Tag Archives: evolution in human life

August 9 – Life Expectancy As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post 

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

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

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

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

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

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

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

Neither was it different from Eastern countries.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

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

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

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

   Time Frame                              Life Expectancy

Prehistoric times                              18-20 YRS

500BC                                                    20-25

1830                                                       30

1910                                                       32

1990                                                       60

2012                                                       70

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

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

Asia:  Increases from 42 to -70 Years

Latin America:  Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa:  Increases from 37 to 57 Years

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

Putting This Into Perspective

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

August 2 – Food As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

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

Product Yield   So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic.  One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods.  Norberg notes that the discovery that ammonia could be synthesized led to the production of artificial fertilizer which immediately increased crop yield.  The invention of automated product extraction added another boost, such as harvesters and milkers:

o   In 1850 it took 25 men, 24 hours to harvest 1,000 pounds of grain.  In 1950 one man could do it in in six minutes

o   In that time frame, it took one person 30 min to milk 10 cows.  By 1950 it was down to one minute.

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

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

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

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

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

From Teilhard’s Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Risk  Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for a non-existing but attractive past, the practices of invention and globalism can be undermined.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the paucity of faith which can be seen today.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

 The Next Post

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

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

July 26 – Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution

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 Today’s Post

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

A Brief History of Fuel

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

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

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

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

From Teilhard’s  Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love as the Energy of Human Psychisms

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

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

 required to find and employ

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

July 12 – Mapping The Structure of The Noosphere

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Today’s Post 

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

Outlining the Noospheric Structure 

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

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

The Structure

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

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

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

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

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

Teilhard’s Characteristics of Noospheric Structure 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Measure of Human Evolution

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

The Next Post

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

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

June 28 – The Future of the Past

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Today’s Post

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

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

Crossing the Equator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

May 17 – Virtues: Love, Part 5, As the Intersection Between Faith and Hope

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Today’s Post

In the past seven weeks we have addressed the three so-called “Theological Virtues”, Faith, Hope and Love, from a secular perspective informed by the insights of Teilhard de Chardin.  We have seen them as ‘attitudes’ or ‘stances’ that we can take as we undertake ‘articulating the noosphere’, a mapping of the implicit laws of humanity that move our species forward in the increase of complexity that Teilhard saw as the principle metric of continuing evolution.

We saw Faith as the confidence that we build in our capacity to act based on interpolation of experience of the past.  Looking at Hope in a similar manner, we saw how Hope is manifested in an extrapolation of this experience to a hoped-for result in the act that we undertake.

This week we will take a final look at Love, this time seeing it as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope. 

Present, Past and Future

What does it mean to say that we “live in the present”?  To neurologists, what we know about what we sense is by definition ‘the past’.  Considering that it takes between forty and eighty milliseconds for any sensory information to be introduced to the brain, anything that we’re aware of is by definition, ‘the past’; it has already occurred.  Considering the additional delay of making a decision to act on the sensed information, the neurological activation of a physical response (‘acting’) requires an additional delay, and our ultimate response to any external stimulus falls ‘in the past’ of the stimulus itself.  So, neurologically speaking, we cannot live ‘in the present’.  By this reckoning, the ‘present’ is an ephemeral concept which is already in the past by the time we are aware of it.

Yet there is a distinct transition between the past and the future that we perceive, either validly or invalidly, as the ‘present’, and it is in this transition that we act.

So, then, what does it mean when we say that we ‘act’?  What is involved in gathering sufficient motivation to act, to ‘decide’ to act, and then to engage our psychomotor system to carry out the decision?

From Past Faith to Future Hope By Way Of Present Love

In our secular approach to the “Theological Virtues”, we saw Faith as an interpolation of our past which provides us with the confidence, the ‘motivation’, to act on the one hand, and Hope as a ‘pull’ from the future as we envision a successful outcome of the act on the other.  But what gets us across the divide?

This idea of an ‘energy of activation’, by which we make this transition, is echoed in Teilhard’s “Activation of Energy”.  This collection of articles focuses on the universal energy potential  that over time effects increasing complexity in its products, but the application to human life is inescapable.  Each human act carries the potential of raising our ‘human complexity’ to a higher level.  And no human act, as we have seen in the previous four posts, carries more potential for our fulfillment, than the act of love.  But this act requires a previous step, and that is, as we have seen, the decision to love.  Such a decision may well indeed be stimulated by sexual desire, a need for companionship, or a response to a moral imperative, but whatever the source a decision is ultimately required.

