Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Instinct and Volition in Human Evolution

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

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

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

Towards a Mature ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

April 18 2019 – How can Indignation Jeopardize Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

The Danger of Indignation Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Today’s Post 

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

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

Isn’t This Just More ‘Progressophobia”?

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

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

The Amplification and Reinforcement Loop of Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Should It Feel So Good to Feel Bad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

April 4 2019 – What’s New About Today’s Unprecedented Pessimism?

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to take a look at what first seems to be a new ‘dualism’, which, when set against all the traditional dualisms we have examined (spirit/matter, this life/the next, sin/grace, damnation/salvation) first appears as just one more.  As we saw, the hard edges of such dualisms begin to crumble into a ‘spectrum of the real’ when we hold up the universal evolution perspectives of Teilhard, Rohr and others.  As we saw with Jonathan Sacks, such dualisms simply represent an unbalanced approach to reality in which one side of the brain dominates our thoughts by prioritizing, for instance, such things as empiricism over intuition or intuition over facts.  From Sacks’ perspective, such dualisms simply represent the difficulty of “thinking with the whole brain”, and begin to resolve themselves as we become more adept, for example, at looking at both sides of an issue.

Is this new negativity, this pushback against reasoned discourse which reveals itself in such deep and  coarse sociological divisions as can be seen in today’s politics and social media, just one more ‘dualism’ which can be resolved by applying Teilhard’s evolutive hermeneutic?  Or is it quite different, and indicative of a deeper, more insidious and therefore stronger threat to our continued evolution?

This week we will peer more deeply into this modern phenomenon.

The Persistence of Indignation

There’s obviously nothing new about ‘indignation’.  Indignation is simply the emotion we attach to disapproval of the actions of others.  It is well described in our earliest forms of literature, as is the different actions and sensations that it incites in us.

We have addressed in this blog the many ways that our ‘triune’ brain affects our perceptions and provide stimuli to our actions, but to summarize:

The ‘reptilian’ brain resides in the brain stem, and was the first brain to be formed in the animal family.  It controls the most basic animal functions, such as breathing (even when we’re unconscious).  It is also responsible for ‘fight or flight’ stimuli, letting us know when we’re hungry, and as an impetus for reproduction.  In its ‘fight or flight’ stimuli it warns of danger to insure our safety.  As such, it is the root of many of our ‘negative’ emotions, such as fear and anger.

The ‘limbic’ or ‘mammalian’ brain is more recent, ‘layered’ on top of the ‘reptilian’ brain, and is more responsible for emotions and sensations of pleasure that come from being socially connected.  The ‘reptilian’ brain provides the instinct to procreate, but the young are left to hatch from untended eggs and are left on their own to mature.  The ‘limbic’ brain introduces a post-natal period in which the young are nurtured until some degree of autonomy is attained, in keeping with their more complex neural systems and the resultant longer gestation periods.  Such ‘social’ instincts are not only essential to the maturation of the individual, but go on to provide (in the higher primates) the structures of society in which individuals can override the ‘individual survival’ stimuli of the reptilian brain in favor of the ‘survival’ of the family or social group.

The ‘neocortex’ brain is the most recent of the ‘brain layers’, and the most complex.  It introduces the ability to have knowledge of our awareness, and to process this knowledge independently of the stimuli produced by the lower brains.

All three ‘brains’ are capable of ‘self-medication’.   Apparently, all three levels of the brain are capable of producing such chemicals as dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in mediating pleasure response.   This is evolution’s way of rewarding activity which is consistent with the brain’s awareness of its surroundings and productive of activity which increases the individual’s evolutionary potential.  Our days are filled with such sensations, from the reward our brain provides when the solution of the morning crossword pops into our head to the pleasure of a close relationship.

But, like all things in the human evolutionary spectrum such a natural and necessary flow of neurological energy can work to ends less appropriate to the continuation of human evolution.

The Danger of Indignation

As we have stated, there are few subjects easier recognized than indignation.   It is commonly experienced in our increasingly fast-paced culture, which seems to require a nearly endless increase in patience and forbearance to survive with any equanimity at all.  No matter what accommodation we have achieved with our constantly changing mileu, the next day will require even more.

At the same time, we are subjected to an endless barrage of data, much of it irrelevant and difficult to sift in ‘real time’.  We are often called on to take actions the consequences of which are unknown.

