Tag Archives: evolution in human life

September 13 – The ‘Structural’ Risks to Continued Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

As we saw in our 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, there is considerable resistance to the data which supports his optimism.

This week we will take a look at some ‘structural’ 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.  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 warning (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.  While improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.  Why not?  As Norberg points out, 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.

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.

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?

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 to find fixes for the things we break?”

One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Next Post

This week we took a brief look at ‘Structural’ risks to the continuation of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will address risks to human evolution that are more subtle, and hence more dangerous, the ‘Noospheric’ risks.

September 6 – Why the Pessimism?- Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at why pessimism over human progress (entitled ‘progressiphobai’ by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”) seems so entrenched in the West, particularly among those comfortable, secure, educated individuals who are unable to project their personal well-being into optimism about their future.
This week, staying with Pinker, we will take a look at several reasons why such a fear of the future might be at the root of this ‘progressiphobia’.

Pinker’s  List

   Pinker identifies several phenomena at work in Western society that contribute to such a notable lack of trust in our future.

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.

In addition to the financial desire to ‘sell’, the competition between paper and electronic media is also raising the stakes.

   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 we have seen 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 their 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.

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 skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity.  Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution, considering that if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom of the last page.  Just as he envisions the first, most primitive cell emerging in evolution “dripping in molecularity”, he also sees humanity still in a stage which is ‘dripping’ with ‘animality’, and very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Illusions of Maturity – As Pinker sees it, we tend to “mistake the growing burdens of maturity, wage-earning and parenthood for a less innocent world”.  Along these same lines, as we age we also have a tendency to “mistake a decline in our faculties for a decline in the times”.  As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out

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

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”.

Human Neurology – 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.  This suggests that indignation, a state of anger which the person feels is justified, can set off a reaction in the brain which is registered as ‘pleasure’.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins 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.”

The Next Post

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s observations of our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution.  In Pinker’s words

“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’ (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.

August 30 – Why the Pessimism?- Part 1

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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 through the human species.  We also noted that in spite of the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides which shows evolution rising through humanity in the form of increasing human welfare (which is the main contributor to survival of the species), ‘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”, sees this as a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norbert, 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”.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.  Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Sarte.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand the human race as in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be protected 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 predictions of future doom.   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, still leaves the majority of Americans to see 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.

Progressiphobia 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, persons seem to be 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 unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the history of pessimism about human progress, through the eyes of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

This week we looked at how such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution  as detailed by Johan Norberg is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

Next week we will take a look a few reasons for such ‘progressiphobia’.

August 23 Summing Up Norberg in the Light of Teilhard’s Vision

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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 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”.

This week, I’d like to wrap up this part of the blog, in which we have looked at the data which substantiate Teilhard’s audacious optimism, with a summary of what we have seen in the past four posts.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   These four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that contrary to ‘conventional wisdom’, human evolution can be seen to be advancing on nearly all fronts.  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.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that 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 noted 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 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 added: “When allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where they 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.

…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’.

Norberg 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 seen as clearly incorrect?  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?

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

August 16 Poverty as a Metric of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

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

This week we will look at a fourth metric of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

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

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

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

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

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

The Data of Poverty

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

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

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

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

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

   So, in 1820, the average percent in poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%.  If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person 2,000 years to double his income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all of Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.  This increase did not emerge as a result of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time period.

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

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

   The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented:

   Country             GDP Increase

     China                   2000%

    Japan                   1100%

   India                       500%

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

From     To           Pct Poverty Decrease

1820  1920           From 94% to 82%

1920   1950          From 82% to 72%

1950   1981          From 72% to 54%

1981   2015          From 54% to 12%

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

Putting This Into Perspective

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

–          Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society.  Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.

–          Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted and globalization is fostered.  Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly.  Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.

–          These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”

The Next Post

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

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify how evolution continues through the human species, but even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveal the same trends as outlined above.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

August 9 – Life Expectancy As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post 

   Last week we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the movement of evolution in the human species.  Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, it is clear that the betterment of humankind is occurring: the slope of the curve of improvement can be seen to rapidly increase in the past few generations, and that this increase is spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

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

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

   “Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short.  More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.   People died early, as infants or children, and mothers often died giving birth.  The high mortality rate was not primarily because of the prevalence of violence, but because of infectious disease, unsafe water and bad sanitary conditions.”

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

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

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

Neither was it different from Eastern countries.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

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

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

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

   Time Frame                              Life Expectancy

Prehistoric times                              18-20 YRS

500BC                                                    20-25

1830                                                       30

1910                                                       32

1990                                                       60

2012                                                       70

   As we saw last week, in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, these startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.  Life expectancy can be seen to increase by 40 years in the short span of one hundred years, a blink in evolutionary time.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such a ‘knee in the curve’.  Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’.  Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

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

Asia:  Increases from 42 to -70 Years

Latin America:  Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa:  Increases from 37 to 57 Years

  We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the increase in human stature as measured by human height increase in developing countries to nearly equal to the West in only sixty years.

Putting This Into Perspective

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

–          Innovation and invention are natural characteristics of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society.  Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.

–          Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted.  Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese and early empires of Islam, but died still-born because restricted from trade.

–          These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed:  the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, ‘The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

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

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

August 2 – Food As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a cursory look at an aspect of human activity that provides a basis for assessing Teilhard’s forecasts for human evolution.  Without going into statistical details, we saw how well Teilhard’s insights are borne out by this cursory look at the topic of ‘Fuel’.

This week we will extend our search to the topic of ‘Food’ but, using Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, this time we’ll include some key statistics that will sharpen the point even finer

Norberg’s Statistics on Food’s impact on Human Evolution

First off, let’s take a look at some of Norberg’s statistics.  In this first look at his evolutionary metrics, he cites over thirty-three statistics which quantify how food, its availability and its production and distribution have increased human quality of life over the span of known human history.  Obviously, we won’t have room go into details on each, but there’s no question that each one is an example of the exponential rise in human welfare.

