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July 11, 2019 – The ‘Terrain of Synergy’- Areas Common to Religion and Science

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Today’s Post

Last week we went a little deeper on the possibility of synergy between science and religion; one which would enhance and enrich both bodies of thought and contribute to the continuation of our evolution.

However, while Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?”  Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), “two completely different and non-overlapping magisteria?”

Mapping the ‘Terrain of Synergy’

While science’s search for the agency by which the universe becomes more complex will go on for some time, as predicted by Paul Davies, humankind cannot afford the luxury of waiting for an empirical closure on the subject if it’s going to continue its evolution.  Our evolution is not only proceeding ‘under our feet’ whether or not we understand it, the rate rate is increasing.  Each day that passes seems to demand more choices with the mounting of the pressure of our advancement from instinct to volition.

The list of evolutionary threats seems to grow every day, and each individual risk gives rise to the prediction, “if this trend continues… (fill in your favorite evil)”.  Malthus may have been wrong in his prediction, but how do we know that eventually he will be proven right and the curtain of humanity will finally fall?

Therefore it is imperative that we build on those intuitions which have carried us thus far, but with the caveat that they must stay in coherence with the findings of science.  The source of these intuitions is religion, properly divested of Richard Dawkins’ “baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

Jonathan Sacks agrees, and goes a little further by identifying some of the many subjects that when addressed would light the way towards a synthesis suitable for mapping a route to the future.

“There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making.  It will be very unlike the Greek thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony.  Instead it will speak about:

– the emergence of order

– the distribution of intelligence

–  information processing

– the nature of self-organizing complexity

– the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them,

– the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos.

   Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity; flourishing and completeness.  Right brain (religious, intuitive) thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century.”

   This list is echoed, with much more articulation, by Davies.  Also note that many of these subjects have long been the object of study and debate by religion.  Effectively, Sacks and Davies have begun mapping the territory that, when explored, offer the terrain of ‘synergy’ between science and religion.

Teilhard elaborates on traditional religion as rich ore to be refined into an elixir which enriches human evolution.

   “After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution.  It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems.  We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order.”

    Davies, from the scientific perspective, echoes the insights of Teilhard and predates those of Sacks toward the need for science to expand its reach to include this underlying principle by which the universe unfolds:

“The general trend towards increasing richness and diversity of form found in evolutionary biology is surely a fact of nature, yet it can only be crudely identified, if at all. There is not the remotest evidence that this trend can be derived from the fundamental laws of mechanics, so it deserves to be called a fundamental law in its own right.

   The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, so it turns out, is not to be understood as a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Rather, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of these new pieces of behavior requires research which is as fundamental as, or perhaps more fundamental than, anything undertaken by the elementary particle physicists.”

   Thus both Davies and Teilhard can be clearly seen to “assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.  Such an approach as Davies is suggesting would act as an agent which can help religion to “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” from one angle while Teilhard offers the translation of science’s universal insight to the lives of human persons from another.

The Next Post 

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,(which) are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, there is another voice that contributes to this dialog, and that is Jonathan Sacks.   Next week we will take a look at his insights to move us along in understanding how ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be understood.

June 13, 2019 – Science, Religion and Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’: further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres? 

As we have seen, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, can be used in opposition, as seen in the many dualities that we have addressed.   It’s not that they are in true opposition, but that often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process.  What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for each to recognize the need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective articulation, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.

Ultimately, after all, there is but one reality.  As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, and the duality of science vs religion is common in our debates.  Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his scientific-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti religionists of science.

However, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to naturally complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.

From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented a way to reinterpret traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.

From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human in scientific discourse.

We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of the underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to capitalize on it.  The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.

Are Religion and Science Compatible?

As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional empiricism of science.  He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to traditional science which empirically treats such complexification.  Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus.  Teilhard fits this bill:

“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”

   I believe that Davies would reply that:

The true religion is that which recognizes the creative aspect of God in the ever-increasing complexity that occurs with universal evolution.

   Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace the Standard Model of Physics.  In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized.  As new phenomena are so recognized, new relationships and paradigms are required to address them.

Teilhard does the same for religion.  As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of religion in the human journey toward completeness.  He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:

“..divests the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

   He sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’

Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science.  The fabrication of such cohesion would equip the human mind a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.

Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence in which we live life.  Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmic large outer reaches of existence of which we are not aware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless.  These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.

What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory.  Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.

In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collective effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live.  Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?

June 6, 2019 – Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

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Today’s Post

We have decomposed Teilhard’s convergent spiral model down from its universal configuration to that of the human person, to the three ‘virtues’ by which we make our personal way up the spiral, to the thinking functions that differentiate us from previous products of evolution, and by which we are equipped to make the transition from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ evolution.

Last week we addressed the model of the ‘whole brain’, by which we perform these thinking functions that power us up the convergent spiral of human evolution.

This week we will look at this model in a little more detail, and see how it manifests itself in our most common concepts.

The Coherent Brain

We have looked at length at ‘dualities’ in human thought, and how most of them can be moved from divergence to coherence once the subject begins to be addressed ‘holisticly’.  This is especially true for the historical approach to ‘right’ vs ‘left’ brain modes of thought.  As we have seen from the perspective of Jonathan Sacks, while these modes are understood as active in the right and left lobes of the brain, they are more psychological than physiological in the way they work.

Further, the popular concept of this dichotomy suggests that those who are left brain dominant are more quantitative, logical, and analytical (eg engineers and mathematicians), while right-brained individuals are more emotional, intuitive, and creative free spirits (eg artists, dancers, musicians).  Thus we have the common concept of left brained individuals more tending to the ‘empirical’ approach to making sense of things and the right brained individuals more ‘intuitional’.