One seeming effect of such a kinetic existence is an increase in the friction between persons resulting in being thrown into increasingly close proximity and requiring increasing tolerance if social balance is to be maintained.

As the social critic, David Brin, observes:

“We have entered an era of rising ideological division and a “culture war” that increasingly stymies our knack at 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 than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

   The resultant ‘culture war’ that Brin identifies can be clearly seen in today’s news: the ‘we vs they’ nature of immigration debates, the tendency to ‘demonize’ opponents on the left or right, and the inability to arrive at consensus on any subject, as if the middle of the road has somehow become the edge of oblivion.

The statesmanlike attributes of empathizing with opponents, accepting criticism, or negotiating practical solutions to problems, so prized by the framers of our constitution, seem to be in scant supply today.  History shows that without them, the state lurches into a one-sided approach to everything, which no matter ‘left’ or ‘right’ eventually becomes unresponsive to democratic norms and destructive of individual and collective freedom.

The rapidly changing nature of our society, with its current trend of tightening our bonds through ever more immediate connectivity, can act as a media for both improving our grasp of reality in such a way as to enhance our reaction to it, and at the same time as a media for increasing our pessimism that evolution is actually moving us forward.  What is it about this current phenomenon that makes it so risky?

 

The Next Post

This week we looked a little closer at how human ‘complexification’ seems to require human compression, and how if we fail to understand this and put it into perspective, our continued human evolution as entities able to ‘think with both sides of their brain’ seems to be at risk.

Next week we will look more closely at what seems to be going on inside our heads as we deal with the risks of indignation.

March 28 2019 – What’s At The Root of the Pessimism?

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been addressing the ‘Cosmic Spark’, the principle of ontological development of the universe by which it comes to be and continues its increase in complexity from the big bang all the way to the human-unique ‘awareness of consciousness.’  We have looked at this ‘principle’ as one which requires both recognition and cooperation if human evolution can be expected to continue.  Evolution is now in our hands.

We have traced awareness of this Cosmic Spark first through the attempts of religions and philosophies to ‘articulate the noosphere’, then through the rise of science as this articulation took on greater empiricism, then through how the pace of human evolution, as quantified by objectively measured and rapid increases in human welfare, has risen over the past hundred fifty years first in the West, then spreading rapidly through the ‘developing world’.

This is an astoundingly optimistic outlook, one which Johan Norberg, who chronicles such a viewpoint admits is difficult to share in the face of a steady drumbeat of a perceived ‘march towards the dogs’.  We have discussed this strange phenomena as can be found in the negative fibers in our Western religion, as well as the nihilism of Nietzsche and the failed police states, but there are others, more neurological in nature, which are more insidious and hence more dangerous, at work.

The Fruits of Negativity

One would think after reading Norberg’s nine specific measures of the phenomenal improvement in the human condition over the past hundred fifty years, a ‘microblink’ in the history of universal evolution, that there would be every reason to see ourselves, especially in the West but as emerging worldwide, as living in a true ‘Golden Age’.  The reduction in warfare, increase in life span, reductions in disease and hunger, and rapid reductions in poverty, all delineated by Norberg, present a powerful picture of ‘Progress’.  Rapid advances in technology make our lives more comfortable, and the explosion of communications links us together in a way that would have seemed to pure magic just a generation ago.

But an undercurrent of dissatisfaction beneath all this cannot be ignored.  Even the most casual subscriber to social media, or follower of disturbing political trends such as extreme Nationalism, hints of resurgence of racism, feelings of ‘unfairness’ and inequality, quickly realizes that there trends in society which generally work against the idea of a ‘Cosmic Spark’.

And of course, our propensity for more and better connectivity itself can be a ‘two-edged sword’.  Resentments that have been built up over the past seventy years have created the perception of inequality out of control, even among those who are well off.  How can I be ‘well off’ if there’s somebody out there better off than I, and look at the benumbing volume of data that pushes this in my face every day?

To some extent, the ‘egality’ of social media (amplified by our rapidly polarizing politics) has stripped the cover of ‘political correctness’ (once referred to as ‘politeness’) from social intercourse and introduced the ‘right to indignation’.  The image this conjures is unhappy persons sitting behind dimly lit, spittle-covered computer screens and hurling invective into a coarse, hostile but ever-welcoming neuro netscape.

