are we ‘there yet’.

While considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, he sees morality as a tool to ‘construct the world’. Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’.

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

   Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   Here Teilhard introduces two insights: First the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it. Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it in unlocking the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   Put another way, as we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to actualize our potential.

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

“The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

– (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.(advance human evolution)”

A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Norberg. One of the facets that he identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP. This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution. Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

As a direct corollary of this insight, Teilhard reinforces his assertion that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and person-ness). Effectively he sees the need to move

“Individual morality (from) preventing him from doing harm (to) working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (person-ness) to the uttermost.”

   In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil to ensure our salvation.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

   Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion. As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the unique human characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention at the basis of its expertise. He goes on to say,

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere. The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure. To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of the understanding of human evolution: Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to the continuation of human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.

The Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson’s assertion of the person as the basis for society…

in the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

in the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality andhow it can be seen as a tool for continuing our evolution as humans.

Next week we will begin to look at what is needed by religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

May 14, 2020 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks to human evolution by better understanding it. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which foll0wed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noosphere’ or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?

One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’. We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ from the perspective of evolution previously in this blog. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’. In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. By this method, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above can now reframe it: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of things, in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos.”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as religion is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. A similar challenge to science also exists: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the ‘spirit’.

Note that I am using this term ‘spirit’ in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’ is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more, and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.

   Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution. There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:

  • Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul) ,and particularly in the human person (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
  • Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
  • Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
  • Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be a return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms. We must be able to rethink religion.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so. Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the early religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being. They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society. All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE. These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh centrur, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change into an increasingly empirical and therefore secular understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.

The clash between the neo-think offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today. These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it. So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-spin them into a single strand.

In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks. Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful, articulation.

May 7, 2020 – How Is Human Evolution A Continuation of Cosmic Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at a way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks, suggested by Teilhard: to better understand the noosphere (the milieu of human thought and enterprise) itself and what part we play in it.

In a nutshell, Teilhard saw that over its fourteen or so billion years of existence, evolution of the universe can be seen to follow the basic principle by which matter enters into more complex (and hence less probable) organizations under the influence of the basic ‘energy of becoming’ which is built into the ‘stuff of the universe’.   He sees this principle manifesting itself explicitly in the increasing complexity of this same ‘stuff’ over time, and therefore sees how this energy is reflected in in human lives as we participate in our own evolution.

Last week we looked at Teilhard’s graphic of the ‘spiral’ as a way of seeing how matter not only evolves, but in doing so it ‘converges’ as its capacity for unification becomes more pronounced through the first eight or so billion years. This week we will see how this convergent rise continues through the ‘life era’, and to its current state of ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Conscious Spiral

Last week we saw how evolution proceeds through ‘discontinuities’ in which new and unprecedented functionalities appear at key steps. These new functionalities not only show themselves in their greater potential for union, but also in increased facilities such as influence over environment, mobility, vitality and potential for further increase in complexity through future unions.

While the above manifestations of evolution occur in scientifically verifiable steps, each of them represents a highly discontinuous step from the preceding plateau of evolution. On an evolutionary time scale, the transition to each new state of complexity can be seen to occur at an increasingly rapid pace. This increasing convergence of the spiral can even be seen to be active in the stage of entities aware of their consciousness (humans).

Last week we looked at this phenomenon in the ‘material’ realm of ‘pre-life’. Recognizing that Teilhard makes no sharp distinction between this ‘pre-life’ realm and the ‘life realm’, we can see how this rise of evolution through discontinuous steps spills over into it and continues its rise into the ‘realm of consciousness’.

