Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

October 25 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard  places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution,  in which context it can be seen not as a ‘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 Norberg, who articulates 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 optimisim.

This week I’d like to 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 both religion and science occur in human history.

As many thinkers, particularly Johathan Sacks, point out, religion originally began as a very early human activity characterized by such right brain activities as instinct and intuition as enterprises which helped to making sense of both themselves and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided 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 from September, 2015,The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human left brain thinking began with Greeks

The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the right and left modes of thought can be  seen in the New Testament  Paul, then John, who 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 departure 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 such application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy (which is still stuck in many of the traditional dualisms which accept the dissonance between right and left brain thinking).

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 that the primacy of the person and his freedom require more than ‘permission’, they also require such things as faith and love (as understood in the Teilhardian context), which science is hard pushed to articulate.

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”.

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 can disappear.  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 in which our intuition is enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both modes of thinking.

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 extrement 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 fact that the facets of empowerment which he documents:  personal freedom and improved relationships also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion, strongly suggest that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them: an empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them,  of how they work and of how to deepen  them.

Something else is necessary.  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 200K 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 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.”

occurred only two hundred years ago.  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 an appreciation of the pace of evolution must be learned.  Certainly it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watched our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger or war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   It’s less important to rue the pace if human evolution than to appreciate its ‘axis’.

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 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 move ourselves forward.

Next week we will continue this line of thought further.

October 11 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took another look at ‘articulating the noosphere’, this time in the light of Teilhard’s insights and the many facts which Johan Norberg cites in his survey of exactly how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human.  We saw how well the forecasts for the future that were posited by Teilhard early in the last century are being borne out with Norberg’s contemporary statistics.

We also saw how, Teilhard asserts, that  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 cooperate with its ‘laws’.  This increasing understanding is also necessary for us to deal with the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution .  This week we will take a look at how both religion and science , properly understood, are up to this task.

The Axis of Evolution

Almost every scientific approach to biological evolution uses the metaphor of ‘a tree’, as in “The Tree of Life”.  The metaphor is obviously sound, in that it shows that every living thing comes from a previous form, and with the new science of DNA available, each new branch reveals details of the form from which it came.

Unfortunately, the Darwinist approach to how such forms emerged is the predominant explanation for biological evolution.  As such, it assumes a ‘trial and error’ approach subject to a wide range of random events and thus relies on a causation popularly known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  Therefore, most scientists adhere to the belief that there is no underlying causation for the continuation of evolution:  it is ‘random’.

Teilhard notes how such an approach falls very short of providing an understanding of evolution at the universal level.  He cites scientific discoveries in the last century that describe how the fundamental universe has unfolded from pure energy, progressing through stages including the precipitation of matter from this initial state of energy through stages in which these initial primordial infinitesimal granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ grow slowly but steadily from simpler to more complex entities until the cell appears.  It is not until this point, some four billion years ago, that the ‘trial and error’ phase of evolution can begin.

Teilhard refuses to admit some sort of divine intervention in this story, insisting that matter and energy, in their initial manifestations, contain a ‘coefficient of complexity’ by which each stage of evolution occurs as a result of this implicit factor, including the step from molecular to cellular entities.  Hence, this ‘coefficient’, while acting in all previous stages, necessarily takes new forms as the complexity of the entities increases.

From this perspective, the orderly ‘tree of life’ can now be seen to have a core element that links it to the preceding ten billion years in which complex molecules emerged from pure energy.  Teilhard refers to this core element as providing an ‘axis of evolution’, and recognizing that it affords us with a metric which unites all three eras of evolution: pre life, life and reflective life.  (Teilhard uses the term ‘reflective life’ to demark conscious life from life conscious of its consciousness.)  While this approach recognizes the impacts of random events, both in the form of cosmic radiation which modifies the DNA of living tissue as well as in the form of interplanetary collisions such as the K-T extinction, Teilhard points to the fact that in spite of them, evolution still can be clearly seen to proceed in the direction of greater complexity over time.

Continuing Evolution in the Human Species

Recognizing this phenomenon of ‘universal complexification’ allows us a starting place to continuing our ‘learning curve’ about the noospheric ‘laws’, a process that is necessary if we are to insure that such complexification continues in our species.

While science sees ‘learning the rules’ as digging deeper and further in the past for clues to how the universe operates, religion has assembled a complex and frequently contradictory set of guidelines for human behavior.  The ‘continuation’ that we seek must rest on both foundations, but only as they are ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of both Teilhard’s forecasts and Norberg’s statistics.