Those of us that are engaged in deep commitments are no doubt fully aware of those times in the relationship in which one does not feel ‘in love’.  Early in any relationship, when this occurs there may be a panic that one is no longer “in love”, and that the relationship has thus failed.  The recognition that this emotional reaction may be premature, and that honest self-assessment, open communication with the other, and faith in the relationship is required, is a dramatic, often painful, but always necessary step not only toward strengthening the relationship but in increasing one’s personal maturity as well.  Such a recognition can only come from a ‘decision’, an action of the human neocortex to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains.  As we have discussed frequently in this blog, it is a skill most essential for our personal evolution.

So now we see another role for Love in the triad of the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Love may well be, as Teilhard asserts, the only energy that can “unite while differentiating”, bringing us together in such a way in which we become more complete.  But, as the energy of evolution manifest in our personal lives, it is also the energy that makes it possible for us to make such risky decisions as ‘excentration’ so that we can reap the rewards of our resultant ‘centration’.

We certainly may be able to understand our past well enough to have confidence in ourselves, and foresee the future well enough to be enticed by it, but until we engage this flow of universal energy within us, nothing will happen.  Love is indeed the hinge on which Faith results in the outcome promised by Hope.   It is the precise moment of ‘the present’ in which the potential of ‘the past’ can become a ‘future’ in which, as Karen Anderson puts it, “We are in greater possession of ourselves”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked at Love from another perspective, seeing it as the hinge on which the door of Faith is opened to the promises of Hope.  Next week we will take a final look at love, returning to Paul for insight of the works of Love in our lives

April 26 – Virtues: Love, Part 2 – As The Continuing Energy of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the so-called ‘Theological Virtue’ of Love by seeing it in the context of an emotion-based ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  This week we will take a second look informed by Teilhard’s understanding of it as the energy become manifest in human life by which we continue the fourteen billion years of evolution’s process of increase in complexity.

We will see Love from Teilhard’s insight, as less emotional than ontological. 

The Ontological Side of Love

Maurice Blondel articulated what had long been experienced by the great mystics when he asserted that

“It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God, as over against us.”

   He goes on to explain why he asserts this:

“This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are by a process in which God is involved” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: Love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human.  He saw a distinctive facet of energy at work in every step of evolution, such as the atomic forces in forging atoms from electrons, electro-chemical forces forging molecules from atoms, the energies escorting molecules across seemingly impenetrable thresholds to cellular formation and so on to those forces which unite us in such a way that we are ‘differentiated’ into distinct persons.  Every change of state that can be seen to have occurred in cosmic evolution has been powered by a more complex facet of the single integrated energy by which the universe unfolds.  In the case of the ‘change of state’ that saw conscious entities (the higher mammals) evolving into entities that were not only conscious, they were conscious of their consciousness, the aspect of the universal evolutionary force that we know as love was necessary for the transition to this new mode of being.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The entire history of science can be seen as the quest for (and the success of) understanding both the entities produced by evolution (such as molecules) and the energies by which their component parts are united in such a way as to increase the resultant complexity (such as the electro-chemical forces).  Teilhard simply extrapolates this past history to a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.  His ‘articulation of the noosphere’ simply recognizes that, just as there are electro-chemical ‘laws’ by which atoms are combined into molecules, expressed in terms of descriptions of matter and rules of combination, humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As we have discussed in the past several posts, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments, values and morals.

Simply put, just like the electrons, atoms, molecules and cells before us, we are simply the latest products of evolution, and are capable of moving forward in complexity by cooperation with the energies which Teilhard insists can be found in these ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

Just as Teilhard expands evolution from ‘natural selection’ to ‘universal complexification’, he expands ‘love’ from ‘emotion’ to ‘ontological energy’.

”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.”

In traditional religion, John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” has been reduced to a belief that we need to love as God loves us if we are to merit the afterlife.  Teilhard restores John’s astounding assertion to its ontological and non-metaphorical truth: among the multifaceted manifestations of the energy by which the universe evolves is a principle by which its increasing complexity eventually manifests itself in the personal.

The less metaphorical understanding of John proposed by Teilhard is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, He (sic) is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the ‘person’.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a third look at Love as al force of continuing evolution by seeing how Teilhard understands its action in assuring our contuing ‘complexification’.

 

November 9 – Reinterpreting Sacraments- Part 1- What Are Sacraments?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how human evolution proceeds through the trial-and-error process seen in our attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’, and how successful attempts are captured in the ‘cultural DNA’ through the ‘tissue of culture’ as found in religion, philosophy and laws.  This week we will continue this exploration by looking how sacraments can be seen as examples of human activity in which the work of grace, the energy of our personal evolution, can be seen to occur.

Sacraments as ‘Signs of Grace’

One treatment of the sacraments suggests that they are rooted in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ values.  In this interpretation, the sacraments were instantiations of seven times in Jesus’ life that he highlighted the action of grace in human life, times in which humans participate most deeply in their lives.