But is there anything new here?  Can’t we find such invective in our holy books?  Haven’t prophets for centuries predicted our long, slow but inevitable descent toward ‘the dogs’, (even if the poet Jeanette Walworth could remind us, “The dogs have had an awful wait.”)?

It’s certainly true that the internet provides us with a megaphone of unprecedented size, scope and volume, as well as an anonymity which eludes consequences.    The imprimatur which validates our messages is simply the volume of ‘likes’ from the logosphere.  Memes survive in a sort of crude Darwinism in which ‘the fittest’ becomes the ‘most popular’, and the most popular is increasingly that pitched at the lowest denominator of human emotion.

So, what is actually new about this phenomenon, other than perhaps its technology-driven unprecedented size, scope and volume?  Further, why should it be considered more threatening to our continued evolution?

The Next Post

This week we continued our look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at the truly unprecedented roots of this phenomenon.

March 21 2019 – Why Deny the Cosmic Spark?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several years we have been tracing the current of evolution as it continues its fourteen billion years of rise in complexity, most recently through our individual and collective lives.  Through the insights of Teilhard de Chardin we have been able to see how God can be understood as the name we give to basis for and the continued principle by which this journey continues.

This week we begin to look at ‘denial’ of the Cosmic Spark.  If it is, as Teilhard asserts, the essential element which has brought the universe into its current state of complexity, can we be assured of its continued presence in our personal and collective lives?

A Recap

This blog addresses the subject of God in ‘secular’ terms; that is without recourse to traditional Western (or Eastern) religious thinking.  This approach opens a fresh ‘hermeneutic’  to making sense of religion by finding ‘reinterpretations’ which square with what we are uncovering about reality through the methods of science.  It is not that religion is basically antithetical to science, but that reality is something that can be approached by both the empirical and intuitional modes of human thinking; the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains.

In our journey, we have come to see both science and religion pointing to an evolution by which complexity rises over time, and how this complexity makes and remakes its products in ever increasing manifestations of complexity.  In such a way that in the latter phases of evolution, this increase in complexity shows up as increased awareness, consciousness and sphere of activity of the individual products.  Teilhard and many others (such as Johan Norberg) see these characteristics as evidence of increases in human ‘personness’ and ‘freedom’.

In tracing this thread first through the sequentially increasing complexity of pre-life (quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules) then into the much more complex world of cells, neurons, brains and consciousness aware of itself, we have become aware of a common thread which runs through the fourteen billion years of evolution that we are aware of.

We have seen how the earliest Christian teachings (especially Paul) grasped the tangibility of this thread (The ‘Cosmic Spark’) as it rises through our lives, but also how the more Greek Platonic influences tipped the scales toward an ‘outsider’ God, an “over and against of man”, as seen by Blondel.  The ‘intimate’ God, proclaimed by Jesus, articulated by Paul and expressed so eloquently and straightforwardly by John in his statement:

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

is not as important to church hierarchy as the God of structure embraced after the Council of Nicea which insured the new Church’s place in the political scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, we have also seen how such an insight as the Cosmic Spark nonetheless offers a hermeneutic for reinterpreting the basic message of Western Christianity: clarifying its message and deepening understanding of how it can be seen as the sap which flows in all limbs of this ‘tree of life’.  Further, we have seen how acknowledgement of it and cooperation with it not only is essential to continuing human evolution, but in doing so enriches our individual lives.

We have also been able to see, through the volumes of metrics offered by Johan Norberg, how in spite of our general clumsiness in recognizing and cooperating, we humans have become generally increasingly adept at increasing our collective evolutionary complexity.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

 “All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is drawing and guiding us forward. We are all (engaged), willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.”

   Evidently, it is not necessary that we consciously and systematically uncover the action of the Cosmic Spark in human life to benefit from it.

Or is it?

What Could Hold Us Back?

In spite of our conscious or unconscious ability to move human evolution ahead, we have looked at the impediments that our society has developed which can get in the way.  We saw how a negative strand of thinking has entwined itself in Western Christianity that gives rise to a mistrust of this ‘Cosmic Spark’ and manifests itself in echoes of Luther’s belief that humans are ‘Piles of excrement covered by Christ’, and Freud’s belief that the fundamental nature of the human person is ‘dangerous’, and cannot be trusted.   Consequences of such negativity can be seen in our time in the arrival of the anti-personal regimes of Stalin, Mao and the Kims.