These two perspectives, of course, represent the two most significant human undertakings: science and religion.  Often seen as opposites, and an instance of a profound human ‘duality’, a more appropriate approach might be to see them as simply enterprises  which are influenced by the two modes of human thinking represented by the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains, and reflected by instincts and intuition on the first side, and empiricism and analysis on the left.

Seen thusly, an integrated understanding of the noosphere requires a synthesis of these two venerable enterprises.  Such a synthesis, in turn, requires a shift of the understanding of God on the one hand, from the anthropomorphic, Greek-influenced model which evolved in the West to Blondel’s ‘ground of being’ and Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolution’.  Teilhard understood the goal of his thinking as “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

On the side of Science, Norberg’s identification of the objective measures of human evolution move the process of evolution from a random series of meaningless consequences to a recognition that not only is evolution not random, but in the articulation of its movement, there are indeed guidelines for its continuation.  Norberg implicitly recognizes underlying principle of human evolution, Teilhard’s ‘axis’, as it manifests itself as a necessary ingredient in the increase in human welfare that he documents so thoroughly in his book, “Progress”.  While there are many other causations at play, such as weather catastrophes, even cosmic accidents, which are indeed random, more important to human evolution are the freedoms and relations that he documents.

This brings us back to the focus of the Blog, “The Secular Side of God”.  We can now see that a fresh understanding of the ‘noosphere’ requires a relook at both Science and Religion, and this relook offers the potential of seeing these two great enterprises as two sides of a single coin, and not as history would have it, systems in opposition.

Returning to the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor, but in a different way than we have seen with his explanation of increasing population over decreasing available space, Teilhard notes that Religion and Science can be seen as parallel longitudes which decrease their distance as they approach the pole.  At the equator, they are at their maximum distance, but as evolution proceeds, they approach one another with an eventual coherence at the pole.

Just as we saw the ‘laws of the noosphere’ becoming clearer as we crossed the equator (with the ‘knee in the curves’ that begin to manifest themselves beginning two hundred years ago), we are now beginning to see (as both Teilhard and Norberg evidence today) a similar demarcation in the systems which energize this movement manifest themselves.

The movement of these systems toward such coherence marks the evolution of both enterprises towards their application to  the inevitable risks to human evolution that we have charted, and insure our continued ‘march toward the future’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at how the approaches represented by Teilhard and Norberg can be seen to ones which permit us to see how Science and Religion can ‘team up’ to insure our continued evolution.

Next week we will take a second look at how could be made to happen.

September 20 – The ‘Noospheric’ Risks to Continued Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed those risks to continued human evolution that are based on the seemingly inevitable negative consequences of every aspect of human ‘progress’, but noted that, at least thus far, human innovation and invention seem up to the task of maximizing the advances over the consequences.

But can we count on this phenomenon to continue?  What can happen to ‘dry up’ this pool of intellectual energy, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’, which have kept us moving thus far?

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series a few 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.  Take the example of looking for a seat at the airport.  Few will choose to sit near a stranger if a seat can be found next to one which is vacant.  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 hoard, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’; the future seems far less secure than the past.

   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 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 little faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed) is to be found.  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.

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 he (man, that is) 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.”

   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 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, such ideological division undermines the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and weakens their power to solve problems.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look 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 continue looking at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.

August 16 Poverty as a Metric of 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 the lot of humans, 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 look at a fourth metric 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.  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 understand 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 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 GNP.  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 2,000 years to double his 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:

   Country             GDP Increase

     China                   2000%

    Japan                   1100%

   India                       500%

      The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing.  The following data also shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty.  (source: World Bank):

From     To           Pct Poverty Decrease

1820  1920           From 94% to 82%

1920   1950          From 82% to 72%

1950   1981          From 72% to 54%

1981   2015          From 54% to 12%

   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.

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 how evolution continues through the human species, but 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 take a last look at Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

August 9 – Life Expectancy As a Measure of 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 movement of evolution in the human species.  Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, it is clear that the betterment of humankind is occurring: the slope of the curve of improvement can be seen to rapidly increase in the past few generations, and that this increase is 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.   People died early, as infants or children, and mothers often died giving birth.  The high mortality rate was not primarily because of the prevalence of violence, but because of infectious disease, unsafe water and bad sanitary conditions.”