This simplistic treatment overlooks the fact that neither art nor mathematics are firmly set in their ‘brain-ness’.  Even the simplest of mathematical expressions requires an initial conceptualization (intuition) of what is being expressed before the factual (empirical) task of formulation.  And of what value is a melody if it is not subject to be quantified into a series of objective notes?  And if we take both these examples into their ‘life cycle’, they will possibly go through several manifestations as the math model is used or the melody played, with each cycle repeating the intuition-empirical dance that iteratively matures the model.

So, at the very base of our evolution, both at the level of the person and of society, these two modes of thinking come into play not as opposites, but as facets of a single, coherent, uniquely human action.

The ‘Golden Rule’ As the Earliest Example of Thinking with the ‘Whole Brain’

One of the earliest examples of pragmatism in human relations was Confucius’ principle of the ‘Golden Rule’, as recorded in ‘The Analects’:

“Zi gong (a disciple of Confucius) asked: “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?”  The Master replied: “How about ‘shu’ [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?”

   Variations of the golden rule of Confucius appear in nearly every major world religion and in most other belief systems as well, as it is frequently believed that this one rule not only underlies the fullness of personal life, but insures the success of society.

This ‘rule’ is based on ‘reciprocity’, which in turn is based on the sense of our ‘universality’.  In universality, what we believe about ourselves is a valid hermeneutic for what we should believe about others.  Very simply, our desire to be well treated can be understood in others to reflect their own such desire.

In terms of ‘thinking with the whole brain’, this simple principle can be seen to have several facets.

The First step is an employment of the ‘right’ brain mode of thinking.  It is necessary to have the intuition that ‘others’ have the same sort of feelings that we do.  “If I want to be well treated, it is likely that others would as well’.  This is intuitive because there is no way to objectively prove such; it must be believed and acted upon without empirical data.

Secondly, the ‘left’ brain hemisphere kicks in as we look into ourselves to establish what constitutes ‘good treatment’.  What sorts of actions towards ourselves would be described as ‘good treatment’?  Further, if we can quantify these actions, we can come to a decision on how they should be ‘reciprocated’ towards another.

Thirdly, this whole process is done while the lower brains continue their never-ending stimuli.  What sort of risks are being taken by following through with these actions?  Is the ‘other’ deserving of such treatment?  If the situation were reversed, would I receive such good treatment?  Will others consider me ‘weak’ because of my thoughtfulness?

So, ‘whole brain’ thinking requires the intuition that all humans persons are sufficiently alike to warrant the treatment we ourselves prefer, the empiricism to determine what that treatment would consist of and the decision to overcome the fears introduced by the ‘lower’ brains.

(It is not coincidence that these three facets reflect the three ‘virtues’ (16 May) which themselves map our journey ‘up’ the convergent spiral of evolution towards increased complexity.  ‘Faith’ is necessary for belief that others are ‘like us’, ‘Hope’ reflects our expectations for outcome of reciprocity and ‘Love’ is simply the energy which effects the unity that results from reciprocity.)

Note that the ‘Golden Rule’ is itself the result of ‘intuition’.  As Jonathan Sacks notes, ‘empiricism’, as found in ‘left brained thinking’, did not arise in the historical record until the Greek era, and finds its way into Western history via the Greek translation of Christian scripture and its subsequent influence on Western religious thought.  In his terms:

“… Christianity was a right-brain religion … translated into a left-brain language [Greek]. So for many centuries you had this view that science and religion are essentially part of the same thing.”

   Sacks’ assertion that the “view of science and religion as essentially part of the same thing”, however, has never been a mainstay in Western thinking, as the emergence of scientific empirical thinking was initially seen as a threat to Western religious concepts, as well as to the established and strongly entrenched Christian hierarchy of the time.

Nonetheless, Sacks, as Teilhard before him, was adamant that these two classical modes of thought were somehow connected at their root.  Further, they believed that recognition of this connection would lead to a clearer understanding of what it meant to be human as a necessary step toward continuing our evolution.  As Sacks sees it:

“It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, further understand our place in it and how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

   Next week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to the great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

May 23, 2019 – The ‘Two-Lobe Brain’ Model of Human Evolution

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been decomposing Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral of evolution’ from the cosmic, universal, level to that of ‘ordinary’ human life.  In doing so we saw how we can begin to envision how the fourteen million years of cosmic evolution continues not only in the human species, but in our individual lives as well.

We have navigated this terrain by the use of models.  Teilhard’s spiral model offers an insight into how ‘lesser’ things become things ‘greater’ in complexity over cosmic eons of evolutionary time.  As convergent it also illustrates how this increase occurs ‘exponentially’, how it becomes ‘tighter’ as it continues through the noosphere.

In doing so we have moved from the cosmic spiral model to the personal model of ‘the virtues’, in which we can begin to envision the ‘attitudes’, the three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.’  We saw how the three attitudes of Faith, Hope and Love show up in the human as manifestations of Teilhard’s three universal components of the convergent spiral: fruitful unity, resulting complexity and increasing response to the agency of universal ‘complexification’.

This presents a highly unified and coherent concept of how universal evolution ‘changes state’ as it becomes more complex, resulting in an insight into how the human person fits into cosmic evolution, not as imposed from without, or emerging from chance and chaos, but a as a ‘natural’ entity.  Or as the song goes, “No less than the trees or the stars”.