But surely in our resolute resistance to such anti-evolutionary currents, successful thus far in overcoming them, the battle is won?

Unfortunately, as even the most cursory examination of current social norms show, in spite of the tremendous increase of worldwide human welfare as documented by Norberg, general trust of these norms is becoming harder to find in those societies most enriched by it.   Trends in such things as recent elections and current social media show not only an increasing unease with our norms, but a downright prevelance of antisociality which works against cooperation.

History has clearly shown that the benefits of a society in which freedom and innovation prevail are phenomenal, with such benefits as decreases in infant mortality, extensions of freedom to all segments of society, reductions in malnutrition, warfare, disease and poverty.  In spite of such ‘hard’ data somehow a large segment of Westerners, where all these trends began, seemed called to be suspicious, even in downright disbelief, at these benefits.

Today, we see trends in our politics in which we are encouraged to mistrust those Democratic norms which have thus far carried us to such unprecedented levels of human welfare.  Why now, after such a hard-won plateau of welfare, should such anti-evolutionary thinking become prevalent?

Who are we?  Are we indeed untrustworthy carriers of the evolutionary genes which are capable of raising our complexity (read our innate capability to grow as whole human persons)?  Is there anything to Teilhard’s profound trust in the Cosmic Spark, or has this bubble, risen for fourteen billion years, only to burst in our inadequate hands?  Is human nature, as asserted by Freud and Luther, really untrustworthy?  Was there a golden age when we were, as some thinkers claim, ‘one with nature and free from sin’, or is our unease simply the result for looking, for the first time, at the cosmos and recognizing its vast potential?

Richard Rohr reflects both the siren song of the past and Teilhard’s great confidence in the future when he states that

“Paul offers a theological and ontological foundation for human dignity and human flourishing that is inherent, universal, and indestructible by any evaluation of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, education, or social position. He does this at a time when perhaps four out of five people were slaves, women were considered the property of men, temple prostitution was a form of worship, and oppression and wholesale injustice toward the poor and the outsider were the norm. “

   But that still leaves us with the question, “Why, with all the evidence of improvement in human welfare, why do we still cling to a pessimism that is capable of eroding the underpins of evolution from beneath us?  Where does what seems to be such an upwelling of mistrust come from and how can it be dealt with?  Is this just another ‘duality’, or is there something more deep-seated and hence more insidious at work?

The Next Post

This week we began a look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at this phenomenon.

March 14 2019 – How Does the Cosmic Spark Contribute to Quality of Life?

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Today’s Post

    Last week we continued our look at the ‘Cosmic Spark’, that thread of becoming which is at the heart of the universal evolution towards increased complexity as it rises through the human person.  Recognizing that referring to this aspect of ‘cosmic becoming’ as ‘divine’ does not square with the secular aspect of God that we have focused on (thanks, responders), I am now referring to it as the ‘Cosmic Spark’.

This week we shift our focus from the need for discovery of and cooperation with this agent of evolution in the human, to its ‘effects’.  While acknowledgement of it is at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the ‘equality of all men’ and thus necessary to our successful mode of societal government, what happens in our lives as we become more aware of it and adept at cooperating with it?

Quantifying a ‘Good Life’

Our history is rife with prescriptions and proscriptions for human behavior.  All societies contain lists of such acceptable behavior, and the criteria for acceptability is some combination of behavioral norms that most frees the individual to produce for the society without undermining the production itself.  The assumption in all cases is that ‘what’s good for society is good for the individual’, and in some cases, ‘what’s good for the individual is what’s good for society’.

But how can we objectively define ‘what’s good for the individual’ other than that which is good for the society?  We can easily make such generalizations such as ‘freedom is good’ and ‘we must all get along’, but how much freedom, and in what areas?  Is it possible to objectively quantify a ‘good’ life?

As we have seen previously, the Apostle Paul is very adept at summarizing the teachings of Jesus as found in the three ‘synoptic’ gospels available to him.  We have seen how Paul’s organization of Jesus’ concepts into ‘virtues’, for example, can be seen to fall into three categories of ‘stances’ or attitudes we can take for a ‘fuller’ life.