Famine   Few metrics are more pervasive than the incidence of famine in human history.  Norberg notes that in just four years in the fifteenth century, famine claimed the lives of one out of every fifteen people, just in Europe.  This wasn’t a unique period, with the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century.  The death toll was horrendous.  Between 1870 and 2015 there have been 106 episodes of mass starvation.  With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, it was not unexpected for Thomas Malthus to predict, early in the 18th century, that in a few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail.  However, statistics show an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now.   27M died from 1900-1910.  Then several million due to wartime famine from 1930 to 1943, then several more in the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, with just one major area today, and that is North Korea.    Further, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, it is now based on poor government.  Norberg notes that “No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because, “Rulers who are dependent on voters to 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.  Norberg notes that the discovery that ammonia could be synthesized led to the production of artificial fertilizer which immediately increased crop yield.  The invention of automated product extraction added another boost, such as harvesters and milkers:

o   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

o   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 timeframe, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours.  Further, 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 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 world malnutrition dropping 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 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, humans are capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction.  Without increasing crop yields, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now.   With the population growth that has occurred, we would by now have run out of 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.  Where the effect of globalization comes in is where such innovation can transfer to other countries where governmental overreach is being reduced by the installation of democratic institutions.  In general, this is nearly always occurs in a West-to-East direction.

Inner Pull  Such amazing 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’ 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 in 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, but in the East it is proceeding today 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 (eg molecule to cell).  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play inhuman evolution, as the innovations we have seen this week clearly show

Risk  Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance.  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 the paucity of faith which can be seen today.  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.

 The Next Post

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

Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Sanitation’ 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.

July 26 – Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution

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 Today’s Post

Last week we began the last segment of the blog which looks into the huge body of objective historical data to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test.  Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve, if so in what ways, how fast, and is the trend positive or negative?
Although Johan Norberg cites a ‘tornado of evidence’ in his book, ‘Progress’, before we begin to dig into his statistics I thought a good place to start might be a general approach to looking at the past which would illustrate this process without going into detailed statistics.  That topic is ‘fuel’.

A Brief History of Fuel

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

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

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

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

From Teilhard’s  Perspective

So, how can we see this simple timeline as an example of Teilhard’s insights into human evolution?

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

Each of these steps required an increase in complexity not only of the technology required by the first example but of an increasing development of Teilhard’s  ‘human psychisms’ which are the core of the  Inner Pull.  By psychism Teilhard refers to the human groups which effect the “increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power” required to find and employ ” new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”  This does not only pertain to the management of fuel, but to the exponential rise in the uses of fuel: from cooking and heating, to such things as the smelting of ores and the powering of engines.  Each such step required yet another ‘new way’ of thinking, an increase in the organization and knowledge depth of the ‘psychism’ and the need to draw on external resources (such as education) for their success.

The third example can be seen in the proliferation of the “new ways” over the face of planet.  While coal, for example, was ‘discovered’ in China approximately in 4000 BC, humans required an expanding empire to spread the discoveries of the Romans far and wide, hence the third example of Globalization.

The fourth of Teilhard’s insights at play in this topic is his observation that compression of the noosphere not only results in Globalization, but also of the increase in speed of the spread of invention.   Hundreds of thousands of years of wood burning, followed by a few thousand years of coal dependency followed by a few hundred years of transition to other sources of fuel.

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

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

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

  • The extraction and proliferation become increasingly complex
  • The discovery and development of methods to extract and manage are vastly more technical
  • Delivery methods require higher levels of technology and globalization
  • The applications of more efficient energies (eg BTU per volume) both increase and become more complex

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

Love as the Energy of Human Psychisms

As Teilhard understands it, love is the manifestation of the continuation of the energy of evolution as it rises through the human.  It is less an emotional connection than it is the energy that connects us in such a way that our persons are (as Confucius sees it) ‘enlarged’.   He notes that it is the necessary ingredient of the effecting of the human ‘psychisms’ which are at the heart of

“…the increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

 required to find and employ

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

   Such ‘psychisms’ go far beyond the simple unity effected by emotion;  in fact emotion might not be a factor at all.  To be able to foster the personal growth of each individual in the ‘psychism’ (eg a research group), all that is necessary is for the individual to open themselves to the personal ‘enlargement’ which is offered by inclusion.

The economy of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ that so well describes emotional human connection applies here as well.  The individual must be open to the ideas and insights of the group at the same time that his or her ideas and insights are provided back to the group.  In this exchange, these ideas and insights are sharpened and clarified in a spiral in which not only can the group be led to a completely new understanding of the problem under scrutiny, but each individual person is ‘enlarged’ as well.

The Next Post

This week we took a simple look at how an understanding of the history of ‘fuel’ illustrates Teilhard’s basic insights into the future.

Next week we will take up Johan Norberg’s nine topics of human evolution, and using the same approach that we used this week (with much more specific statistics) continue to see how Teilhard’s insights can be seen to ring true.

July 12 – Mapping The Structure of The Noosphere

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Today’s Post 

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

Outlining the Noospheric Structure 

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

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

The Structure

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

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

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

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

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

Teilhard’s Characteristics of Noospheric Structure 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Measure of Human Evolution

As I outlined two posts ago, what’s the case for optimism?  It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for being optimistic about human future.  Since then human society has become ever more proficient at gathering data; we are drowning in it today.  With all the facts at our hand, we should be able to get some objective sense on whether Teilhard’s projections are proving true.

The Next Post

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

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

June 28 – The Future of the Past

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Today’s Post

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

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

Crossing the Equator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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