However, as we have also noted, this comes with a price: the need for human ‘volition’ if this tendril of evolution is to continue.  And as so many philosophers have noted, the growth to human maturity is marked with difficulty.

In this blog, we have addressed many of the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution which constitute the locus for this difficulty. We have also noted that many of them present themselves as ‘dualities’ in which human life is depicted as options or positions that we can take which are in significant opposition.  Such dualities are seen in such concepts as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’, ‘damnation’ vs ‘redemption’, and many more.

These dualities demark the occasions of our maturity that call for us to make choices.  As Teilhard has noted, making the choices which overcome such ‘ontological’ dualities is one of the necessary steps toward our increased personal and social evolution.  And further, one of the steps toward such overcoming occurs when we begin to better understand both the universal process of evolution and our part in it.  As Teilhard notes, understanding evolution in this way permits us to see these ‘dualities’ as simple ‘spectra’: less ‘this vs that’ than ‘this and that’, with both present in some cohesive way.

This week we will continue the ‘decomposition’ of Teilhard’s evolutionary spiral as it manifests itself in the human person.  We will move from the ‘virtues’ to addressing how we can use the gifts of evolution more fruitfully in moving toward a cohesive and integrated mode of being.

Thinking ‘Objectively’: Beyond Duality, Towards Complexity

We have looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (and hence human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.  This finding illustrates the action of the three virtues discussed last week:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of Love as the action of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human

–          Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan

–           Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification:  Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level

Norberg also highlights an aspect of this welfare that is less ‘championed’ by Western liberals: the role of wealth in this increase.  Generally, the liberal position calls for a more ‘equitable’ distribution of wealth as a necessary facet of human welfare in opposition to the conservative valuation of capitalism as necessary for the health of society.  Norberg’s extensive and well-cited data shows a different dialectic: Increased wealth as necessary for increased welfare.  Capitalism isn’t, in his view, the opposite of poverty, but rather the underlying solution to it.  Yes, the inequity remains, but not in such a way that poverty increases as a result of the rise of wealth, as if the rich add to their wealth by taking it from the poor.  He sees the rapid (and unprecedented) decrease of world poverty as a direct result of increase of world wealth.

This is an example of the overcoming of a traditional duality: ‘rich’ vs ‘poor’, in which there may be an unequal distribution of ‘rich’, but this is occurring today with an unprecedented decrease in the number of ‘poor’.

This is another example, as well, of Sacks’ observation that to become whole, which implies that we are evolving, we must think with both sides of our brain.  The ability to objectively see both sides of an issue, for example, often requires accessing the issue both intuitively and empirically, from both the left and right brain hemispheres.  Sacks sees such integrated action as looking at a dualism ‘wholistically’.

As he understands such ‘wholism’:

“It is not incidental that Homo Sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   In this statement, Sacks is illustrating the overcoming of several traditional dualisms: subject/object, emotion/reason, love/justice, and attachment/detachment.

Sacks offers a highly integrated insight into human evolution as seen in the increasing skill of thinking with both sides of the brain.  He traces the modes of human thinking through the development of written language from the Semitic to the Roman languages, from right-to-left expression and from the appearance of empirical (left-brain) conceptualization as it emerges from the legacy intuitional (right-brain) legacy.   The trick, he notes, is to find the ‘right’ balance between the two human powers of understanding represented by the skills of empiricism and intuition.

While this is one of the ways that we can increase our skill of using the human resources provided to us by evolution, there is yet another aspect to consider.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will look at an extension of this model which addresses the rest of the human brain system as we consider ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

May 16, 2019 – How Does The Spiral Of Evolution Work in Human Life?

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Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have turned our focus to Teilhard’s ‘spiral evolutionary model’ of the sweep of evolution from the beginnings of the universe itself to the current manifestation of complexity on our planet today.  We saw last week in Teilhard’s model of the converging spiral how complexity, his metric of evolution, could be seen as increasing in three facets: the unification of entities, resulting in the increased complexity of their offspring which in turn renders them more responsive to the ‘complexifying energy of evolution’.  As ‘consciousness’ emerges as a measure of complexity, leading to ‘consciousness aware of itself’ (the human person), we can also see how such recognition can eventually lead us to awareness of the process by which we become persons.

The Presence of the Evolutionary Spiral in the Human Person

We noted how Teilhard’s spiral model encompasses the entire sweep of cosmic evolution.  How can this be seen as reflected in the noosphere?

Such complexification can be seen in the phenomenon of personification.  As we become more aware of the energies from which our personal evolution evolves and continues in us, we can become more aware of how cooperation with them can be enhanced.

As Teilhard points out, the energy by which entities move along the spiral unites them in such a way as to:

–           advance their complexity (eg atoms into molecules)

–           become less’ intrinisic’ (eg ‘built into’ the entities as in atoms-to-molecules)

–          become less ‘instinctual’ (eg as in mammalian nurturing)

–          and become more ‘volitional’ (eg as in humans-to-humans).

As can be seen in this brief list, the energy of evolution itself changes state from chemical principles to biological imperatives, to emergence in the human as the ‘energy of relationship’.  In this series of transitions, love emerges as the current manifestation of the cosmic energy by which the universe evolves.  As we saw in the post on love as energy, love is much more than an emotional encouragement for relationship and procreation as it effects not only an increase in complexity of human offspring, but has an ‘ontological’ influence in the evolution of the human person himself.

