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November 29 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a more detailed look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, how it has been taught in Western religion, and how putting it into the context of evolution can point the way to incorporating it as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

   This week I’d like to look at the five insights from last week that Teilhard offers from his book, “Human Energy” in the context of the multifaceted view that we have been building in our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Each one of these insights is in reality just an outline, a starting point for these subjects, and offers a basis for considering the concept of morality to be a cornerstone for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so.  Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights , the early religions were simply extensions of the clans which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density and complexity of human society.  All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights did not begin to rise from the highly subjective perspectives that had held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE.  These perspectives, while somewhat impacted by early Greek thinking, managed to remain as the prevalent mode of thinking until mid-1200’s, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change, culminating in the growing understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it, from static to dynamic.

The clash between the neothink offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today.  They offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it.  So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to respin them into a single strand.

  In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic secular basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

Rethinking Morality

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in these new terms offered by science.  The five insights that we saw last week offer a summary of his understanding of how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular and empirical meaning to the ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard’s five insights into morality all offer opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

Looking a little deeper into the first two of Teilhard’s five insights into morality:

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human approach is to ‘articulate the noosphere’, using the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, and impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions. 

   He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in many ways ‘we’re not there yet’.  Considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, the ultimate use of the tool of morality is to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

   Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’..

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   Here Teilhard introduces two insights:  First the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it.  Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it in unlocking the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   As we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to increase our personal complexification.

The Next Post                  

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by expanding on the first two of Teilhard’s synopses of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at the remaining three of Teilhard’s insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

November 22 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Part 1: Teilhard’s View of Morality

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Today’s Post

Last week be began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human.  We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’.  In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, with its historical attachment to such things as radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as

fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from them?

   This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Morality

One such starting place for such an undertaking is the idea of morality.  We covered the concept of morality with its companion subjects of spirituality, virtues and sacraments last December, and I’d like to expand upon this brief series of posts by looking more deeply at how Teilhard himself saw it from his evolutionary perspective (From “Human Energy”. Parentheses and italics mine):

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“For the old-style spiritualist who regards the spirit as a meta-phenomenon, as for the modern materialist who chooses to see it only as an epi-phenomenon, the world of moral relationships forms a separate department of nature.  For different reasons, forces and connexions of a moral kind are for both less physically real than the energies of matter.  For us who see the development of consciousness as the essential phenomenon of nature (eg from an evolutionary perspective), things appear in a very different light.  If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

 

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality arose largely as an empirical defense of the individual and society.  Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.  And once an arrangement was in practice discovered which more or less guaranteed to each one his due, this system itself felt the need to guarantee itself against the changes which would call its accepted solutions into question and disturb the established social order.  Morality has till now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

This conception rested in the last resort on the idea that every human being represented a sort of absolute term in the world, whose existence had to be protected from all encroachment from without.  It is transformed from top to bottom as one recognizes…that man on earth is no more than an element destined to complete himself cosmically in a higher consciousness in process of formation.  Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.  The moralist was up to now a jurist, or a tight-rope walker.  He becomes the technician and engineer of the spiritual energies of the world.

 

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

(From this perspective) “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement

-The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit

– The morality of love based on the material founding of a family vs loving in response to a personal creative force

– Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality to the uttermost

To the morality of balance (“closed morality”) the moral world might seem a definitely bounded real.  To the morality of movement (‘open morality’) the same world appears as a higher sphere of the universe, much richer than the lower spheres of matter in unknown powers and unsuspected combinations.”

Religion and Morality

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”  In that case, if there was, as we have agreed, a deeply humanizing intuition in the idea which unfolded in the 18th century that each of us is a conscious and responsible unit in a universe in progress, it was inevitable that this intuition should sooner or later raise an amplified echo in the heart of Christian consciousness.  At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

The next Post                   

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by looking at Teilhard’s synopsis of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at each of Teilhard’s (above) insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

October 31 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 4- Understanding the Noosphere – Part 1- The Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw that one way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks was to better understand the noosphere itself and what part we play in it.  In doing so, we are taking Teilhard’s approach which he explains:

“Evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses which all systems must

submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.”

   Teilhard’s approach, therefore, is to place any subject into the context of universal evolution if we are to better understand it, and the noosphere is no exception.

This week we will continue down this path of looking at the noosphere in an evolutionary context to help situate ourselves in this process of understanding ‘complexification’ as it takes place in human evolution.

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard used the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor for understanding how the expansion of humanity compresses us as it reaches the equator of our metaphorical sphere, and instead of continuing to spread, we begin to press in on ourself.  In the same way, he uses that of the spiral to illustrate how ‘the stuff of the universe’ becomes more complex as its components unite to increase their complexity at the same time that they are drawn ‘upwards to more complexity’ and ‘inwards towards closer union’.  The spiral that Teilhard envisions isn’t just a simple coil, like a bedspring, it’s a spiral which converges as it rises over time.

Teilhard identifies the energy which induces convergence as ‘radial’, and the energy by which the components of the ‘stuff of the universe’ become more complex in their uniting as ‘tangential’.  These two components, work together to increase the complexity  of this ‘stuff’ as the convergence  of the spiral pulls these components not only closer to each other but also closer to the ‘axis’ of the spiral (Teilhards ‘axis of evolution’.  In doing so they become closer to the source of the universal energy by which all things become united in such a way as to differentiate themselves at the same time that they are enriched.

Applying this metaphor to humanity, we can understand ourselves as the most recent manifestation of such ‘stuff of the universe’, produced as the result of these three components of energy which interact to increase the complexity of the universe.  We engage with  ‘tangential’ energy when we relate to others while enhancing and enriching our ‘persons’; we engage with ‘radial’ energy as we become more conscious of, and learn to cooperate with the ‘tangential’ energy which differentiates and enhances us, and in this cooperation both our persons and our ‘psychisms’ become more complete and enriched.

