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March 19, 2020 – With all This Progress, Why All The Pessimism?

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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 rise in the evolution of the human species.

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

We also noted that in spite of 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 the human race 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, showing clearly that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited in the last two posts. Even actual, tangible and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of 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

Pinker 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? Pinker offers a few suggestions.

   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, negative news 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.

Mscalibration – 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’, it is “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 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 brains continue to stimulate us 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 ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”. This can be seen, for example in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”. The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening to confirm the prediction, somewhere.

Pinker also notes that “Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.” As we saw last week, the affluence of the Graham family (and many Evangelicals like them) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that pessimism is all bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about harms that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail. The danger that Pinker sees is tbat

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

   The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last example comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli. In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities. They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate. It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases pleasure, as eating chocolate. In a nutshell, indignation feels good. As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

These examples show the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors. It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’ is needed to provide a compass for navigating them. Failing to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to ‘greater consciousness’ and hence leads to ‘more completeness.”

 

The Next Post

 

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s insights, following Norberg and Teilhard, which address our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution. In Pinker’s words (summarizing Norberg)

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

   But, he goes on

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such a plethora of ‘fruits’ (as well documented by Norberg), at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so scarce presents us with yet another ‘duality’. When Teilhard addresses what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.

Next week we will address risks to this continuation, and take another look at Teilhard’s concerns.

March 12, 2020 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism

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Today’s Post 

   Last week, we did a brief overview of the fourth of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species. 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 b3e so poorly reflected in today’s society.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   Norberg’s four 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. We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’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.

In the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, for example, 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.”

   He is saying 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 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 this is less a statement 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 have to 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 phenomena can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany following the Wall.

…And Why Can’t We See it?

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 take a look at this phenomena and its roots in today’s Western culture.

March 5, 2020 – Poverty and Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the statistics (from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’) documenting the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’, all point to not only a general improvement in human welfare, but 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 agents 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 phenomena, 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 found in the gospel of Matthew, “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 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 data 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 the majority 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 in 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 of Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income. (This increase did not emerge as a result of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time period.)

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 to 12% today.

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 other half required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’..

Putting This Into Perspective

At the risk of redundancy, I’ll revisit how all this fits into 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 took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, confirms 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, 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) reveal the same trends as outlined above.

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

February 27, 2020 – Life Expectancy and Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

   Last week 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 betterment of humankind 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.

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 notes:

   “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. 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 all 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 20th 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’. 

Putting This Into Perspective

Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, as we did last week, I’ll just summarize:

  • 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 has mostly happened in the West.
  • Such innovation and invention requires 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 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 took a look at 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”.

February 20, 2020 – How Does the Data Show We’re Evolving?

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Seeing Food as a Metric for Human Evolution

Today’s Post

Last week we considered whether the immense volume of data available today from such resources as the Food and Agriculture Org of the UN, the World Economy Historical Statistics, The US Food Administration and many others, reflects Teilhard’s optimistic insights on human evolution or do they support the common and ubiquitous pessimism that seems to pervade our society. Using the example of ‘fuel’ last week, we were able to see not only how the data seems to be on Teilhard’s side, contradictory to ‘conventional wisdom’, but agrees with Teilhard’s eight insights (last week) into how this data can be put into his evolutionary context.

This week we will go into more detail, summarizing the similarly optimistic insights of Johan Norberg, in his recent book, “Progress” in which he seeks to show

“..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.”

We will begin a look at four of Norberg’s nine metrics of evolution, introduced last week, and see as we did last week how Teilhard’s insights play out in all of them.

Food

Famine   Few metrics are more pervasive in human history than famine. Norberg cites the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century. Between 1870 and 2015 this has fallen 106 episodes of mass starvation on our planet.

With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, Thomas Malthus, reflecting conventional wisdom, predicted early in the 18th century that in a very few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail, dooming humanity to extinction.

The data, however, shows an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now.   27M died from 1900-1910. Several million more due to wartime and communist state mismanagement from 1930 to 1943. Today famine persists in just one major area, and that is North Korea.