Hence, we can see the ‘spiral of evolution’ equally at work in the human person as it is in the universe.  Learning to cooperate with the current state of evolutionary energy not only enriches our relationships, (which increases the complexity of our society), but enriches ourselves.  Such enrichment in turn increases our ability to enrich our relationships.  In such a way, the ‘universal spiral’ can be seen to be active in each human life.

However, as we saw, a successful relationship requires us to move from affection as an instinct to one which requires conscious decision.  The practice of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ described in the May 10, 2018 post (referenced above) requires us to modulate our lower brain stimuli as well as the resultant egoism that we have seen in our treatment of ‘noospheric risks’.   As the result of the ‘change of state’ seen in the energy of love, love becomes more a ‘decision’ than a response to an emotional imperative.  It becomes more ‘volitional’ in the human than it was ‘instinctual’ in the mammal.

That said, knowing what we know about the universal spiral of evolution, how can we map it into human life so that we can better understand it and respond to its new manifestation of energy?  What sort of ‘model’ can we use as a guide?

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the Theological Virtues.   Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”  Just as Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human.  The ‘virtues model’, however, only works at the level of the human, but is an example of how universal processes can be seen at work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the human equivalent of the three universal effects of the spiral:  unity, response to evolutional energy and rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity.  Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become.  To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become.  It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed.  Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all.  While this sounds religious, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from their static state.  Faith is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward on the spiral.  One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be.  If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and sees us as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life.  Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

The Next Post

This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.

We saw how the three components of the ‘theological virtues’ can be seen in a purely secular context as the three components of our individual personal evolution.  These three components are the personal instantiation of a cosmic process which takes us ever onward, upward and inward.

Next week we will look at yet another model, one which addresses a different but equally important skill of continuing our evolution as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.

May 9, 2019 – How Does the ‘Spiral Model of Evolution’ Continue in the Human Person?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard envisioned the process of universal evolution as proceeding in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’ in which entities, products of evolution, join in such a way as to produce ‘offspring’ of higher complexity.  We also looked at how, in the human, the evolutionary spiral is slowly taking on a ‘volitional’ characteristic, built on top of the ‘instinctual’ characteristic which has powered it for the past four billion or so years of life.  While the agency of ‘natural selection’ is undoubtedly at play in biological evolution, at the level of the noosphere it is becoming superseded by the human need to consciously choose the future.  Evolution is slowly becoming less ‘something that happens to us’ and more ‘something that we must consciously choose’.

This week we will take a more detailed look at how this ‘spiral of evolution’ is at work in universal evolution as a step toward better understanding of how we can respond to it in order to insure our continued evolution.

A Closer Look At The ‘Convergent Spiral’

We ended last week with Teilhard’s succinct description of cosmic evolution, in which he summarizes the action of a ‘convergent spiral’:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

   This simple statement has many facets of meaning which we will begin to unpack this week.  Each of these facets illustrates some characteristic of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’.

First, the joining of products of evolution can effect an increase in complexity in their offspring.  As Teilhard sees it, this characteristic is the basic thread of universal evolution.  Nowhere in the universe does matter move toward greater complexity without this basic step.  Evolution is complexification, and complexification is the action that moves an evolving entity along the spiral.

Second, this universal phenomena (without which we wouldn’t have a universe or be here to address it) happens under the influence of some sort of implicit energy, which Teilhard understands as radiated by the ‘axis of evolution’ (the center line of his spiral).  While it is common in the scientific community to see this statement as ‘teleogical’, and hence a back door intrusion of religion into the field of science, Paul Davies, secular physicist and astrobiologist, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, states:

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”.  (underline mine.)

   As we saw last week, even the atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins acknowledges the existence of a ‘mainspring of complexity’.

Third, the action of such joining of entities, which results in an increase in the complexity of their offspring, can result in a new entity which, because of its increase in complexity, is more responsive to the energy emanated by the ‘axis of evolution’ and better able to produce yet another level of complexity.

Fourth, the increase in complexity can be seen to occur exponentially over time, which means that as time goes on, products of evolution manifest higher measures of complexity more quickly.  A simple sampling of internet sources will quickly show that the observed interval of time between the appearance of the first atom and that of the first molecule is much longer than the interval between the molecule and the cell.  The intervals leading up to each of evolution’s major milestones (atoms, molecules, cells, single cell animals, neurons, brains and consciousness) are each shorter than the last.  The exponential decrease of the distance from the evolving entity to the ‘axis of evolution’ is a metric of the spiral’s ‘convergence’.

Fifth, each of these transitions appears as a ‘jump’, a ‘discontinuity’, or as Teilhard puts it, “a change of state’.  The resultant new entity of such transitions is radically different from its ‘parents’, and the diversity and volume of new capabilities of the ‘child’ are radically different from those of the ‘parent’.

As an example, hundreds of atoms are capable of uniting in such a way as to join to produce millions of different types of molecules, and the types of cells which eventually emerge from the initial cells is as yet uncounted.

As Davies cites biologist Bernhard Rensch:

“For example, when carbon, hydrogen and oxygen become combined, innumerable combinations can originate with new characteristics like alcohols, sugars, fatty acids, and so on.  Most of their characteristics cannot be deduced directly from the characteristics of the three basic atoms.”

   The presence of Teilhard’s spiral of evolution is therefore clear when we look back at what we understand of the past.  As Dawkins understands it, there is clearly a process at work “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

This process, while decidedly hard to quantify, nonetheless powers complexification via the intrinsic nature of matter which, as it becomes more complex, also becomes more ‘spiritual’.  I am using the term ‘spiritual’ here not in the vernacular of religion, but in that of science (as recognized above by Davies and Dawkins).  As Teilhard puts it:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic ‘change of state’.”