While the earliest days of humanity are only vaguely understood, it is possible to roughly track this convergence of the spiral of evolution as it morphs into human history (all dates approximate):

  • Very early humans began to invent intuitive modes of thinking, based on instincts and clan relationships some 200,000 years ago
  • The evolution of primitive ‘laws’ of society evolve from clan norms about 15,000 years ago
  • ‘Axial Age’ concepts of person and society emerge from primitive concepts into ‘philosophies’ based on intuitions and instincts 3,500 years ago
  • ‘Left brain’ (empirical) modes of thinking arise in Greece from the traditionally universal ‘Right brained’ (intuitional) thinking of earlier systems some 3,000 years ago.
  • Merging of left and right ‘modes’ of neocortex functions begins with the introduction of ‘left brain’ thinking into the legacy ‘right brained’ mode as Jewish-inspired Christianity becomes more influenced by Greek thinking 2,000 years ago
  • Scientific/empirical thinking emerges from the Christian right-left merge 1,400 years ago
  • The ‘Enlightenment’ emerges from the prevalent right-brained, post medievalism at the same time as establishment of the personal as locus for the juridical (Jefferson) three hundred years ago
  • The abrupt increase in human welfare, documented by Norberg, begins one hundred fifty years ago.

In each of these ‘discontinuous bursts’ we can see Teilhard’s three ‘vectors of increasing complexity’ at work in the human species:

  • Societies are all initially similar to the less complex entities which preceded them
  • They all in turn effect an increase in both the vitality and potential for union from those that preceded them
  • Each new step required a new and more complex way of human relationship, increasing differentiation, and leading to increased vitality and power to unite.

It’s also important to note the timeline: each discontinuity in the above list took less time to effect its step increase in complexity than the preceding.

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

Thus, while Teilhard notes the occurrence of discontinuity in evolution, he also shows how underneath these discontinues lies a basic fundamental, continuous current which powers the ‘axis of evolution’. He notes that at each such step, several things happen no matter which stage of evolution we are addressing:

  • The evolved element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ (atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, humans) rises not only in its complexity, but in its uniqueness. Each new appearance, while initially retaining its similarity to its parent, becomes sharply distinguishable from its precedent.
  • This characteristic is very important to the recognition that human evolution occurs in the same way that all steps have occurred in universal evolution. As Teilhard puts it: “True union differentiates”

This applies to evolution at every phase, from the Big Bang to the human person.

Thus, an important step in understanding the noosphere is to recognize that our lives are powered by a cosmic agent by which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted ever upward. In Teilhard’s words:

“..I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Understanding this connects us to the fourteen billion year process which has raised the universe, as Richard Dawkins observes, “into its present complex existence”.   So, if we are to understand the noosphere, as Teilhard suggests as a step towards managing its risks, we need the ‘scales to fall from our eyes’ so that we can not only take in the breadth and scope of the universe, but recognize that we fit into it naturally, as a child to a loving parent.

The Next Post                         

This week we took a second look at ‘understanding the noosphere’ in terms of a rising, converging spiral, this week looking at the nature of the spiral as it rises from ‘complexifying matter’ by way of ‘enriching spirit’. Teilhard shows the current state of human evolution to be a stage in a sure and steady continuation of such rise over the preceding fourteen or so billions of years of universal existence. As such, we can now see that the basic nature of our lives is nourished and assured not only of survival but increasing fullness by this personal agent of evolution. All that is necessary, he asserts, is for us only to open our eyes to it, recognize it as active in our lives, and learn to cooperate with it if we are to be successful in dealing with the ‘noospheric risks’.

Having taken a closer look at those risks which can impede human evolution, and looked at a better understanding of the ‘noosphere’ as a start to managing them, next week we will return to the core topic of this blog, ‘reinterpretation of religion’, to see how religion can be employed to build on Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the world” to assure our future.

April 30, 2020 – Understanding the Structure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw that one way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks (those associated with the risks brought on by the milieu of our collective humanity) was to better understand the noosphere itself and what part we play in it. In doing so, we are taking Teilhard’s approach which he explains:

“Evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses which all systems must submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.”