Today, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, now more results from poor government. Norberg notes that

“No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because, “Rulers who are dependent on voters do everything to avoid starvation and a free press makes the public aware of the problems”.

Product Yield   So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic. One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods. Another is the invention of automated product extraction such as harvesters and milkers:

  • In 1850 it took 25 men, 24 hours to harvest 1,000 pounds of grain. In 1950 one man could do it in in six minutes
  • In that time frame, it took one person 30 min to milk 10 cows. By 1950 it was down to one minute.

As a result, in the same time frame, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours. From 1920 to 2015 the cost of this supply was reduced by fifty percent.

Better strains of wheat have also led to increased yield. In the last fifty years the production of Indian crops has increased by 700%; in Mexico by 600%, moving these countries from importers to exporters of wheat.

The combination of better crops and improved extraction has also led to a slower increase of land dedicated to growing crops.

Malnutrition   Not surprisingly, increased production has led to decreased malnutrition. The average Western caloric intake per person increased by 50% in the last hundred years; in the world by 27% in the past fifty years. This has resulted in a reduction in world malnutrition from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

This has also increased human stature.   In both East and Western countries, average height was about the same until about 1870, when it began increasing in the West by 1cm per year to the present day. The same level of increase did not begin in Asia until the forties, and is still continuing to this day. However, in countries with poor governments, such as in Sub Saharan Africa and North Korea, it has only slightly decreased.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s projections 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.

   Globalization 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, this is nearly always has occured in a West-to-East direction.

Inner Pull 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 effected; note that most of them found in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years. In the estimated eight thousand generations thought to 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 the ‘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 at twice this rate.

   Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the end of the times did not occur. While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially. Even today, there are still writers 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.

   Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback. In the yearning for a non-existing but attractive past, the practices of invention and globalism can be undermined. The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how much 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 effect the 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

This week we took a look at the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’ to see how his statistics show a general but undeniable improvement in human condition over a very short time, and how Teilhard’s evolutionary forces can be shown to be active 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 humanity. As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary characteristics that we saw this week.

February 13, 2020 – How Can We Tell We’re Evolving?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of human evolution . We have also seen how conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, suggests that things are going downhill.

As we have seen over the course of this blog, Teilhard, in spite of writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time. Having looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed, we can now look into how they are being played out today in human evolution..

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere, into several characteristics that he believed to constitute the ‘structure of the noosphere’.

This week we will begin a survey of this noosphere as it appears today to see how contemporary objective data can be brought to bear on his insights. As we will see over the next few weeks, by looking at quantifiable data from reliable sources his case for optimism is stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history

Human Evolution Metrics

With all that said, how do we go about quantifying human evolution? One very relevant approach can be found in “Progress”, a book by Johan Norberg, which seeks to show:

“..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.”

   In doing so he alludes to the existence of an ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

   Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard or cite religious beliefs. Instead he refers to findings from public surveys, Government data, International media and global institutions.

His approach is to parse the ‘metrics of human evolution’ into nine categories. They are:

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                   Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

For each of these categories he provides, as the noted international news magazine The Economist notes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species. He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to near- and mid- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa. And, to the extent possible, he extends trends from antiquity to the current day.

Norberg is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the areas of human life listed above, are profoundly contrary to conventional wisdom, and he acknowledges the human tendency toward pessimism. He quotes Franklin Pierce Adams on one source of this skepticism:

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

   His prodigious statistics clearly, and to considerable depth, offer a look quite different from the nostalgic, sepia-tinged memories the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
…

The cave man in his queer skin togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state
The dogs have had an awful wait.”

Our Approach

Over the next few weeks, we will address some of Norberg’s categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s insights on and projections for human evolution are borne out by Norberg’s data.

This look at objective and verifiable historical data will serve to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test. Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve? If so, in what ways, how fast, and is the trend positive or negative?

This week we will take a simple example, one not listed by Norberg but simple enough to illustrate the process that we will use: that of ‘fuel’

A Brief History of Fuel

Few issues are closer to our everyday lives than that of fuel. Every person on the planet uses fuel every day for such things as heating or cooling their homes, cooking their meals, transporting themselves and communicating.   As the issue of fuel is so ubiquitous, its history provides a great metric for putting our evolution in an objective perspective.