   What is less clear is how this spiral can be seen to continue in the human.  Since the continuation of human evolution becomes less and less ‘instinctual’, and more and more ‘volitional’, it seems clear that our understanding of this spiral is increasingly necessary if we are to insure its continuation.  If we don’t understand this, it will be difficult to organize ourselves to align with it and make the choices necessary for its continuation.  In Teilhard’s words:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the Earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   Implied in these poetic but insightful words is that if we do not understand the ways that evolution continues its universal unfolding in the human, we will not be able to cooperate with them, and thus will ultimately fail.   Understanding Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ may well help us to understand more about how evolution works on a universal scale, but other models are needed to see how such a process can be extrapolated into human life, and to better understand how we can move from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ response to ‘the winds of the Earth.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at Teilhard’s model of a convergent spiral as a way to better understand how evolution proceeds as a process central to the history of the universe.   We then began to address how this spiral can be seen in human life.

Next week we will look a look at another set of models that can be helpful in moving from this week’s ‘universal’ model to one closer to human life as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to the ‘winds of the Earth’

May 2, 2019 – A Model for Universal Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week, after looking at how the ‘addiction’ that is possible as we enhance our subjectivity and anger in the acidic pool of internet ‘likes’ that dilute our brain’s ability to reason with dopamine, we saw how this can be seen as another risk (when added to all the other ‘dualisms’ that underlay pessimism) to our continued evolution, and looked a little more closely at this phenomenon of ‘human evolution’.

We saw how the first eight or so billions of years of evolution, ‘pre-life’, and the following four or so billion years of ‘biological’ evolution depended on an innate and instinctive (in the biosphere) agent by which the ‘coefficient of complexity’ slowly rose.  In contrast, in the past two hundred thousand years, as humans have evolved, we noted the slow rise of ‘volition’ as the agency which is becoming the prominent force.  We saw again how the past one hundred fifty years (a nanosecond in evolutionary history) human evolution, as measured by human welfare, has increased exponentially, and how the key agent of this new surge could be recognized as the increase of freedom of the human person.  Such an understanding represents the beginning of our (in Teilhard’s terms) ‘articulation of the noosphere’, and the process of building personal freedom into our political constructs is a beginning to construe our ability to cooperate with it.

We have also seen throughout this blog, examples of ‘risks’ to our evolution, the last of which identified an insidious rising of subjectification and ‘progress pessimism’, which offers yet another ‘risk’.

This week we will begin to move forward to look at the action of universal evolution and see how our understanding of it can help us better overcome these risks and hence develop appropriate responses to it.

A Geometrical Model for a Universal Process

Developing a truly objective and wholistic grasp of universal evolution can be difficult.  After all, we are products of this process.  Whatever and whoever we are, whatever the energy or agency by which we seek this grasp and whichever cause we attribute it to, we are still caught up in its grasp.  Developing a comprehensive but objective view of cosmic becoming and our part in it is not dissimilar to constructing a bridge while we are traversing it.

Teilhard offers a fairly straightforward geometrical model which may help to better grasp this situation.   He sees universal evolution taking place as a ‘convergent spiral’, and this model can be clearly seen in our scientific understanding of the past.  Science understands the eight billion year period preceding the cell as the production of increasingly complex products of evolution, and this elaboration always leads to richer ‘entities’ which are always more conducive to ‘offspring’ of even more complexity.  Biology understands the following four billion years in much the same way: products of evolution appear as richer, better organized and more autonomous entities with each wave of living things.

Science has had a difficult time with this viewpoint, in fear that it is a ‘back door’ for inserting subjective theology into an objective method of inquiry.  However, there are few practitioners of science today that disavow the fact that the universe has become a much more complex thing today than it was at the ‘big bang’, and that humans are products of evolution which exemplify such complexity.

Even those atheists with a scientific background do not deny this.  We have seen how one of the most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, in his book, “The God Delusion”, states it:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, but God is not an appropriate name unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers. The first cause that we seek must have been the basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

Other than to note that this does not constitute a vote for religion (he seems less ‘a-theistic’ and more ‘a-religionist’), he doesn’t develop it further or recognize the many contemporary theological concepts that do so.

Teilhard, in one such concept, completely agrees with Dawkins’ premise, but goes on to elaborate in some detail how such a ‘process’ can be articulated in terms of the model of a ‘convergent spiral’.

Such a spiral is simply like a vertical spring, except as the spiral becomes increases in height, the diameter becomes smaller until the spiral converges on a single point at the top.

How Does Teilhard’s Evolutionary Model Apply to Universal Evolution? 

Teilhard applies this model to universal evolution, seeing each stage of such ‘raising of the world’ as located at some point on the spiral.  The vertical axis of the spiral is time, with the past at the bottom and the future at the top.  Along the spiral itself, evolving entities (eg, atoms) join in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, with the result that the new entity (eg, the molecule) is located further along the spiral.

In addition to the new attributes of the new entity, a measure of such complexity can be also understood as the proximity of the new entity to the ‘axis’ (the centerline) of the spiral.  This distance slightly decreases as each new entity emerges with its slight increase in complexity, and can be seen as the influence of the agency of evolution by which the hew entities become more complex.

The third component of the converging spiral, which distinguishes itself from a simple spiral, is that the increasing complexity of the new component manifests itself as ‘vertical’.  To move along the spiral, the evolving entity must move upwards, increasing its complexity. The entity’s new level of complexity can therefore be seen as a ‘rise’.