      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.

Neither was it different from Eastern countries.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

   Charts which show the occurrence of data over time are commonly used to illustrate ‘trends’.  Most often, extrapolations from recorded to anticipated data are effected by using previous trends to predict those anticipated in the future.  This is a very effective method of prediction, except when there is a sharp change in the rate of change that could not be anticipated by past data.  These sharp changes are known as ‘knees in the curve’, data points at which past performance no longer serves as a basis to predict the future.

Norberg’s charts show many such points at which past trends in human evolution are significantly interrupted by new paradigms, and his data on life expectancy is no exception.

   In the early 1800s, the trend of globalization, in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, such a startling reversal began to happen.  Norberg’s statistics quantify the trend and clearly show this ‘knee in the curve’ of human life expectancy:

   Time Frame                              Life Expectancy

Prehistoric times                              18-20 YRS

500BC                                                    20-25

1830                                                       30

1910                                                       32

1990                                                       60

2012                                                       70

   As we saw last week, in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, these startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.  Life expectancy can be seen to increase by 40 years in the short span of one hundred years, a blink in evolutionary time.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such a ‘knee 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.

Further, as Norberg notes, such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results.  As they have been applied to developing countries, such improvements are being seen much more quickly.  As Norberg notes,  Life expectancy in the ‘developing countries’ has seen such an increase.  These figures represent the period of 1950 to 2010:

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 increase in human stature as measured by human height increase in developing countries to nearly equal to the West in only sixty years.

Putting This Into Perspective

Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, I’ll just summarize:

–          Innovation and invention are natural characteristics 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.

–          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 evolution, with the topic of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

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

July 19 – Is Human Evolution Proceeding? How Would We Know?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of evolution in the human species.  We spent two weeks looking at conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, which 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.  We are now looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed.

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 several 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

The Characteristics Of The Structure of the Noosphere

Teilhard’s basic assertion is that the universal thread of evolution continues its fourteen billion year rise thru the human species.  In his vision, Evolution produces products of increasing complexity over time, and this process can reliably be expected to continue through the human, the latest such product.

Here’s how he suggests that we can see it in play:

  1. Evolutionary laws Continue in the Human The ‘laws’ governing universal evolution may have changed as the level of complexity has increased, but the energies themselves continue to morph into ever new manifestations (‘changes of state’)
  2. Inner Pull vs External Push  Evolution is bringing us into ever closer proximity via the ‘compression of the noosphere’ (external compression).  This requires humans to effect paradigms of internal cohesion if the fundamental evolutionary law by which elements are joined in such a way as to continue their ‘complexification’ is to obtain
  3. Evolution from Compression If these paradigms are developed, such ‘compression of the noosphere’ can be expected to not only continue human complexification, but speed it up.
  4. Human Invention As an effect of this internal cohesion, humans can be seen to be ever more capable of inventing what is needed to continue their evolution at a time when it is needed.  “The future may not be able to be predicted, but it can be invented” (John McHale).
  5. Globalization of Invention Once such evolutionary breakthroughs are made, the increasing compression of the noosphere which effected the discovery also makes it quicker to spread
  6. The Risk of Human Evolution Since humans are now in a position to either continue or fail future evolution, there is a risk that lack of confidence in the future may result in the absence of a future.

Metrics of Human Evolution

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 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 Mi- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa, and to the extent possible, from antiquity to the current day.

Then,  Why the Pessimism?

He is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the metrics 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 some depth offer quite a different look at the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
His grandpa in his house of logs
Swore things were going to the dogs.
His dad among the Flemish bogs
Vowed things were 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

The approach that I will take in this last section of the blog is to take each of his above categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s characteristics above, and his forecasts for the future, are borne out by them.

 

The Next Post

This week we identified the approach of the last phase of this blog, which is to take an objective, data- supported look at the past, identify current, quantified trends, and begin to see just how prescient Teilhard was in his optimistic vision of the future.

Next week we will begin this process by looking at the first of Norberg’s eight facets of human evolution, ‘Food’.

July 12 – Mapping The Structure of The Noosphere

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Today’s Post 

Last week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on in the noosphere.  This week we will summarize his observations into a list of its characteristics that we can then use to quantify how closely actual contemporary data resonate with his insights.

Outlining the Noospheric Structure 

From Teilhard’s insights into the mileu of human activity, the ‘noosphere’, we can begin to identify its structural components so that we can better navigate its complex geography.