In the posts on Jesus (beginning with http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=352) we looked at Jesus as a signpost to God, and discussed how he can be seen as evolution becoming aware of itself.  As western religious tradition has seen it, there are seven activities of human life that Jesus recognized as critical to our personal evolution.  Just as Jesus was a ‘signpost to God’, these events were ‘signposts to grace’, events to which we should pay special attention as they are examples of times in human life in which this ‘evolutionary energy’ is most active.

The idea of seeing some human activity as more significant to human life is found in other religions as well.   In his book, ‘The Souls of China’, Ian Johnson addresses the trend in which many Chinese are beginning to identify themselves as Daoist, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim after decades of having religious expression outlawed.  He explains how traditional rituals help people overcome urban anomie and answer the “pragmatic but profound issue of how to behave at critical life junctures”, such as weddings, funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation.

So, as we proceeded in the other objects of our search for the “Secular Side of God”, the key step in this search is the reinterpretation of those traditional teachings from the secular perspective that we have developed.  The sacraments are no exception.

What Are ‘Sacraments?’

    Christianity identifies seven events in human life that are ‘occasions of grace’: events in which our lives are infused by the energy of grace.  Although the church places great emphasis on the action of the church hierarchy in ‘conferring’ the grace that flows in these events, a secular approach simply sees them as events in our lives in which we are cooperating with this flow of grace in such a way that our personal evolution, our ‘spiritual growth’ is enhanced.  Paraphrasing Teilhard, when we participate in these events we are ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, aligning our lives to the axis of evolution.

Traditional church teaching identifies seven such rituals, all of which require church hierarchy for the ‘conferring’, and all of which recognize the action of grace which takes place.  These teachings place great emphasis on the both the need for the church to perform the ritual and to effect the outcome of the giving of grace, and the need for our participation in them as a condition for church membership.

From our secular perspective, however, we can reinterpret the church’s concept of the sacraments in terms of our understanding of grace as the energy of both our personal evolution and the resulting evolution of our species.

The Next Post

This week we began to look into how the Christian concept of the ‘Sacrament’ can be seen from our secular perspective, as the continuation of the thread of evolution as it rises through the human.

Next week we will look at each of the sacraments themselves to see how they can be reinterpreted in the light of this secular perspective.

October 12 – Spirituality, Grace and the Sacraments

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October 12 – Spirituality, Grace and the Sacraments

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have taken a look at the Christian idea of ‘spirituality’ in the light of our ‘Secular Side of God’.   We saw how in this secular mode of reinterpretation, ‘spirit’ is neither supernatural nor ‘other-worldly’, but simply a word for the energy that propels evolution in the direction of increasing complexity.  We saw how Teilhard sees ‘spirit’ as neither an ‘epi’ nor a ‘meta’ phenomenon, but instead the critical phenomenon in the evolution of the universe.  Although, as Richard Dawkins acknowledges, science has not yet addressed it per se, the religious term for the energy “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, is ‘spirit’.

This week we will move on to some consequences of understanding that spirituality not only underlies the evolutionary process by which the universe becomes more complex, it is the milieu in which we live.

The History of Grace

Grace is one of the basic concepts of Christianity, which understands the ‘love of God’ as a tangible thing by which God interacts between his supernatural divine life and our natural human life.

As we will see, the church teachings on this interaction with God can be seen to have much in common with our secular understanding of spirituality.  Not that the traditional dualisms of supernaturalism and otherworldliness are not present in these teachings, but the idea that grace makes up the milieu in which we live is pervasive in them.

The church teaching on grace, however, can also be seen to be tarnished by the gradual drift of Christianity towards a hierarchy which effects social stability and a system of beliefs necessary to secure successful promotion into heaven.  This can be seen in the Baltimore Catechism’s description of grace as a “Supernatural gift of God bestowed on us through the merits of Jesus Christ for our salvation.”  It goes on to say, “The principal ways of obtaining grace are prayer and the sacraments.”  In this teaching, grace is less a milieu in which we exist than a gift, not gratuitously given by God but ‘earned’ by Jesus and mediated by the church.  Grace is a ‘gift’ necessary for our ‘salvation’ which must be ‘obtained’ by asking for it (prayer) and participation in church-provided rituals (sacraments).   To a large extent, it is seen as necessary commodity to be obtained from the church.

Sacraments, as defined in the Baltimore Catechism, are “outward signs, instituted by Christ, to give grace”, and are conferred (dispensed) by church hierarchy.  In this teaching, the sacraments only ‘work’ (only dispense grace) if they are performed by the correct rank of church hierarchy (eg ‘Confirmation’ by bishop) and according to the established ritual (eg Baptism by water).