   If we’re going to manage the risks, we must better understand the milieu that we are creating as we evolve. Teilhard’s approach to any subject is to place it into the context of universal evolution if we are to better understand it, and the noosphere is no exception.

This week we will continue down this path of looking at the noosphere in an evolutionary context to help situate ourselves in this process of understanding ‘complexification’ as it takes place in human evolution.

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard used the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor for understanding how the expansion of humanity compresses us as it reaches the equator of our metaphorical sphere. As a result, instead of continuing to spread, we begin to press in on ourselves, requiring replacement of those tools that served us so well in the ‘expansion’ phase with ones which will support our ‘compression’.

In the same way, he uses the metaphor of the spiral (Jan 9) to illustrate how ‘the stuff of the universe’ evolves as its components unite to increase their complexity at the same time that they are drawn ‘upwards to more complexity’ and ‘inwards towards closer union’. The spiral that Teilhard envisions isn’t just a simple coil, like a bedspring, it’s a spiral which converges as it rises over time.

Teilhard sees the cosmic energy which powers evolution, active in each element of the universe, acting in three ways:

  • First, he notes a ‘tangential’ component of this energy by which the granules of the ‘stuff of the universe’ have the potential of uniting with each other.
  • Secondly, he notes a ‘vertical’ component of this energy by which such union increases complexity
  • Thirdly he notes a ‘radial’ component of this energy by which the components become not only more complex, but more capable of increasing their unification and therefore becoming more complex .

Hence the convergence of the spiral pulls these components not only closer to each other but also closer to the ‘axis’ of the spiral (Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’). In doing so they become closer to the source of the universal energy by which all things become united in such a way as to differentiate themselves at the same time that they are enriched.

Thus, in this simple graphic metaphor, Teilhard shows the universe evolving as union brings complexity which in turn increases the potential for further union.

A very simple example of this tri-vectored evolutionary force can be seen in the Standard Model of Physics. Electrons can unite to become atoms, which by definition are more complex. The few types of ‘the stuff of the universe’ represented by electrons become the many types represented by atoms. The atoms in turn contain more potential for unification than did the electrons, and therefore become a larger set of granules which are not only more complex but whose potential is increased in such a way that they can unite to become highly complex molecules.

In such successive ‘trips around the spiral’ do we see the incredible simple electron evolving into the highly complex amino acid which is one of the building blocks of the cell.

Applying Teilhard’s spiral metaphor to humanity, we can understand ourselves as the most recent manifestation of such ‘stuff of the universe’, produced as the result of these three components of energy which interact to increase the complexity of the universe. We engage with ‘tangential’ energy when we relate to others; while enhancing and enriching our ‘persons’; we engage with ‘radial’ energy as we become more conscious of, and learn to cooperate with the ‘tangential’ energy which differentiates and enhances us, and in this cooperation both our persons and our ‘psychisms’ become more complete and enriched.

So, to the question of where are we in this universal journey from pure energy to some future state of increased complexity, Teilhard offers a suggestion: We are early in the process of learning both how relationships and cooperation are essential to our progress.

That said, can we quantify how such process can be seen?

Th Empirical Spiral

We are surely very early in the process of building an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them. Even so, empirical science can offer some insight.

While the light which science can show on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights the many ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

  • Matter appearing from pure energy
  • Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter
  • Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms
  • Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells
  • Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into the more complex groupings found in neurons
  • Neurons find ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then to brains
  • Neocortices emerge from limbic brains, themselves from reptilian brains
  • Conscious brains become aware of their functionality.

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which ensues. While science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the increasing complexity that ensues. There is no current scientific explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the undifferentiated level of the big bang to the highly differentiated human which is uniquely capable of an awareness which is aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by science, their increase in complexity following each discontinuity into human evolution requires a look into how the element of ‘consciousness’ can also be seen to evolve.

Next Week

This week we took a first step toward ‘understanding the noosphere’ by following Teilhard as he situates the noosphere in an evolutive context.   To begin this phase we saw how Teilhard used the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ to map out the manifestations of energy which power our evolution, and how their manifestations can be seen in the ‘discontinuities’ which have occurred in the history of the universe.