It is very evident from last week’s post that Teilhard believed that humans are very well equipped to ‘navigate’ this uncharted Northern hemisphere into which we are beginning to inhabit.  This week we will outline his characteristics of this structure so that we can proceed to see how his concepts, and his forecast for the future, lines up with what we know today.

The Structure

Teilhard recognizes that, as a product of evolution, humans are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as our evolutionary precedents.  While every evolutionary step from the burst of energy at the big bang to the present is accompanied by risks to its continuation, Teilhard recognizes the ‘structural’ evolutionary agency of ‘increasing complexity’ which moves it forward.

He also recognizes that this rise of complexity is decidedly non-linear: each major step requires crossing some boundary by which the new entity differs considerably from its precedent, such as the emergence of matter from raw energy, the appearance of complex atoms from simple ones by the agency of gravity, the formation of complex molecules, the appearance of the cell, the rise of consciousness from neural networks and eventually, the appearance of ‘reflective consciousness’: consciousness aware of itself.

In traversing each of these boundaries, or as he calls them, ‘changes of state’, we can see that the ‘laws’ of the sphere which preceded the new entity are superseded by a new set of ‘laws’ by which the new sphere is governed.  The structure of the ‘biosphere’, for example, is quite different from that of the ‘lithosphere’, and the emerging understanding of living things requires a new grasp of how living things differ from ‘non-living’ (or as Teilhard would say, ‘pre-living’) things.

With the rise of complexity, not surprisingly, these laws themselves become more complex.  With the human, in addition to all the novelty of reflective consciousness, we have the added complexity of entities whose evolution is dependent on their understanding of the new set of laws.  Humans are effectively building a bridge on which they are trying to cross.

In effect, understanding the structure of the noosphere is essential to building it.

Teilhard’s Characteristics of Noospheric Structure 

  1. The Product of Evolution Teilhard’s first characteristic of the noosphere is that it fits into the sweep of evolutionary development.  While humans are definitely unique products of evolution, they are nonetheless products.  The insight here is that while this may be so, humans can expect the same phenomenon of ‘change of state’ to effect new capabilities in the human navigation of this new sphere.
  2. Persistence of Evolutionary laws His second characteristic is that the ‘laws’ of the previous spheres, while still at work in the human person (such as the instincts provided by our pre-human reptilian and limbic brain structures), need to be modulated by the new brain capacity provided by the human neo-cortex.  What worked in early human social structures must be slowly replaced by activities more appropriate to the noosphere.  As we become more aware of the structure of the noosphere, our activities must evolve in the direction of cohesion with them.
  3. Changes of State  His third characteristic applies this succession of ‘changes of state’ to the human when he recognizes that ‘noospheric compression’ can also effect ‘human complexification’.  The proximity of humans caused by their movement into the ‘Northern hemisphere’, while (like all such evolutionary steps) this may come with some risk (and we have seen the risk in our past), it also comes with progress.   As we saw last week, the human species is

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

  1. Inner Pull vs External Push In this enterprise, Teilhard sees a fourth characteristic: such compression can only succeed if the elements can find a new way of relating to each other.  This new way of relating requires persons to connect in such a way as to expand their person-ness, 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 our selves, allows compression to effect complexification.   Thus he understands Love as the latest manifestation of the basic force of evolution:  the only one capable of uniting us by what is most unique in us, but yet one rising from the depths of time, continuously uniting the products of evolution in such a way that they become ever more complex.
  2. Human Invention This characteristic isn’t from Teilhard, but from John McHale, The Future of the Future .  but fits in well with those of Teilhard.

“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.”

   As he points out, while forecasting the future may difficult, we seem to always be able to invent what is needed to continue it.

  1. The Risk of Human Evolution In the sixth characteristic, Teilhard acknowledges the risk in such an undertaking.  If we are walking on the bridge while we are building it, and our grasp of our internal self is critical to the enterprise, what happens if we cannot commit to its continuation?  The pessimism that he saw still persists today.  Without faith in the future, there is no guarantee that human evolution will continue.   In his words:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is, man as such) 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.”

   We will begin looking into such ‘cogent experimental grounds’ in the next post.

Taking the Measure of Human Evolution

As I outlined two posts ago, what’s the case for optimism?  It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for being optimistic about human future.  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, we should be able to get some objective sense on whether Teilhard’s projections are proving true.

The Next Post

This week we have boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections into six characteristics.