The discovery of fire a few hundred thousand years ago was a monumental moment in human history. The availability of cooked, rather than raw, food led to improved health, and the ability to heat habitats led to an increase in habitable area. It is obvious that both led to general improvements in human life.

Following the many thousands of years in which wood was the only fuel, coal began to take its place, increasing in use as the Bronze age led to the Iron age, and continuing a key role to this day.

Today other types of fuel, principally gas but including nuclear, wind and solar extraction, provide fuel for the many applications of the modern era.

While fuel offers an example of how human evolution can be seen to continue, how can it be seen to support Teilhard’s many assertions?

From Teilhard’s Perspective

The first is that of Human Invention. The history of fuel offers an articulation of the steps of human evolution: first ‘discovery’, then ‘extraction’, then ‘application’ and finally ‘dissemination’. Some early humans discovered that certain stones would burn, and over time developed methods of extraction and dissemination that made it possible to use coal as an improved method of heat (more BTU per volume). This required improved methods of extraction and dissemination, such as mining coal vs gathering wood.

The second is that of the Human Psychism. Each of these steps required an increase in complexity not only of the technology but more importantly an increasing development of what Teilhard refers to as ‘human psychisms’. By this he is referring to the aspects of human society which are the core of the Inner Pull addressed last week. By psychism Teilhard refers to the human groups which effect the

“increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

“new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   This does not only pertain to the management of fuel, but to the exponential rise in the uses of fuel: from cooking and heating, to such things as the smelting of ores and the powering of engines. Each such step required yet another ‘new way’ of thinking, an increase in the organization and the depth of knowledge of the ‘psychism’ and the need to draw on external resources (such as education) for their success.

The third example can be seen in the proliferation of the resulting “new ways” over the face of planet. While coal, for example, was ‘discovered’ in China approximately in 4000 BC, it wasn’t until the advent of expanding empires before, for example, the discoveries of the Romans could spread far and wide, hence the third example of Globalization.

The fourth of Teilhard’s insights is his observation that compression of the noosphere not only results in globalization, but also in the increase in the speed of the spread of invention.   Hundreds of thousands of years of wood burning, followed by a few thousand years of coal dependency followed by a few hundred years of transition to other sources of fuel. Not only can evolution be seen to rise, but to converge, and the increasing convergence can be seen to stimulate its increasing speed.

The fifth Teilhard insight is the Timeliness of Invention, the recognition that humans invent as necessary to insure their continuing evolution. Had humans not discovered the advantages of coal, the dependency upon wood would have left our planet by now denuded and bereft of oxygen. We would be extinct. Had not new sources of fuel come available in the Eighteenth century, the exclusive use of coal would have doomed us to asphyxiation, choking on the effluvia of civilization. (A poignant example can be seen in the ‘Great Smog’ of London which killed over twelve thousand people in 1952.)

The sixth Teilhard insight is the recognition of the failure of forecasts that do not take into account the six above phenomena. Such an example is Thomas Malthus, whose dire predictions from the early 1800’s are still read today. Malthus depended on historical data for his end-of-times predictions (increase in population outstripping production of resources) but failed to recognize the basic human capability of invention, by which production would rise exponentially and unwanted side effects mitigated. Malthus provides an example of the failure of any forecast which uses past history to predict the future without taking human invention into account.

The seventh insight is that of Change of State. As Teilhard notes, the journey of evolution from the big bang is not a linear one. At key points, not only does the “stuff of the universe” change, but it changes radically. The transition from energy to matter, from simple to complex atoms, from molecules to cells and from neurons to conscious entities, are profound. Further, the energies through which they continue to the next step are profoundly different as well. In our simple example of ‘fuel’, this can be seen to be happening literally before our eyes. The result of each step from wood to coal to gas and onto future sources could not have been be predicted from evidence of the past. The changes are highly nonlinear.