Next week we will look further into the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ as we carry it forward into the realm of consciousness.

April 23, 2020 – Managing The Risks of Evolution

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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.

April 16, 2020 – How Do We Insure Our Own Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species. We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.”

   But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence. Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore compromise progress in favor of superficial improvements . They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’. From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken-ness’. We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’. This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more, and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.

   Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally prized by secularists. In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality. Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved. From his perspective, it can be seen as active in every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness.

Thus the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed. However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (eg: matter, eg: us). With this understanding, the idea of spirituality rises from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter to one in which matter is dependent on spirituality for its evolutionary rise in complexity.

With this new approach, human welfare is not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, it is actually a result of it. And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported in the free press. However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future. Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t just not in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.   Seen thusly, Teilhard’s extension of spirituality from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a third look at this new perspective so we can better understand the difference it can make in where we go on from here.

April 9 – We’re Evolving, We’re Pessimistic, What’s Next?

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Today’s Post

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues. We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, Initially experiencing an age of expansion, but as the ‘equator’ is crossed, leading to a new age of compression. He notes that as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself. In Teilhard’s words, “The noosphere begins to compress.”

We then went on to address how this new phenomena is effecting a change in human evolution.   We started with a focus on evolution as it manifests itself in our daily lives, then went on to see exactly how we can see such manifestation, then to question the lack of recognition of this manifestation in society at large and finally to look at the risks of such pessimism.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’: the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human. Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stage of biological life (Natural Selection), he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the workings of the stages of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’, the stage of human thought.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology. This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’. To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how the ‘complexification’, so clearly seen in these spheres, can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles (human persons) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires ever more “harmonious interrelations”. Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” is resolved as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can now see more clearly why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution. Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward. Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s three essential elements of human evolution:

  • New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)
  • A rise in interiority (our personal maturity) and liberty (our autonomy)
  • Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

But as we have seen, these teachings all require ‘reinterpretation’ to uncover their relevance and focus to these three elements. Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species (which is the same as continuing its evolution) we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to more clearly understand and cooperate with its ‘laws’. As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past hundred fifty years we have seen distinctive examples of both. Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’ is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also articulate the evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously renew their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us when put it into these terms. For the past hundred fifty years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products. They may not have been explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups

contributed to their personal growth, but nonetheless grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit. They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out. We’ve looked at both examples and risks. While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Richard Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

April 2, 2020 – What Risks Undermine The Continuation of Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, although there are risks to the continuation of human evolution in our perennial (but so far successful) break-fix-break cycle, faith in our ability to manage this cycle is more important than the expertise we develop to invent fixes to those things we break.

This week we will take a second look at these ‘Noospheric’ risks from the perspective of our place in the upsweep of cosmic evolution.

The Fragility of Evolution

Consider that the enterprise of cosmic evolution is itself a risky business. Science sees evolution occurring when the ‘stuff of the universe’ which emerges from the ‘big bang’ seemingly thumbs its nose at entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics by which each unification of particles of like matter comes at a cost of available energy. Such unification may well, says science, contribute to evolution by an increase in complexity, but at the same time is accompanied by a small loss of energy. By this understanding of Physics, the universe begins with a certain quantum of energy, and as soon as it begins it starts running down.

In seeming opposition, not only do things evolve while this is happening, but they evolve from simple configurations to more complex ones. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, since there are obviously many more ways for things to be un-complex (disorderly, even chaotic) than there are for things to be complex (more orderly), the very existence of evolution seems counter to the Second Law. According to Pinker, “Evolution occurs against the grain.”