In simpler terms, as each new product of evolution appears, it ‘rises’ in complexity in response to some ‘agency of complexification’ which equips it to produce an increase in complexity in its offspring.

In Teilhard’s words:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

The Next Post

This week we have taken a look at Teilhard’s spiral model of evolution and how such a model can be used to conceptualize and even visualize how evolution can proceed.  It still remains to see how such a model can offer a way to see it at work in each of us as we live our lives.

Next week we will unpack Teilhard’s simple statement into terms which articulate how he sees the agency of evolution in universal becoming.

April 25 2019 – The Risk of Dismissing Progress and Ignoring Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

    Last week we looked a little more closely at the phenomenon of ‘indignation’.  While it might be understood as a normal and frequent response to the vagaries of the world around us, we saw how the rapidly growing new milieu of the internet can amplify subjective thinking as it compounds it by rapid validation of biases and negativity on a near universal scale.

We also saw how such fixation with the internet can lead to an insidious form of addiction, known as ‘motivational toxicity’, which appears as a deterioration in the ability of normal rewards (such as careers and sex) to govern behavior and requires ever increasing cycles of subjectivity, expression and reinforcement to receive the pleasurable effects of dopamine.

This combination of the internet as an enabling device for an addiction which skews our judgement and our increasing addiction to it can be seen as a danger to our continued evolution.  As we have seen, continuing our evolution increasingly requires that we understand it and cooperate with it.  Anything that undermines our ability to think objectively and cooperate with others bodes poorly for our future.

This week we will move on to looking at how we can understand evolution to be taking place today.

Instinct and Volition in Human Evolution

In this blog we have looked at many facets of both universal and human evolution in the light of insights from Teilhard de Chardin and others (eg Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr) as we have explored a concept of God that is couched differently from that traditionally expressed in the thousands of religions on our planet.  We have also seen, however, how Teilhard’s concept, which pursues a different approach to understanding the ‘ground of being’, is not only consistent with that of science but is quite compatible with the ‘basics’ of Western theology.  We have seen how such an insight permits the sweep of cosmic evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, to be seen in the context of a single current which raises the ‘complexity’ of its products from that of pure energy to that of consciousness aware of itself.

The existence of this current suggests that, with the advent of the human person, evolution will manifest itself increasingly less as a force which guides the inherent restructuring of simpler entities into those of richer and more complex forms, (such as atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into brains, and brains into consciousness) and more as an ‘axis of evolution’ which must be consciously recognized and cooperated with for human evolution to continue.  In Teilhard’s view, human evolution becomes less ‘instinctive’ and more ‘volitional’.

Teilhard sees the first step of such ‘volition’, recognizing, as ‘articulating the noosphere’, quantifying the structure to which we advert as we go about our affairs.  Examples of such articulations can be seen in our many religions, philosophies and social structures (our laws).  In the several hundred thousands of years since the first ‘homo sapiens’ set about trying to make sense of his environment, human history (and to some extent ‘prehistory’) shows a vast variety of such ‘articulations’, with their underlying assumptions, beliefs and practices reflecting their diverse grasp of the underlying ‘nature’ of reality.  Such history also shows the profound ability of humans to ‘learn from mistakes’ as the world has grown more populated with the attendant crowding of people on a planet with decreasing open space.   Somehow, in spite of our collectively discordant understanding of ourselves and our environment, we have managed to thus far not only survive but thrive. 

Towards a Mature ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’

The past hundred fifty years shows an exponential increase in human welfare, as articulations such as those expressed in the ‘Enlightenment’ have come to be imbedded in our social structures.  While perhaps not being conscious of advancing evolution per se, or of even increasing the complexity of the human as a measure of advancing evolution, a simple but key underlying principle of such advance can be seen in the statement of Thomas Jefferson:

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

    This statement is the cornerstone of the increase in welfare that Norberg charts in his book, ‘Progress’.  However, Norberg carefully notes the necessary extension of Jefferson’s assertion for such increase in welfare to take place.  To achieve such a rapid increase in the level of welfare that he details, personal freedom is required for the innovation and invention that is necessary for understanding and surviving our mistakes.

In effect, while the Enlightenment might be seen as the point in history where our ‘articulation of the noosphere’ began to mature, the increase in human welfare since 1850 might be seen as the point in history that humans began to learn how to ‘cooperate with the forces of evolution’.  In this brief time frame, our grasp of our ‘complexification’ has taken a quantum leap.

However, as startling as such a sudden change in our evolution can be seen in Norberg’s nine metrics of recent human evolution, the continuation of this trend is not guaranteed.  If we don’t recognize first that such an increase in human welfare has actually taken place and second, that such increase reflects an increase in the evolutionary complexity of our species, we can tend to take a stance in which not only do we ignore it, we dismiss it and fail to recognize it as actual progress.  Such dismissal and denial will make it increasingly difficult to cooperate with it and thus extend our evolutionary progress.

The pessimism that we have been addressing in the past few posts is evidence of such disbelief.  A critical way to insure continuation of our evolution is to better understand it, but a sure way to undermine it is to ignore, or worse disbelieve in it.

The Next Post

This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.

Next week we will look a little more deeply into how universal evolution continues its rise of complexity through the human species as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.

April 18 2019 – How can Indignation Jeopardize Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

    Last week we explored what goes on in our ‘thinking system’ as external stimuli is processed by the ‘lower brains’,  stimulating the neocortex faster than it can examine and evaluate the external stimuli to decide on a reaction.  We also saw how these stimuli manifest themselves in the form of ‘messenger chemicals’ or ‘neurotransmitters’ sent to the neocortex, many of which are experienced by the neocortex as ‘pleasurable’.