The eighth and last Teilhard insight is that of Risk. Human evolution is not guaranteed to continue. Continued innovation and invention, deepening insight into the structure of the noosphere provided by new human ‘psychisms’ and improvements in globalization which tighten communications all require closer cooperation. None of these will happen unless humans continue to have faith in their future.

The Next Post

This week we began a two-pronged look at how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species: The first of which is to look objectively at what we know about our history so far, and the second to see how in this view such data bears out Teilhard’s insights into human evolution. This week we looked at a rather simple example, ‘fuel’ to illustrate this approach.

Next week we will begin a much more detailed look at the data from Norberg’s book, “Progress” to see how it, too, supports Teilhard’s optimistic worldview.

February 6, 2020 – Navigating Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing Teilhard’s reinterpretation of the traditional Western theological concepts of God, Trinity and Spirituality into addressing how these concepts actually can be seen to play out in human evolution as it moves from its expansion into what appeared as limitless space, to its compression as the ‘sphericity’ of the earth increasingly limits available space.
We saw how as we move further into this era of human evolution, the tactics common to human expansion begin to morph into those which will accommodate such ‘compression’ without diminishment of the human person.

This week we will begin to look at navigating the ‘Northern hemisphere’ of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere in a way in which the continuation of the human species is assured while accommodating the individual evolution of the human person.

Compression, Evolution and the Human Person

There’s plenty to worry about in this new phase, and the anxiety which seems so prevalent in our society is surely not misplaced as we cautiously tread upon the bridge to the future while we are building it. Teilhard acknowledges the anxiety that arises as we move from expansion to compression:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which … divergence… still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which.. is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   At the same time, Teilhard asserts, if we know how to see it the very compression that causes such concern can be seen as an agency necessary to our continued evolution.

Teilhard can make this seeming counterintuitive assertion based on his six observations of the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human influence on our planet:

  1. We are the latest products of evolution, and as subject of the same rise of complexity seen by our precedents, can expect to see the continuation of the energy of evolution that we saw at work in the previous products. Put simply: the agency of evolution as increased ‘complexification’ will continue to assert itself in us as it had in our evolutionary precedents.
  2. Just as the ‘laws’ that worked so well for these precedents for each stage were not replaced, but expanded in each new stage, this trend can be expected to continue in the ‘human stage’.
  3. Therefore the inevitable compression in the human stage must contain some means of moving us forward. These ‘new laws’ must be discovered in order for us to move forward. As Teilhard puts it, humanity is

“…vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

  1. Thus the ‘outer push’ of compression must somehow be accompanied by an ‘inner pull’ which occurs if the human elements can find new ways to connect so as to expand their ‘personness’, to become more of what they are capable of becoming. This transition from an external force which pushes us ever closer, to an internal force which pulls us together by freeing us from our limited possession of ourselves, allows compression to effect complexification. Thus Teilhard understands Love as the latest manifestation of the basic force of evolution: the only energy capable of not only uniting us by what is most unique in us but in doing so increasing our uniqueness
  2. Human ‘invention’ is a manifestation of ‘finding new laws’ (# 3 above). John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes Teilhard 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.”

  1. Teilhard does not underestimate the risk, stressing the importance of choice, which requires the existence of faith:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time man… is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   “Cogent experimental grounds”? Neither science nor religion offer a clear picture of how evolution proceeds through the human, often questioning the concept that it may at all.

It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for being optimistic about the evolutionary future of the human species.. Since then human society has become ever more proficient at gathering data; we are drowning in it today. With all the facts at our hand, is it possible to make some objective sense of, find some ‘cogent experimental grounds’ in this data to see whether Teilhard’s projections are proving true?

The Next Post

This week we turned from seeing Teilhard’s model of human evolution as moving from expansion to compression to a more detailed look at how this transition manifests itself in the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human induced changes to our world. We noted the risks that are present in this transition, as well as the need for faith in the thirteen billion year rising tide of evolution that will usher in a new phase in which compression brings personization. We noted that with all the data generated in today’s ‘dataorcacy’, is it possible to see examples of such a counterintuitive process occurring?

Next week we will begin to overview how examples of such ‘personization’ can be seen in today’s events.