The excesses of the medieval church which led to Luther’s reformation are well documented, but one of the more egregious practices that Luther attacked was the ‘selling’ of sacraments.  To the church of this era, grace had become a hierarchy-controlled commodity without which salvation could not be accomplished but from which the church could profit.

So,  What is Grace, and Where Do The Sacraments Come In?

As we saw last week, spirituality is fundamental to the process of evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to (so far) the human.  From this secular perspective, grace is simply the quantification of this energy of evolution.  Paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, we can say, “There must be an energy of evolution, and we might as well give it the name Spirit, but Spirit is not an appropriate name unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘Spirit’ carries in the minds of most religious believers. The energy that we seek must be that which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

Just as we saw in our discussion of God, the ‘axis of evolution’ rises through every branch of the tree of life.  The specific branch that rises though each human person is a continuation of the basic energy of evolution and it is manifest in its potential in our lives.

The long legacy of dualism that has risen in Christianity came to understood sacraments as a means by which the spiritual energy of God could be delivered across the wide gulf between spirit and matter, and that this aperture was opened by ‘the merits of Christ’ and therefore contributes to ‘our salvation’.

Setting aside the issue of ‘salvation’ for now, we can see how our secular approach to the idea of the energy of evolution, and our understanding of God as ‘supremely’ natural (as opposed to ‘super’ natural) permits the idea of the sacrament to be seen in a secular context.  While we may well be immersed in this milieu of grace, the very nature of its intangibility calls for reminders, ‘signposts’ of its activity in our lives.  The sacraments are religion’s attempt to erect these signposts.  They are, in Teilhard’s words, examples of “articulation of the noosphere’.

The Sacraments and Evolution

As we have suggested many times in this blog, the continuation of evolution through the human species can be understood as the development of tge skill of using our unique human neocortex brains to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ limbic and reptilian brains.  In the post of February 2, 2017  – “Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 2”  (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201702), as well as several others, we saw this skill requiring two actions.  The first action was to recognize the rise of this axis of evolution in us, and the second was to learn how to cooperate with it.  In religious terms, this is expressed as “finding and cooperating with God”.

In the posts which addressed ‘finding God’, beginning with “Relating to God – P1: Opening the Door” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201609) we addressed the concept of meditation as a process for finding God as understood by Teilhard, and how it has been carried through to the current day by psychology.  In these posts we saw how the idea of ‘finding God’ happens in the quest to find ourselves.

The second step is less obvious, and less treated by psychology.  To ‘cooperate’ with this manifestation of the ground of being in our lives, it is necessary to see how the energy of evolution is specifically manifested in our life so that we can cooperate with it and enhance its effects in us.  Effectively, to cooperate with the energy of evolution, we need to learn to recognize how the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ occur in our lives.

This is where the sacraments come in.

The Next Post

This week we saw grace as the manifestation of the ‘energy of evolution’ as it flows through our lives, and addressed the idea of ‘sacrament’ as articulation of how the action of grace can be seen if we know how to look.  Next week we will look at the sacraments in more detail to better understand how the seven traditional sacraments can be seen as active in our personal evolution.

September 28 – Spirituality, Part 2- Spirituality and Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we introduced the concept of spirituality from a secular perspective, and saw how spirituality can be understood as underpinning the continuation of human evolution as seen in the development of human ideals.  This week we will broaden out look to see the essential part played by spirituality in universal evolution.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds.  We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.  Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution.  At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from bosons, the effecting of atoms from electrons, and the effecting of molecules from atoms.  At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete.  At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’. 

It is at work, therefore, to an increasingly lesser extent as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution.  While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is ‘spirit’.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, therefore, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“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.  ..it 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.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized.  (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other.  The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here.  He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction.  This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit.  To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution.

Universal Spirituality and Dualism

He goes on to elaborate how the ‘spirit/matter’ dualism so endemic to religion is overcome by the realization that instead of spirit and matter in opposition to each other, they are simply co-operative aspects of reality as it emerges and continues to evolve to levels of greater complexity:

“The problem of the world, for our minds, is the association it presents of two opposed elements (spirit and matter) in a series of linked combinations covering the expanse between thought and unconsciousness.  Now if consciousness is taken to be a meta-phenomenon, this dualism in motion is simply and verbally noted, without any attempt or even any possibility of interpretation.  If this dualism is pushed aside as an epi-phenomenon, it is conjured out of sight.  But it is simply and harmoniously resolved, on the other hand, in a world in which consciousness and its appearance are regarded as the phenomenon.  Everything then takes its natural place in a universe in process of changing its spiritual state…And hominization (the appearance of the human) merely marks a decisive and critical point in the gradual development of this change.”

   In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state’.  ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully tangible in the human person and his society.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the concept of spirituality from our secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our exploration of Christian concepts by applying this perspective to the Christian concept of ‘grace’.