As Jesus says, “I come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10).  More germane to this week’s subject, Paul does the same for abundance as he did for virtues, summarizing what he sees as Jesus’ insights into ‘what is good’ for the human person.

Paul listed those attributes of life that he saw as deriving from a life informed by the Theological Virtues, and his list is a good start to describing ‘abundancy’ as an underling principle of ‘goodness of life’.  These attributes are summarized in his ‘fruit of the spirit’, which in our secular reinterpretation can be seen as attributes which the human person takes on as he becomes aware of the Cosmic Spark and becomes adept at cooperating with it.

The ‘Fruit’ of the Cosmic Spark

The ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’.  Chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians lists them: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, these seem high on the list.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, noting the significant difference between the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way as they become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to peacefulness than that the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering teeth gritting endurance necessary for  ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “..current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we ‘…set our sails to the winds of life.”

Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill a patience with the vagaries of life that was would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated ourselves requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all reflect Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while it might be unknown is nevertheless fully manageable.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, ‘gentleness’, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, this process is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into how finding and cooperating with the ‘Cosmic Spark’ adds to the abundance of our lives.  .

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how denying the cosmic spark can not only leave us unable to taste Paul’s ‘fruits’, but can undermine our continued evolution.

March 7 2019 – What Part Does the Divine Spark Play At The Personal Level?

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Today’s Post 

   Last week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.

We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus insure the continuation of the enterprise of human evolution.

This week we will move on to looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is not only essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species, but to our own personal evolution as well.

The Divine Spark As The Principle Of ‘Personness’

    Teilhard strongly asserts what happens when we realize the existence of the divine spark within us:

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Why should this be such a ‘decisive moment”?  In what way is it indeed ‘decisive’?

To answer we must consider what happens in the normal maturing process of the human person.  We begin as children at the center of our own universe, surrounded by attention and provision of our needs.  One of the first things that must happen as we grow toward adulthood is to become more aware of our environment, particularly in the form of other persons.  The complete human ‘gestation’ process is quite long compared to the ‘lower mammals’, but like them, it is initially more stimulated by the nurturing instincts of the mammalian ‘limbic’ brain. Unlike them, however, the development of intellectual maturity requires development of the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate these emotional stimuli.  This modulation, the emergence of ‘objectivity’, is essential to ‘learning’ and inevitably incurs an increase in openness to the surrounding world, especially to other persons.

We have seen how, in Teilhard’s view of the world, love is also something that develops in the same way.  For love to be able to energize human growth (instead of just a lubricant to relationship), it must become more open to the other, whose reciprocation stimulates our own growth.  Teilhard refers to this recursive cycle of ‘humanization’ as excentrationfollowed by centration.

To Teilhard, love is the humanized manifestation of the energy of evolution.  It is the unique energy rising from the existence of the divine spark in each of us.  While not denying the limbic-tinged emotion that is undeniably present in human relationships, Teilhard’s grasp goes much deeper, seeing love as the essential energy by which we become what we can be, and how doing so contributes our small increment to the continuation of human evolution.

It is very common among all religions and most philosophies to value ‘selflessness’ over ‘egocentricity’, but in most cases it is valued for the social stability that it provides, or as a qualification for the rewards of the ‘next life’.  The recognition is very revolutionary indeed that when we undertake such an excentration-centration cycle in our life that we are cooperating with  ”a universal will to become and to be” that manifests itself in each of us and which is essential to continued human evolution.   Once realization of the existence of this Divine Spark begins to take place within us, our potential for the fullness of human becoming is increased.

The ‘Fruits’ Of The Divine Spark

How can we quantify such increase in potential?  What difference does it make that we awaken to such a possibility?

At the coarsest level, that of society, we have seen in quite a bit of detail of how human welfare has increased exponentially over the last two hundred fifty years.  In this same overview, we saw how the chronicler of such welfare attributed such explosive development to the rise in human freedom and improvement in human relationships.   We have also seen how the cornerstone of such freedom and relationships was based on Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.  And in the past few posts, we have seen how such an assertion is only possible if we assume the presence of the ‘Divine Spark’ in every human person.