January 23, 2020 – Moving Evolution Forward

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Today’s Post

Last week we added the concept of ‘spirituality ’to our look at the secular side of such concepts as God, Jesus and the Trinity. We saw this concept through Teilhard’s eyes as “ neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon’ but instead as ‘the phenomenon” which underlies the steady progression of ‘complexification’ as it rises from inter-atomic forces to those forces by which we ourselves continue the process of universal evolution.

Given these insights into the scaffolding of evolution, this week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as it manifests itself in our personal complexification and in the progression of our species toward yet further complexity. What are the ‘nuts and bolts’ that hold this scaffolding together so that it can continue to progress through the human species?

This week’s post summarizes several posts that address what Teilhard referred to ‘Articulating the noosphere’ as the development of guidelines for forging our evolution.

‘Articulating the Noosphere’

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen in the appearance of five ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products, which have appeared in succession on our planet.   He sees these spheres as:

  • The ‘lithosphere’, the grouping of matter which form the base of our planet
  • The ‘atmosphere,’ which consists of the gasses which emerge to surround it
  • The ‘hydrosphere, which forms as the atmosphere produces water
  • The ‘biosphere,’ the layers of living things which cover it
  • And finally, the ‘noosphere’, indicative of the layer of human activity which pervades it

Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology, global economy and global warming are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significantly the noosphere has become in the evolution of our planet and how important it is to understand it..

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’. With religion’s strong infusion of myths, superstitions, dualities, and entanglements with the state that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), its accumulated guidelines for continuing our evolution are problematic. Thus we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.

Science does not offer much help in this area. Its exclusion of the ‘spiritual’ (see last post) nature of the person offer little support for the faith and insight needed to deal with the daily burden of human life.

Putting this into perspective, Teilhard notes that we are moving as a species from passive experience of evolution to actively affecting it. It is becoming more necessary to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctive impulses of our lower brains, impulses which were successful in raising the complexity of our pre-human ancestors, but which now must be channeled to insure our evolutionary continuation.

As Teilhard sees it, to be effective, human life requires us to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, but the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Teilhard refers to identifying these skills, those necessary for evolution to continue through us, as ‘articulating the noosphere’. These skills are reflected in examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘DNA’ of religion.

Religion is not the only place that such ‘noospheric articulations’ can be found. As we saw in the post of September 14 on the ‘secular basis of spirituality’, a secular example of spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government. It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic institutions. Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of ‘the power of the people ‘and ‘consensus in government’ as ‘articulations of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves” is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’. When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution. This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’.

Some Specific Articulations

As we saw last week, ‘spirituality’ is the underpinning of ‘matter’. In order to better understand ourselves and our role in evolution we must understand how this dyadic energy works. Following Teilhard’s insight that

“..the artificial, the moral and the juridical (are) simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic”

any ‘articulation’ of the structure of the noosphere that we undertake must first identify the places in our lives in which such ‘spirituality’ (or as Davies would have it, ‘software’) manifests itself so that we can better cooperate with it and thus strengthen our own journey toward fuller being.

Almost all religions attempt to articulate the noosphere by traditional rituals which help address

such things as funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation. The Western ‘sacraments’ are but one example.

The Western church made an early effort to identify this ‘articulation’ in its concept of ‘grace’. Using the term, grace to indicate the manifestation of spirituality in human life, this early effort identifies those human activities where it is believed to be most active. These activities are known as ‘sacraments’.

Thanks to the-all-too human Catholic attempts to control (and profit from) these activities and to Luther for recognizing the evil in doing so, the ‘sacraments’ have little attraction today outside the Catholic church. Their reinterpretation in secular terms might seem forced, but in terms of Teilhard’s context of evolution, they can be seen as highlighting where the agency of spirituality, Davies’ ‘software’, is most active in critical human life events. They identify the human activity that is most likely to move us forward in our quest for both personal and cultural complexity.

