Tag Archives: evolution in human life

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing the March to the Future

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

The Fragility of Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

So What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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

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

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Next Post

 

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

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

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

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

March 26, 2020 – The Evolutionary Risks of Pessimism

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Today’s Post

Today, we return to thread we were following before we took a side trip to review the optimistic thoughts of Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer laureate, in Sunday’s New York Times.

In the initial post on the subject of quantifying human evolution, Teilhard acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of the human race is nonetheless balanced by risk. As we saw in the last two weeks, while there is considerable data to quantify optimism, there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.

This week we will take a look at some of these risks and see how they could play out to undermine the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which supports Teilhard’s optimistic projection for the future of human evolution. But even as he goes through the numbers which show exponential growth in human welfare in nine distinct and critical categories of human existence over the last two generations of human evolution, he also notes that every such aspect of ‘progress’ comes with an unplanned and unwelcome consequence. A few examples:

  • Humans learned to replace wood with coal for fuel, which avoided the deforestation of the planet, and probable human extinction, but at the same time led to the near asphyxiation of those living in cities as population increased along with density.
  • Advances in sanitation, agriculture and medicine exponentially lowered the death rate of both mothers and children in childbirth, which then led to a huge growth in human population, which then threatened to overtax food production and lead to widespread famine.
  • And today we see the threat of global warming (at least partially) caused by dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping heat, possibly leading to the rising of the seas and the drowning of millions.

However, as Norberg and many others note, forecasts of the effects of such consequences have historically failed to materialize as predicted. Such forecasts, such as those of Malthus, who predicted population growth overwhelming food production and leading to global famine by now, did not factor in the human ability to innovate and invent. Even though improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.

Why didn’t such dire consequences happen?

As Norberg points out in the example of overpopulation, the reduction in childbirth deaths actually led to a decrease in the rate of population growth as parents no longer felt the necessity for large families when such a large percentage of children began to survive the vulnerable early years.

And, as we have seen, the introduction of coal did indeed lead to deaths caused by foul air, but of course, once again, innovation and invention produced methods of cleaning coal smoke, and new technologies to produce more BTUs with fewer side effects, such as the extraction and management of gas.

But what about global warming? The CO₂ content in the air may take centuries to dissipate naturally, and by then humans may well have effected their own demise.   Again, such a forecast fails to factor the ability of humans to invent. Considering the number of initiatives under development today, such as wind, solar and nuclear power, such prophesies may well be premature. There are also studies underway to not only extract CO₂ from the air, but to market it as a source of fuel as well. All these, of course, are optimistic forecasts, and all subject to unplanned consequences which will set off new rounds of invent-pollute-clean up. Can humans win this war, or will the inevitable consequences rule out in the end?

John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   While this point of view definitely suggest optimism, the question can legitimately be asked, “What costs are we prepared to pay for progress?” This is followed by the more significant question. “How can we be sure that we will continue, as McHale suggests above, to find fixes for the things we break?”

The risks that we are discussing are ‘structural’ risks. One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series several weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over. Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil. The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.

This recoil from increased compression is an indication of the fear that in the future we will be subsumed into the horde, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’, resulting in a future which seems far less secure than the past.

The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ is directly related to this fear.

   Each human innovation that has been cited in this series has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback. In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism, clear ‘fruits of evolution’, can be undermined.

The fact that they have historically prevailed over the institutionally entrenched pessimists is evidence of the strength of such beliefs., but what happens when such optimism ‘runs dry’ in the well of human evolution?

The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the danger to such faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics, McHale’s forecasts and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed).

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   With this insight, penned some eighty years ago, he correctly forecasts trends which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West. He goes on to elaborate:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time (we are) becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of (our) future on earth, what (we) need before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species. As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented, historically proven knack for problem-solving. Nowadays, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as ‘even more unreasonably dogmatic’ (Pinker) than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, as David Brin points out,

“..the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

   And exactly how does this jeopardize our continued evolution? Again, Teilhard explains how human evolution is shifting from the neurological increase in brain size to the ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:

“.. as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation. Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

   In short, significant evolutionary risk can be seen in sharp ideological divisions as they undermine the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and as a result weaken their power to solve problems. In order to continue our evolution, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the risks to our continued evolution. We saw how the (so far) successful ‘fix-break-fix:’ cycle of ‘structural’ evolution can be weakened by the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.

Next week we will look a little deeper at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

The Risks of World ‘Flattening’

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

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

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

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

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

The Other Side of ‘The Exponential’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Post 

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

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

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

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

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progressophobia In Western Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Next Post

 

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

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

   But, he goes on

“Almost no one knows about it.”

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

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

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

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Today’s Post 

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

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

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to b3e so poorly reflected in today’s society.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   Norberg’s four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front. We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

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

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

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

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

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

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

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

   And the reason?

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

   And what’s changing?

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

   As Norberg sums it up:

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

…What can we see?

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

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

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

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

…And Why Can’t We See it?

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

March 5, 2020 – Poverty and Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

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

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

The History of Poverty

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

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

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

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

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

The Data of Poverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting This Into Perspective

At the risk of redundancy, I’ll revisit how all this fits into the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

February 27, 2020 – Life Expectancy and Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

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

– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of betterment of humankind over time

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

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

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

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

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

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

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

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

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

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

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

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

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

Asia: Increases from 42 to 70 Years

Latin America: Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa: Increases from 37 to 57 Years

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

Putting This Into Perspective

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Seeing Food as a Metric for Human Evolution

Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Teilhard’s Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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