Richard Rohr writes extensively on how one of the most important concepts of early Christianity, the idea of “God in Us”, has been superseded by Christianity’s rush to codify theology in Greek terms, and organize a structural hierarchy to insure its endurance.  Rohr refers to the many teachings of Jesus which refer to what was later understood as ‘The Christ’.  To be sure, these teachings are sprinkled among the many teachings which were understood as essential elements of the resultant theology and normative to church hierarchy, but Paul, the ‘great summarizer’ of Jesus’ teachings, stressed them.  It was Paul who highlighted Jesus’ teachings on Love, and on the ‘virtues’ (last week), but also Paul that first stressed not only the existence, but the universality of the Divine Spark:

“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11)

  In spite of his insistence on this intimacy with God, not only the universal nature of the Divine Spark, but of its presence in each of us, came to be second to the more structural basis adopted by the church.  The church came to stress more a remote, judgmental God who required human sacrifice to reconcile himself to his creation than an intimate God of which John could say,

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

And At The Personal Level?

But what about the human person ‘himself’?  Are humans just cogs in the machinery of evolution, whose relationships and freedoms are needed to insure the increase in human welfare?  Or is there some level of ‘payoff’ at the personal level?

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and it is active in each human person.

Next week we will move on looking into how acknowledging and cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ can make a difference in our individual lives.

February 28 2019 – Recognizing the Divine Spark

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Today’s Post 

    Last week we looked at the ‘dualism’ between a positive assessment of the human person, as taught by Jesus and ‘politicised’ by Jefferson on the one hand, and the contrasting negative assessment asserted by Luther and promulgated by Freud and Nietzsche.  We noted that, unlike the other dualisms we have examined in this blog, this one can’t be reconciled by putting the dualism into Teilhard’s ‘evolutionary context’.

We also noted that such a chasm between beliefs undermines the future of human evolution, in both the human person and society.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, those societies built upon the negative perspective of Nietzsche have now been unequivocally shown to be anti-evolution: under them the human person is crushed, and therefore the society collapses on itself.  The boon in human welfare as documented by Johan Norberg in the West not only fails to happen, human welfare at the personal and societal level is degraded.

However, in the post- Enlightenment period, even with the successes chronicled by Norberg, we also saw how Nietzsche’s negative hermeneutic still endures.  This week we will look a little deeper into this persistence.

Quantifying the Divine Spark

One of the gifts of the Enlightenment has been the rise of importance of ‘empiricism’ over that of ‘intuition’.  In short, our adherence to a belief becomes more a function of how such belief can not only be quantified, but grounded in proven fact.  One of the reasons for the success of the ‘scientific method’ has been its insistence on objective verification of postulation.  For a belief to be worthy of our adherence, it must first be objectively tested.  This obviously works in most cases, especially those in which human consciousness is not itself the subject of such a method.  It is critical to the ‘innovation and invention’ so well chronicled by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This was (and still is) considered to be a leap forward in human thinking, as it seemingly eliminated the need for religion as a source of beliefs.  Since religion, especially in the West during the period preceding the Enlightenment, was seen as the cause of much turmoil, even to the point of human slaughter, with religious beliefs seen to be at the root of such carnage.  This same religious-based carnage can be seen today in the middle East.

The rise of Atheism is one product of the Enlightenment, with its insistence of the lack of God’s provable tangibility mixed with the history of Western religious wars.  This is compounded by the huge disparity of understanding of the concept of God, immense across the spectrum of world religions, and huge even within the loose category of ‘Christianity’.  Such an unprovable God, especially one of seeming amorphousness, belief in which is the basis of such chaos in humanity, is not worthy of adoration.

That said, even the fathers of the Enlightenment did not take this need for provability of tangibility so far as to undermine their confidence in the human person’s ability to ‘articulate the noosphere’, even if such confidence was beyond the scope of empirical reason.  Their belief in the potential of the human person to make sense of his surroundings and act accordingly to move society forward was quite robust.

Jefferson goes one step further, unequivocally postulating the positive value of the human person as the basic building block of democracy.

However, this still leaves the basis for such postulation in question.  What is the basis for any confidence that the human person is indeed ‘endowed’ with such rights as claimed by Jefferson, or that he is indeed a “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”?  Don’t the examples of failed, illiberal governments around the world, especially in ‘developing’ countries, show many examples of this not being the case?

We have seen that the data presented by Norberg shows an unarguable correlation between human invention and innovation and the improvements in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years.  Norberg attributes this remarkable and unprecedented rise in human welfare to the legally grounded increase in personal freedoms and societal norms for human relationships.