Next week we will begin a survey of the noosphere today to see how objective data can be brought to bear on his insights.

June 28 – The Future of the Past

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the future.  As we noted, on the surface, it’s not necessarily pretty.  Even though we are some eighty years out of a global quagmire from which, for a while, seemed capable of destroying civilization as we knew it, other threats seem to incessantly loom.  Last week we considered, “with all this, can there be a basis of optimism?”

This week, we will continue to explore Teilhard’s metaphor of the sphere as a surface that we must navigate is we move increasingly Northward from open territories and plentiful resources into a space that closes up on us even as we continue to multiply and consume.

Crossing the Equator

   Let us focus for a moment on that critical point, the ‘equator’ of the sphere: the point at which each new wave of expansion is met by a reduction of space and an increase in tension.  The massive two ‘world wars’ of the past century certainly seem to reflect the inevitable conflagration that occurs when literally the whole world, with all of its arms of expansion, seems to be bent on conquest.  The sheer size of the conflict intensified by the destructive efficiency enabled by advancements in technology, made the carnage so unbelievable that still, some eighty years later, it is very difficult to put it all into perspective.  Literally every family in our United States was impacted by the loss of life or property that resulted from these wars.  In Europe and Asia, the effects were even more devastating.  Although it may be true that ‘literally’ the whole world was not bound up in them, they were significant enough to register as true ‘world’ conflicts.
Can we say with some confidence that the past few hundred years mark the ‘crossing’ of Teilhard’s ‘equator’?  The histories of clashing civilization in antiquity all point to an increase in human conflict as time goes on.  Now that we can forecast the loss of space and resources to be expected as we enter the North half of our metaphorical sphere, it seems safe to expect yet more of what we have come so vividly to see in the past.  Is the future of the past the past?  As the tensions of the increasing pressures from human expansion continue to grow, can we expect even more such ‘world wars’?

As Teilhard sees it, the perception that we are surely moving into uncharted territory is well warranted:

“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 the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As Teilhard points out, it’s not just that things are becoming tighter and less comfortable as we cross over into this new mileu, it’s that they are happening at an increasing rate.  No sooner do we become inured to some new and uncomfortable aspect of our society than some new innovation is discovered to have a negative impact on our lives.  Our homes become more comfortable as our environment is endangered, our wealth increases even as the number of people dissatisfied with life increases, those behaviors that, in retrospect, brought us safely through adolescence into responsible adulthood, now seem to have become antiquated, even injurious, to our children.  Our acquisitions, now easier to acquire, offer less and less satisfaction.  While such changes have always occurred in history, never before have they seemed to be so drastic so quickly.  In a single lifetime, we now see, it seems that the world we live in has changed drastically from the one into which we were born.

Then, the problem seems to be greater with ‘resources’.  It seems today that we are ‘running out of everything’.  Even more importantly, as Richard Rohr frequently observes, we are running out of ‘love’.   Even the most casual review of current events reveals a seemingly endless increase in scorn, bullying and disdain in our social norms.  It has become commonplace to revile competitors, demonize enemies (a class in which more and more others seem to belong) and disparage those not in our ‘class’.

This ‘casual review’ also surfaces another aspect of our new Northern Hemisphere.   The increasing cheek-to-jowl packing of the noosphere speeds up the dissemination of information.  As a commodity, to compete for the eyes and ears of subscribers, the news must be increasingly ‘clickworthy’.  ‘Bad news’ sells much better than ‘good news’.  Not only do we get much more of it, but what’s alarming about life (and there is much to cause us alarm) occupies an increasing percentage of what we read.

Indeed, the ‘tightening’ of the noosphere as we cross over into this uncharted territory seems to be squeezing the capacity for forbearance, patience. out of our lives.  As the news is so quick to print, such breakdown of tolerance shows up frequently in acts of personal violence.  The ownership of half the world’s billion guns by the citizens of a single nation, especially one evidentially so irritable, surely is a recipe for instability.

Given all this, such aspects of life as Paul’s ‘fruits of the spirit’ (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness) now seem antiquated, suitable for another time when seen in the light of current events, even at the exact time when they are most needed.

The Next Post

   This week we took a closer look at this unique and danger-filled era of human history when we seem to be crossing Teilhard’s metaphorical equator.   Teilhard cites the error of looking to the past for the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that will serve our navigation of this new, Northern hemisphere.  As we saw last time:

 “…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.”