Worse yet, complex entities are clearly more fragile than simpler ones. In the example of DNA molecules, which contain the ‘data’ which guide a living entity toward its development, it employs such a stunning magnitude of components that it is more susceptible to cosmic radiation and random fluctuations than a simple molecule. Any ‘rise in complexity’ clearly is in opposition to the ‘rise in chaos’ potentially resulting from such effects.

Still worse yet, As Teilhard observes, while nature seems to have a built-in ‘agent of complexity’ by which its elements can unite to increase their complexity, (and without which evolution could not proceed) this factor becomes secondary to continued evolution when it enters the realm of the human and now requires ‘cooperation’. As Richard Dawkins sees it, “Genes are replaced by ‘memes’ as the agent of evolution in humans”.

Once humans acquire the capability of ‘reflective consciousness’, by which they are ‘aware of their awareness’, the rules change once again. In the human person, evolution must now be chosen if it is to continue.

So What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

But if evolution needs to be ‘chosen’ to continue, what’s involved in choosing it? Restating and simplifying the Teilhard quote from last week:

“(we need) to be quite certain… that the (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.

We saw in the last three posts how common it is to engage in denial of progress and how such denial reflects a fear of the future. We also touched on the fact that such fear can be (and so often has been) seized upon by populists who offer themselves as bulwarks against the woes of the future if only we would trust them. Their first move is to insist that there is much to be feared, then to begin to use this fear to undermine trust in the Western structures of society (effectively a grouping of ‘memes’) which they claim to have unleashed such woes as the free press, individual freedoms and open immigration.   Other Western liberal practices are also denigrated, such as the development of a global infrastructure by which every advance, such as those reported by Norberg, can be shared globally and hence contribute to worldwide progress. While walling off the rest of the world may shut us in, it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ (identified last week as not only one of the fruits of these norms but an essential component of continued evolution) will become less efficacious and over time will begin to fail to mitigate the inevitably unwanted side effects that result from future inventions such as new sources of energy.

So, while Norberg’s quantification of human progress is in optimistic agreement with Teilhard, the risks are nonetheless substantial and cannot be overlooked. Evolution is in our hands, and stewardship of its continuation requires a clear-headed knowledge of the past, a commitment to the energy of evolution as it rises in the human species and confidence in the future. In the words of Teilhard:

“..the view adopted here of a universe in process of general involution upon itself comes in as an extremely simple way of getting past the dead end at which history is still held up, and of pushing further towards a more homogenous and coherent view of the past.”

   Yuval Harari opines in his book, “Sapiens” that consciousness is an “evolutionary mistake” and is certainly sure to lead to an early (by evolutionary standards) extinction of the human species. While his book shows ignorance of evolutionary history (as documented by Teilhard) and recent human history (as documented by Norberg), the fact that human consciousness is a two-edged sword cannot be denied.

 

The Next Post

 

This week we took a second look at the second and more serious category of risks to human evolution. Recognizing the ‘fragility’ of evolution, we acknowledged the ongoing risks of fixing what we have broken (the ‘structural’ risks). But we also noted the greater risk, the ‘Noospheric’ risk, which lies in the possibility of losing faith in our historically proven ability to, as Teilhard says,

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   In short, the interruption of this “rise in interiority and liberty” will stifle the flow of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will sum up where we’ve been in tracing Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ through Norberg’s enumeration of the articulations and arriving at the risks evolution introduces as it enters into the realm of the human.

March 26, 2020 – The Evolutionary Risks of Pessimism

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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.

March 22, 2020 – Optimism in the Age of Covid-19

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Today’s Post

Those who have been following this blog know that one of the most frequently addressed topics is the correlation between current events, contemporary writers and the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French theologian and paleontologist from the early twentieth century.

Today I’d like to apply this focus to the current pandemic that is consuming resources across our world even as it saps our sense of well-being.

In today’s New York Times’ editorial, Thomas Friedman, recipient of three Pulitzer prizes, offers a perspective on today’s society and the terrifying forecasts for this global epidemic. As with almost any voice of optimism, the correlation with Teilhard is unmistakable.