Norberg also goes on to document how these freedoms and social norms have spread into the developing world, and stresses that this is occurring at a rate much faster than they initially came to fruition in the West.

Teilhard, as we have seen, goes even further in mapping this now well-articulated phenomena of increasing freedom and improved human relationships directly to his ‘axis of evolution’.  In the context of this axis, such phenomena is simply the latest manifestation of the universal metric of evolution: ‘increasing complexity’.   Whether we are doing it consciously or unconsciously, Norberg clearly shows that we are collectively pursuing Teilhard’s vision of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and learning to cooperate with it.  Norberg also clearly identifies that one measure of this increasing complexity is ‘increased human welfare’.

Norberg recognizes the risk that we take as we move forward, and the need to insure that democracy is more than ‘the will of the people’:

“Democracy is not a way to sanctify the majority opinion, but to limit the damage any group can do to others, so it has to be combined with the rule of law, rights for minorities and strong civil institutions.”

  Other than acknowledging the need for such articulation of the thread of evolution as ‘the rule of law’, Norberg offers no prescription on how to go about it.  While the ‘rule of law’ is certainly an end result which can channel human activity in the direction of the freedom and improved relationships which Norberg cites as the building blocks of progress, how do we get there?

Virtues: How We Get There 

To talk about ‘getting there’, I’d like to return to the discussion on the ‘Theological Virtues’, which addressed how the virtues (summarized by Paul from the teachings of Jesus) are essential for the conduct of human life which insure our future evolution.  These three ‘virtues’, aspects of human psychological life, are much more than that prized by traditional religion as practices which justify our ‘salvation’, they are attitudes or ‘stances to life’ in which we align our lives to ‘the axis of evolution’, or as Teilhard put it:

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

   As the reference above addresses, Faith simply becomes the practice of trusting the axis of evolution (trusting that the ground of being is ‘on our side’).  Hope is the expectation of the outcome of evolution (Paul’s ‘Fruits of the Spirit’, Norberg’s ‘”Progress’’), and the most important, Love.

In Teilhard’s view, Love is much more than an emotion shared between individuals, it is the practice of relationship in which both individuals become what they are capable of.  It is the energy which underlays personal evolution, as Norberg later goes on to quantify.  He clearly identifies human relationships, along with personal freedom, as the two essential building blocks of continued human evolution.

By believing that there is indeed a basic, fundamental, principle of increased human evolution, and that by learning to articulate it and acquiring the discipline to cooperate with it, we are advancing our own evolution, we are subscribing to what we have been addressing as ‘The Divine Spark’.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.  We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus continue the enterprise of human evolution,

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.

February 21 2019 – How Does the Divine Spark Play Its Part?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how recognition of what we have been calling. ‘The Divine Spark’ is not only key to our personal evolution, but even more so to the evolution of the state towards a democracy.  As we saw, Thomas Jefferson’s embrace of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society” has become the cornerstone of what has become, so far, the most successful form of government by nearly every measure possible.  We saw how the metrics assembled by Johan Norberg not only delineate a distinct increase in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years, but how societies based on his fundamental assumption, the recognition of an ineffable quality of the human person, are essential to this burst of progress. 

Denial of the Divine Spark

 

We also saw last week, in opposition to such progress-oriented vision, a movement which would return societies to governments led by Nietzsche’s ubermensch, one step away from rule by ‘royals’.  We how his mistrust of the ‘Divine Spark’, the common human denominator recognized by Jefferson, played out in his writing, but here’s another, from his book, “Twilight Of The Idols”

“The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.”

   One would think that Nietzsche’s bitter and negative philosophy, especially in contrast to the success of one based on Jefferson’s recognition of the divine spark, would have fallen out of vogue in the intervening hundred years marked by the success of democratic forms of government.  As seen in the rise (and fall) of such regimes as Nazism and Communism, embracing his illiberal tenets , there is plenty of evidence that Nietzsche continues to be read today.  Some of his negativism can be seen in the recent resurgence of nationalism in many parts of the globe.

From where does such a negative and contrary-to-data outlook arise?  Undoubtedly, some blame falls on the failure of Western religion to focus on the divine spark first identified by Jesus in the gospels and promoted by Jefferson.  This failure eventually led to hundreds of years of ‘Christian on Christian’ fratricide.  To the fathers of ‘The Enlightenment’, the rise of empirical science as a building block of society must have seen like a safe shore after the storm tossed years of religious wars.