So, to the question of where are we in this universal journey from pure energy to some future state of increased complexity, Teilhard offers a suggestion:  We are early in the process of learning both how relationships and cooperation are essential to our progress.

That said, can we quantify how such process can be seen?

The Empirical Spiral

While an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them, might be so far immature in understanding at this point in our evolution,  empirical science can offer some insight.

While the light which science can show on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights the many ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

–          Matter appearing from pure energy

–          Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter

–          Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms

–          Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells

–          Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into the relatively complex groupings found in neurons

–          Neurons find ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then to  brains

–          Neocortices emerge from limbic brains,  themselves from reptilian brains

–          Conscious brains become aware of their functionality

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which ensues.  While science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the increasing complexity that results.  There is no current explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the level of the big bang to that of the human which is capable of an awareness aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by science, their increase in complexity following each discontinuity into human evolution requires a look into how the element of ‘consciousness’ can also be seen to evolve.

Next Week

This week we took a first step toward ‘understanding the noosphere’ by following Teilhard as he situates the noosphere in an evolutive context.   To begin this phase we saw how Teilhard used the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ to map out the manifestations  of energy which power our evolution, and how their manifestations can be seen in the ‘disconuities’ which have occurred in the history of the universe.

Next  week we will look further into the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ as we carry it forward into the realm of consciousness.

October 25 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard  places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution,  in which context it can be seen not as a ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize matter into increased complexity.  We also saw how Norberg, who articulates how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides ‘proof of the pudding’ for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimisim.

This week I’d like to continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves  into  the context of universal evolution.  This includes understanding how both religion and science occur in human history.

As many thinkers, particularly Johathan Sacks, point out, religion originally began as a very early human activity characterized by such right brain activities as instinct and intuition as enterprises which helped to making sense of both themselves and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first laws as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

As we saw in posts from September, 2015,The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human left brain thinking began with Greeks

The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the right and left modes of thought can be  seen in the New Testament  Paul, then John, who began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s  ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ in each of us.   While demonstrating a clear departure from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure from it than evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out , Christianity can be seen as possibly the first  attempt to synthesize  right and left brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early such application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy (which is still stuck in many of the traditional dualisms which accept the dissonance between right and left brain thinking).

Science in its own way is also stuck.  Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion.  Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers.  However, by neither recognizing that the primacy of the person and his freedom require more than ‘permission’, they also require such things as faith and love (as understood in the Teilhardian context), which science is hard pushed to articulate.

As Sacks puts It,

 “To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’.  We saw in last week’s post how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter can disappear.  We have seen many other examples over the last many posts

Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory  than we could  in the past.  Teilhard saw such an enterprise as

 “A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”

   So we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking in which our intuition is enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both modes of thinking.

This approach also, to  some extent,  recovers much of the optimism contained in the gospels, such as  the recognition that , as Blondel  puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”,   and as John puts it, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “Clearer disclosure of God in the World”.  It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine and emerged in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of extrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which show how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.  The fact that the facets of empowerment which he documents:  personal freedom and improved relationships also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion, strongly suggest that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them: an empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them,  of how they work and of how to deepen  them.

Something else is necessary.  Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some 200K years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them  less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’.  The morphing of such an integrated insight of humanity into a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

occurred only two hundred years ago.  An evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure,  but by ordinary human standards,  represents many lifetimes, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases,  stomped out) in human society.

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

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into into a single integrated context, and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can move ourselves forward.

Next week we will continue this line of thought further.

October 18 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ (from the Post of October 4)

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

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

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

Spirit and Matter: Spirituality and Progress

We have noted, as both Teilhard and Norberg show, that no human movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore decrease true spirituality in favor of 9simply) materialistic improvements .  Such critiques highlight what is seen as the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’ and grow spiritually.  This criticism is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

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

And

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

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

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spitituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally  prized by secularists.  In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied in any progress by which human welfare is advanced.  More succinctly, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.

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

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

This perspective doesn’t mean that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both of them are commonly enough reported in the free press, but the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that these two facets of existence will

lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

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

The Next Post

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

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

October 11 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 1

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Today’s Post

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

We also saw how, Teilhard asserts, that  to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  This increasing understanding is also necessary for us to deal with the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution .  This week we will take a look at how both religion and science , properly understood, are up to this task.

The Axis of Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing Evolution in the Human Species

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

October 4 – Where Have We Got to?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at the risks that Teilhard saw in the continuation of human evolution. This post concluded the part of the Blog which has seen how Teilhard understands human evolution, and how it can be objectively assessed.

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues.  We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, and how as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself.

We then began to address how this new phenomena effects a change in human evolution by starting with the question,  Is Human Evolution Proceeding and how Would We Know?, and proceeded to answer the question with evidence from Johan Norberg which quantifies such metrics.  We also saw how his quantification (beginning with July 26- Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution) illustrates how Teilhard’s insights are being borne out today, but as we saw, not without risks.

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

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

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

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

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

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

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

–          New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)

–          A rise in interiority (our person) and liberty (our autonomy)

–          Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of employing increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

but as we have seen, require reinterpretation to uncover their relevance and focus to the job at hand.  Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

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

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

This should come as no surprise to many of us, put into these terms.  For the past hundred years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products.  They were not necessarily explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups contributed to their personal growth, but grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit.  They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series a few weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over.  Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil.  Take the example of looking for a seat at the airport.  Few will choose to sit near a stranger if a seat can be found next to one which is vacant.  The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.

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

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

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

This week we took a first look the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.

Next week we will continue looking at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.

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.