Such reinterpretation sees the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, eucharist, matrimony, penance, ‘holy orders’ and the ‘last rites’ taking on new relevancy as the recognition of the ‘sanctity’ (proximity to the ‘tree of evolution’) of the human person, human maturity, human society, human relationships, human reconciliation, human focus on spirituality and the end of human life. New, more secular, sacraments are still appearing in the West, such as the well-being of nature (ecology).

Sacraments simply point the way to the critical points necessary to continuation of the evolution of our species. They are not divine intrusion into nature, but signposts to those activities most important to our continued evolution. Such signposts aid the navigation our lives by the compass of, and in cooperation with, the energy of evolution as it flows through our lives.

The Next Post

Having seen how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’., this week we looked at how such spirituality can be found in human life.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” taking another look at religion from Teilhard’s vantage point of seeing religion not as ‘anti science’ but as, at its core, valuable not only of sharpening our sense of evolutionary direction, but providing science with a new hermeneutic which opens its study of the human person to wider and more relevant vistas.

January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

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Today’s Post

For the last few weeks we have been summarizing the part of the blog, “The Secular Side of God, in which we have seen how from Teilhard’s perspective, the traditional concepts of God and the Trinity can be reinterpreted into facets of universal evolution. Last week we saw how they play together in Teilhard’s convergent spiral, manifested in the ‘hominized’ vectors of Faith, Hope and Love, the human version of the universal agencies of unity, convergence and complexification, and thus continue the rise of complexity through the human person.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming that at every rung of evolution some sort of underlying agency moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

This week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’. The posts of September 14 through 26 October, 2017 are summarized this week.

The Evolution of ‘Spirituality’

In opposition to the traditional Western concept of spirituality as a quality of ‘supernature’, in which reality is dualistically divided into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Teilhard sees only one reality, not two, and things traditionally relegated to the ‘supernatural’ are simply things that we have not yet recognized as ‘natural’

Teilhard takes the key underlying metric of ‘complexification of the universe’ as his starting point. As many have objected, how can we make this assumption? Teilhard’s answer is that if the universe did not evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, it would have been ‘dead on arrival’, and we would not be here to debate it. In his words, “complexification is not a phenomenon of the universe, it is the phenomenon”

Hence if we follow this thread of increasing complexity, we can better understand ‘how things come to be what they are’ and in doing so, better understand how we fit in.

In Teilhard’s day, this concept had yet to take root in traditional Physics. Science restricted evolution to the biological era, via the Darwinistic principle of ‘Natural Selection’. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to question what happened in the preceding ten billion or so years that prepared the inanimate ‘stuff of the universe’ for integrating in such a way as to produce living cells.
Teilhard’s insight was that each particle of the universe somehow had the innate capability of joining with other ‘like’ particles to effect an increase in complexity in the resulting new particle. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s before empirical scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, began to address the mystifying capability of natural things to ‘self-organize’, such as weather patterns (tornadoes), crystals, in their intricate patterns, and many other phenomena.

In the next few decades, scientists began to build an approach to physics which saw inanimate particles as inclusive of ‘information’. An example of this ‘information’ is how the complex DNA molecule provides ‘instructions’ for the conversion of nucleic acids into proteins, which would ultimately provide energy to the cell.

Paul Davies, who elaborates on this implicit factor in his book, “The 5th Miracle”, asks the question,

“How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their intermediate neighbors, cooperate and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?”

   He answers his question:

“If I am right that the key to biogenesis lies, not with chemistry but with the formation of a particular logical and informational architecture, then the crucial step involved the creation of an information processing, system, employing software control.”

   Thus empirical science is being led to consider that there is something in material particles which contains what Davies analogically refers to as ‘software’. This ‘software’ is precisely what Teilhard understood as the underlying principle which guides things to unite in such a way as to increase their complexity.
Davies is quick to point out that science does not yet have an empirical understanding of exactly how this ‘software’ is embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter, but like Richard Dawkins, he believes that it will one day be discovered.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds. We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.

Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution. At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from quarks, then atoms from electrons, protons and neutrons, then molecules from atoms. At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete. At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

It is at work, therefore, to an increasingly lesser extent as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution. While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is spirit.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“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. ..it 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.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized. (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here. He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction, which itself is capable of closer union (See last week’s post on the convergent spiral of evolution). This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit. To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution, or in Davie’s analogy, “The ‘software’ which drives the ‘hardware’ to more complexity”.

In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state”. ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully tangible in the human person and his society.

The Next Post

This week we summarized the posts which addressed the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” by addressing the specific aspects of evolution as it is appears in human life. We have seen how evolution can be understood both by science and a reinterpreted religion as an increase in complexity leading up to the era of biologic life, but what happens when we introduce the concept of “Natural Selection”? Does Natural Selection replace ‘complexification’ as the key agency in evolution once the cell arrives? How do these two phenomena play out in human life? How can we become aware of evolution as it occurs in our lives?

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding found in John became a victim of the endless human trend toward ‘dualism’. From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of ‘the ground of being’ in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of this unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

Today’s post is a summary of the posts from August 3 to August 17, 2017.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.   As we have seen, the understanding of God and Jesus in these books has evolved over time, but the concept of a ‘third person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

It wasn’t until this point in the evolution of the early church’s theology that this agent began to be considered divine in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three distinct but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in universal evolution was reflected in three separate ways. The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’, however, are of little help in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept. Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation (as in the belief that Jesus was both God and Man), it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated before the Nicene council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated. After the Arian controversy was resolved by the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Was this new person, the ‘Spirit’, equal or inferior to the other two? How could it be integrated when it was absent from scripture?

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was indeed of the same ‘substance and nature’ of God, but like Jesus, a separate ‘person’. While perhaps theologically acceptable, Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest removed from human life.

So, what secular sense can we make of this? Can the ‘secular’ sense make ‘common’ sense?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, when put into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution, the concept of the Trinity becomes not only much simpler but more relevant to human life. Looking through Teilhard’s (and before him, Blondel’s) eyes, we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes, to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution via increase in complexity. And applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw last week how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through cosmic evolution to eventually manifest itself as the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.

In the same way we can see a third facet of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, as the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect their increase in complexity. From this perspective, the ‘Spirit’ is simply the “the agent of complexification in evolution.”

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the unfolding of the universe in general, but as the principle of this becoming as it emerges after long periods of time as the ‘person’.
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the product of evolution that has become ‘person’
  • ‘Spirit’ as the energy by which this ‘becoming’ takes the form of increasing complexity which leads to the ‘person’

Or, more succinctly

  • The ‘Father’ acts to move the universe along its evolutionary path.
  • Jesus is the blueprint for this action.
  • Spirit is the agency by which such action results in increased complexity

As we have noted frequently in this blog, Teilhard describes the human manifestation of this third ‘person’, this third facet of the ground of being, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   There’s something very revolutionary about this assertion. Before the advent of the human, universal ‘complexification’ rose through the outcome of such unification: increased complexity only occurred in the antecedent to the union, the precedents are left unchanged.

This can be seen in the early stages of universal evolution where more complex atoms result from the unification of less complex electrons and more complex molecules from less complex atoms. In the human person, the act of love increases the level of complexity in the uniters themselves. It is in this latest manifestation of the energies of the universe that we ourselves grow when we participate in love. So much more than the emotion which we experience when we unite, this unification effects our personal coming to be of what we are capable of. The point that Teilhard makes many times in his writing is that love is more ontological than it is emotional.

And in addressing this last agent of becoming, the ‘Spirit’, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity. We can see in Science’s “Standard Model’ how this energy is manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry as they all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life. We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection. Understanding the ‘Spirit’ is simply recognizing how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their personal growth) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing structure and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its message. With our secular perspective, we can see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms which are relevant to life.

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the ‘Spirit’ to the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general. More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (Richard Dawkins) works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

There is still another aspect of the concept of ‘The Trinity’ to explore. Understanding that the universe ‘is raised..to complexity” by the three-vectored actions of the ‘ground of being’, Teilhard proposes a ‘model’ how they act in concert to effect such raise in complexity. Next week we will look into this model as we address the “Convergent Spiral of Evolution.