This pleasurable response to a negative stimuli is captured in our term for it, ‘indignation’.  When we disapprove of the actions of others, for example, we can feel good about it.

This week we will take a look at how this natural condition, known to thinkers for ages, can metastasize to new proportions in the milieu of the rapid, ubiquitous and near universal world of the internet. 

The Danger of Indignation Today

What’s different about such a common condition today, and how can it be seen as possibly undermining the continuation of human evolution?

David Brin, author and social critic, notes the “rising ideological divisions that are becoming more prevalent today, even to the point of “culture wars”, that makes it increasingly difficult to form coalitions to solve problems”. Today it seems that fewer groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems.  Such an impasse is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders, especially if they are armed with the stamina and dedication of indignation, knowing, in Brin’s words,

“.. with subjective certainty, that (they) are right and (their) opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.”

   Last week we saw how the internet, with its various forms of social media, not only act as an amplifier for beliefs and assertions, but as a positive feedback mechanism which can enhance and reinforce biases, negativity and pessimism.

What’s involved in getting to this deeply dogmatic, self-centered and troubling state of mind?

Brin calls attention to studies that investigate reinforcement processes in the human brain, especially those involving dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in producing pleasure responses, such as those at the Behavioral Neuroscience Program State University of New York at Buffalo.  He refers to this physiology as “chemically-mediated states of arousal that self-reinforce patterns of behavior”.

Such self-induced arousal can be seen as “self-doping”, in which individuals have the power to trigger the release of psychoactive chemicals simply by entering into certain types of consciousness.  Typical types of such arousal include anger, or more specifically, ‘indignation’.

When such self-induced behavior becomes frequent it can become habitual, even to the point of addiction.

Such ‘self- doping’ of course is not limited to indignation. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, using MRI, have examined the brain activity that occurs when volunteers won games of chance, and found that responses were very similar to those responding to cocaine.  Evidently, gambling produces a pleasant stimulus similar to cocaine.

Simple activation of brain reward systems does not necessarily constitute addiction.  We do this every time we hold our love ones, hear beautiful music, or even find the word which satisfies the crossword clue.  Those who practice meditation, also a self-induced state, also report the pleasure of entering into a meditative state.

Rather, the extreme control of behavior—exemplified by a deterioration in the ability of normal rewards to govern behavior (termed ‘motivational toxicity’)—is the distinguishing feature of an addiction.

Motivational toxicity is apparent when rewards which are normally effective in influencing behavior lose their ability to motivate.  This is typically seen in drug addicts when they neglect formerly potent rewards such as career, relationships and sex, and focus their behavior on the acquisition and ingestion of drugs.

So it appears possible to habitually pursue drug-like reinforcement cycles — either for pleasure or through cycles of withdrawal and insatiability that mimic addiction — purely as a function of entering an addictive frame of mind.  Such pursuit requires no mental discipline (such as does the practice of meditation) and produces much stronger sensation.  A sense of righteous outrage can feel so intense and delicious that those caught up in this emotional whirlpool actively seek to return to it, again and again.  It is not necessarily associated with one political outlook or another, as it seems to be a trait that crosses all boundaries of ideology.

Since it undermines our ability to empathize with opponents, accept criticism, or negotiate practical solutions to problems, it undermines the mature discourse necessary to a healthy society.  Further, it skews how the world is experienced.  While the torrent of news today, and its incessant reliance on ‘click-bait’ content promote a sense of pessimism, motivational toxicity takes this level of pessimism to the point that the positive trends such as reported by Johan Norberg can not only be ignored, they must be seen as insidious ‘fake news’ designed to lull us into a untrustworthy sense of security.   Such an enhanced and reinforced pessimism increases the paranoia in which long-standing and successful social and political norms are no longer to be trusted.  In a society in which such pessimism prevails, the structure of democracy will not survive.

The problem with chronic dopamine release is not just the danger it poses to society at large.  As the cycle increases, brain receptors become desensitized and continued self-doping bring less pleasure.  As with any psychotropic drug, regular release of dopamine will in turn result in a craving for a larger release to feel the same ‘high’.  When this happens, the only way to achieve the high is to increase the rage and act out more; either verbally or violently.  This is how anger addiction is born.

As we saw last week, this cycle is further reinforced by the feedback power of the internet.   This sort of dopamine response is induced by the many ‘clickbait’ posts found on social media, and as the need for more production of it increases, the internet gladly ups the volume and content of negative and indignation-worthy content to accommodate.  At the same time, the skill of using the neocortex to modulate and minimize the stimulation is eroded.  The person becomes less and less capable of objective evaluation of the increasingly indignation-inducing posts.

The Next Post

This week we took a closer look at how anger, and its everyday manifestation of indignation can metastasize to new proportions in the mileu of the rapid, ubiquitous and near universal world of the internet, and how this can constitute new dangers to both personal and societal evolution.

Next week we will look into how this natural and common phenomena can turn into practices which can jeopardize our continuing evolution.

April 11 2019 – What’s Different About Today’s Indignation?

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Today’s Post 

Last week we began looking into the current wave of pessimism that seems to be embedding itself into our social fabric.  As Johan Norberg clearly delineates in great detail in his recent book, “Progress”, by almost any measure (and he cites nine distinct ones) we are living in an unprecedented ‘golden age’ of human welfare, but from the incessant negative chatter on Twitter, Facebook and the other faces of social intercourse, the world is increasingly seen to be heading to the dogs and our institutions can no longer be trusted.   The recent political trend toward nationalism in the West suggests a similar dissatisfaction with the current state of the state.  Does this trend suggest that an inevitable side effect of our collective evolution is the souring of our outlook?