   For this new hemisphere, he sees the need for new articulations, more appropriate to the new terrain that we are entering.  Next week we will continue our exploration of this new terrain, not by looking further into the dangers that lie ahead, but into the human capabilities for managing life that we are only recently (in evolutionary terms) becoming aware of.

June 14 – Summing Up: “Articulating the Noosphere” and Living the “Theological Virtues”- Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard understood  the ‘spheres’ of existence (and the difficulty that both science in religion have dealing with them) as the first part of summing up the last fifteen posts.  This week we will review how he saw overcoming the duality in such traditional approaches and how such an understanding can lead to our navigation of the noosphere not only successfully, but joyfully.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it’s not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident between all the different perspectives of the spheres of existence,, but the lack of a more comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution affords the possibility of bringing all four of these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them.  (See the posts on “The Teilhardian Shift” for a more comprehensive treatment of his unique insights).

So from this unique insight Teilhard sees the noosphere in need of a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  If this can be done, it is possible that whatever structure which underpins this context will provide the light that we need in order to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence to be in need of our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require.   In his words

 “The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) 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.” (Parentheses mine)

   More to the point, he goes on to say

“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”

  with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to

“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Navigating the Noosphere

In a quote I have frequently used, Teilhard remarks that

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

  As we saw in the post on “Grace and the DNA of Human Evolution”, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ that Jesus offers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller.   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?”

Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution.  This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing for the past fifteen weeks, come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we saw in the posr on “Hope” those wonderful ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ which are promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  In our secular context, they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following His (sic) laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a wonderful way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’.  The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still under construction) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’

The Next Post

In the last fifteen posts we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it.  The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.

But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin  explore it as we begin to conclude this blog by looking at where evolution is taking us.

June 7 – Summing Up: “Articulating the Noosphere” and Living the “Theological Virtues”- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our secular look at the three so-called “Theological Virtues”- Faith, Hope and Love- by seeing how Cynthia Bourgeault’s reinterpretation of Paul encapsulated the workings of these virtues in our most intimate relationships.

This week we will conclude this segment of the blog in which we have looked at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and saw how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take, in living them out.

The Articulation of the Spheres

Two things that nearly everyone can agree are the comprehensiveness of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it.  Science depends on it and Religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.

The current state of religion is a many faceted, often contradictory, but fervently felt set of beliefs about the world and our place in it.   The ten posts on the ‘History of Religion ‘ (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509) offers a brief and somewhat superficial overview of religion and its quest for insight into the human condition.

Science, coming into play much later, also offers an approach to understanding existence, although coming at the enterprise from an entirely different perspective.  While religion relies on the intuitions developed, passed down and modified in many ways into metaphors, practices and expectations, science, at least nominally, constrains itself to a collegially empirical approach, with heavy dependence on objective data, which is itself a product of independently verifiable observations.

Both of these powerful modes of thinking have developed significant ‘articulations’ of their respective spheres of thought.  Physics, the mainstay of the science of matter, has laboriously effected its ‘Standard Model’, which underpins many of the modern discoveries and applications by which we are surrounded.  Biology, the investigation of living things, through development of the theory of Natural Selection, has brought a profoundly deep understanding of living things, and more importantly, how we and they interact.

The Duality of the Spheres

As is commonly known, while these two profound modes of thought both address the single reality in which we all live, they are frequently seen to be in conflict.  Like nearly every human enterprise, they fall into different sides of an underlying ‘duality’, a dichotomy divided by a deeply conflicting understanding of the human person.

Physics, with its ‘Standard Model’ can be seen to have developed an ‘articulation of the lithosphere’, and Biology with its theory of Natural Selection an ‘articulation of the biosphere’.  Psychology steps in as the first attempt at a secular ‘articulation of the noosphere’.   But, as I have discussed in the four posts addressing psychology beginning with “November 24 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2: The Transition”, (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=302), psychiatry seems no more united in addressing the human than are science and religion.  All three would seem, sharing as they do an adherence to the concept of evolution,   to be in competition with Religion, and its basis of intuition and scripture, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at summarizing the last fifteen posts in which we have addressed Teilhard’s ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’,  in values, morals and sacraments,  and finally in the attitudes captured in Paul’s so called “Theological Virtues’.

Next week we will conclude this summary by seeing how Teilhard understood uniting the Noosphere to the spheres of matter and life, and how his ‘articulations’ can lead to their successful inhabiting..