But as we have previously noted in this blog the human brain is not a simple organ, but exists as three tiers ‘stacked’ one on the other, and all contributing stimuli to our consciousness.  The reptilian layer contributes ‘survival’ stimuli to insure that we fly or flight, for example; the limbic layer contributes emotional stimuli to insure that we, unlike the reptiles, nourish our more complex young; and the neo cortex layer, unique to humans, enables us, when we are so disposed, to base our responses to the ‘lower brain’ stimuli on what we understand to be ‘true’ of a certain circumstance.   As humans, we can choose our actions based on what we have learned about our environment, and choosing the ‘correct’ actions is an essential skill in insuring both our personal and societal continued evolution.

Or, as Teilhard would put it, as humans we have the capacity to ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we can learn how to cooperate with it and thus insure our continued evolution.

Unfortunately, however, we can allow these lower-brain stimuli to distort our neo-cortex conclusions which might arise from such articulations.  Fear, as almost every belief system recognizes, cannot only be much more powerful than hope, it can be a much more successful motivator to action.

Thus our negative experience with religion combined with the need to properly balance our neurological stimuli with our ability to ‘know that we know’ offers many paths to a decidedly negative comprehension of what it means to be a ‘person’.

Dualisms

In the two hundred fifty years delineated by Norberg, we saw a sharp rise in human welfare, which we interpreted as quantification of evolution in the human species.  During this same time frame, we also saw the appearance of philosophical paradigms antithetical to the principles identified by Norberg, – for example, in the writings of Nietzsche – and the resultant rise of systems like Nazism and Communism which were based on his illiberal principles.

In this blog we have addressed many ‘dualities’- antithetical beliefs historically held in tension- such as science-religion, body-soul, grace-sin, damnation-redemption, human-divine, this life-the next, salvation-damnation, and many others.  We have shown in each case how the evolutive hermeneutic of Teilhard operates as a perspective by which these dualities can be seen not as opposites, but perceptions of facets of a single thing.  When we come to such a duality as ‘Jefferson- Nietzsche’, or more basically ‘human personal equality-inequality’, however, no such integrated understanding is possible.  Either the divine spark exists or it doesn’t, and whichever side one comes down on makes all the difference.

And this is the ultimate conundrum before which mankind is currently ‘marking time’:  Shall we continue to trust in Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”, or do we to move to Nietzsche’s dark opinion of these “people themselves”?

Note that this irreconcilable duality of the human person has risen in Western religion alongside that articulated so positively by Jefferson.  It is one assessment shared by the father of Christian Protestantism (and exists in threads of teaching found therin) and is shared by those expressions of psychology which hold Freud’s negative assessment of the human to be authoritative.

On the one hand, we have the positive assessment by Jesus, which proved valuable in constructing Western society beginning with Rome, but was diluted by the rigid Church hierarchy and demands for adherence to dogma influenced by Greek thinking.  On the other hand we have the insidious creep of what Richard Rohr identifies as the ‘penal substitutionary atonement theory’ in which the death of Jesus was necessary to appease a God angry at the imperfections of his creation.  We have addressed in several places in this blog how this theory festered into Martin Luther’s assessment of the human person as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”, and by Freud as ‘basically dangerous’.  It is not surprising that such elements in Nietzsche’s Teutonic culture would have influenced his disdain for the person.

Even though, as we have pointed out throughout this blog, Western religion contains nuggets of a positive humanism which underpin such progress as chronicled by Norbeg, the history of Christianity in the West shows facets which can, and have in the past, inhibit such progress.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into the aspects of a ‘nationalism’ which can be seen in the West which threatens the continuation of improvements of human welfare documented in such detail by Norberg.  We showed how a ‘dualism’ between the tenets of thinkers like Nietzsche and those of Jefferson are not simply ‘two sides of a coin’, they are true opposites which cannot be ‘held in suspension’ and understood in in an integrated context such as the many others we have addressed in this blog.

Next week we will move on to looking a little more closely at what we have been calling “The Divine Spark’ to understanding its persistence in universal evolution.  Such a perspective is necessary to understand how its presence in the human person is deeply rooted in the billions of years in which the universe has grown a ‘personal’ face.