The Risks of World ‘Flattening’

Friedman first takes on the rapid growth of ‘globalization’. He notes the exponential growth in the way we have seen things change from the way we saw them only sixteen years ago:

“Twitter was only a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, applications were what you sent to colleges, Skype was a typo, and Big Data was a rap star All these connectivity tools, not to mention global trade and tourism, exploded after 2004 and really wired the world. Which is why our planet today is not just interconnected, it’s interdependent, and in many ways even fused.”

   But he goes on acknowledge that while globalization comes with economic benefits,

“..when things go bad in one place, that trouble can be transmitted further, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before.”

   Further, the fact that the rate of such transmission is exponential only adds to the quantum of mind boggle. With such a phenomenon, how can we avoid seeing the near future as not only pandemic, but exponentially leading to pandemonium?

The Other Side of ‘The Exponential’

Friedman uses ‘Moore’s Law’ as another facet of “the exponential’. In 1965, the co-founder of Intel, George Moore, forecast the doubling of the power of computer processors every two years as superior processing hardware was developed. This forecast has been well borne out by the fifty year innovation and invention uplift seen in the computer industry that permits each of us to hold in their hand a device the size of a pack of cards that exceeds the processing power of room-sized, thousand BTU-cooled IBM 360-94 with twenty washing machine-sized memory drums in 1965.

The relevance to Covid-19? Friedman notes comments today by Nitin Pai, director of the Takshashila Institution, an Indian research center:

“Advances in computer technology and synthetic biology have revolutionized both detection and diagnosis of pathogens, as well as the processes of design and development of vaccines, subjecting them to Moore’s Law-type cycles. They will…drive more talent and brainpower to the biological and epidemiological sciences.”

      Effectively, Pai is saying, we can expect the process of finding, developing and disseminating treatments for and cures of new diseases to speed up in the same way as (and because of) more rapid development of our tools.

As we have seen in the past several blog posts, a common factor of the exponential rise in human welfare mapped in benumbing detail by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress” occurs when

“..people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital”.

   The advance of such progress, he is saying, is natural to humans when they are allowed to pursue it.

Teilhard’s astonishingly optimistic view of the future is based on his insight that humans have inherited the universal principle of ‘complexification’ by which products of evolution (such as human persons and atoms) continue the universal uplift of evolution by joining together in such a way that they fulfill their potential for growth. Positing the underlying ‘energy of evolution’ as alive and well in each human person, he is confident that in the entity formed by humans when they come together (his word for is it ‘psychisms’), such groups innovate and invent tools to insure our future.  As Teilhard puts it, for millennia humans have been able to

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles (‘psychisms’) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

Effectively, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, the nature of the ‘noosphere’ is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. Norberg marvels at

“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”

   Friedman’s example of Moore’s Law and Nitin Pa’s insights into the fruits of human research substantiate such optimism. There is no reason to believe the reservoir human evolution will run dry any time soon, and every reason to believe that its exponential rise as mapped in detail by Norberg will continue unabated.

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.”

   A greater danger from such global crises is that we fail to believe this, and as a consequence retreat into an insular, nationalist withdrawal from the world stage.

While, as Friedman observes above, the risks of globalism are decidedly non-trivial, Norberg prefers a different perspective:

“Globalization makes it easier for countries to use the knowledge and technology that it took generations and vast sums of money to generate. It is difficult to develop cellular technology, the germ theory of disease or a vaccine against measles, but it is easy to use it once someone else has. The infrastructure that has been created for trade and communication also makes it easier to transmit ideas, science and technology across borders in a virtuous cycle”

   It is such a ‘virtuous cycle’ that Teilhard celebrates; the recognition of which can light the lamp of the path to our future.

   And ‘dealing with the complex planetary society’ is indeed the bottom line. Thanks to Friedman, Pai, Norberg, McHale and Teilhard for providing a compass that points in this direction.