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

Isn’t This Just More ‘Progressophobia”?

We took a look at the history of pessimism in the West last Fall, citing the historical trends of ‘progressophobia’ as reported by Steven Pinker, and briefly exploring the threads of pessimism woven into Protestant theology and Freudian psychology, but here we’re dealing with something quite different.  The pessimism we are now addressing, while containing overtones of the above influences, is much more intimate and prevalent, therefore more difficult to grasp.

Last week we identified an age-old condition of the human psyche, ‘indignation’ as complicit in this trend.  But we noticed that there’s nothing new about this mental state, simply a ubiquitous emotion we attach to disapproval of the actions of others, so why would we see this as a factor in today’s trend toward a deeper, more intimate, and potentially more dangerous form of pessimism?

The Amplification and Reinforcement Loop of Social Media

One thing that is clearly different today than in the past is the phenomenon of the internet.  Via this new technology, we are not only able to connect with many more other persons, our thoughts and opinions are available to thousands, and their approval, their ‘likes’, are instantly available to us.  Thus, social media is not only an amplifier of our opinions, it provides feedback which tends to reinforce them.

Russ Douthat, pundit for the New York Times, notes that in just a few years, the Internet as a new manifestation of our culture has morphed from a “just enough (interconnection) to boost economic productivity, encourage social ferment, challenge cultural gatekeepers, and give lonely teenagers succor” to “an addictive dystopia for everyone.”

Such reinforcement can easily boost our feelings of ‘being correct’, reinforcing our biases and diluting self-criticism.  This reinforcement cycle is very effective at supporting a ‘dogmatism’ in which every issue is painted in black and white, and addressed only at the extremes.  Indignation therefore works to different degrees, from the logical observation and simple disapproval of actions which we do not approve, to the extreme cited by David Brin, author and social critic:

“.. knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.”

   Even the most casual read of current social media shows the prevalence of such extreme thinking.  The proof of such a conclusion is only reinforced by the volume of ‘likes’ that flow back in and complete the reinforcement.

It is even clearer in our social and political activity.   Opponents are demonized, cataclysmic consequences are predicted from their proposals, pronouncements are structured to insure a maximum of outrage, conspiracies are spun and reinforced, and it is all amplified and reinforced through the power of the internet.

Why Should It Feel So Good to Feel Bad?

There are several studies that can be found on the internet that show the direct relationship between anger, indignation and rage, and the increase in activity of dopamine and other pleasure-inducing ‘messenger’ chemicals in the brain.  Several of these studies show that, for those who frequently give in to rage (an extreme form of indignation), “nothing makes them happier than getting angry.  Rage can actually feel quite exhilarating.”  The pleasurable sensation at work in such feelings is generally ascribed to the effects of dopamine.

The secretion of these drugs is no longer a mystery.  It is generally understood that the production of these ‘neurotransmitter’ drugs emanates in the ‘lower’ brains (those formed earlier in evolution), and is therefore common to all vertebrates.  Their importance to evolution is also clear: they provide pleasurable feedback to activities essential to survival and therefore continued evolution.  While much pleasurable feedback stems from the body itself (sex, eating, etc), dopamine provides pleasure from just thinking about such activity.  Since some activity which insures survival requires anger (defensiveness), it is not surprising that anger should activate the production of these neurotransmitters.

Since these ‘messenger chemicals’ are provided to the neocortex brain, the center of objective reasoning, there can be competition between the pleasurable sensation invoked by the neurotransmitters and the objective process of reasoning which tries to establish the appropriate response to the external stimuli which set off the response to begin with.

I may initially respond to a casual comment from a friend with the sensation of anger arising from the vagueness of the comment.  “Have I been insulted?”  This sensation arrives at the neocortex much quicker than it can process the appropriate response.  “What exactly was said?  What is he intending?  Should I be angry?”

One way to look at the skill of such neocortex activity required for the appropriate response is to recognize that as we grow,  the lower brains begin to stimulate our neocortices long before they are mature.  The neocortex is generally considered to mature by age twenty, but we are embedded in the often confusing context of families, friends, and schools for most of those twenty years.  If our environment is consistently filled with fear, anger and danger, the influence of the ‘lower brains’ on our eventual neocortex skills will be much stronger than if we are more surrounded by affection and safety.

I have suggested several times in this blog that one of the critical skills necessary for our continued personal evolution is that of using our neocortex brains to modulate the stimuli of the lower brains.  Here we can see such a process clarified in neurological terms.  Other human thinking processes also are clarified as well, such as thinking with both sides of the brain to avoid dualisms, and thinking objectively to avoid egoism.  In both cases the neocortex is required to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli rising from the lower brains in order to manage a perspective which is appropriate to the objective reality which is at the base of the external stimuli.

That said, how can we quantify the ‘evolutionary risk’ of ‘indignation’?  What difference does it make if we allow ourselves the pleasure of basking in the glow of our neurotransmitter activity?

The Next Post

This week we took a look at how our instinctive responses to things we disapprove of can be pleasurable, and how there can be a conflict between such ‘knee jerk’ reactions and reactions more appropriate to the external stimuli.

Next week we will look into how this natural and common phenomena can turn into practices which can jeopardize our continuing evolution.