How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’. As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective. We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith. In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’. As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next. In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present. Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’. At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II. His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesialreform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.” “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.” (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life. As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.” (Italics mine)

As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’. Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion. Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society. We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith? Why should we believe what we believe? Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative. Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture. An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large. The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith. Science is based on two unprovable beliefs: that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe. Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment. Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness. It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’. We saw how the religious attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’, to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.

How can religion be reexamined through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the noospheric risks to human evolution by better understanding it from the perspectives of religion and empiricism. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually, at least on this planet, given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, with the human person, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it is at work in our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will begin to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (e.g., ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which followed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed last week, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that attributed to the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

It is obvious that the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures are sources of ‘evolutionary risk’. This suggests that the post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us mitigate these risks, or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history? Is it simply a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?

One way to look at this question is to see in religion the evidence of many deep seated ‘dualities’. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as seeing different facets of a single reality as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism, and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with his ‘lens of evolution’. In such a context ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. From this perspective, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above allows us to reframe it: “How can the legitimate aspects of the ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of the human person in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos?”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential that these two modes of human thought operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that Teilhard’s ‘lens’ shows us that they are.

I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition, and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as it is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a closer relation to science can aid in the recovery of such relevance, as John Haught asserts.

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

A similar challenge can be made to science: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the phenomenon ‘spirit’, as understood in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’, to Teilhard, is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it,

“…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’.

Haught sees the opposite side of the coin as he takes note of

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a context of evolution helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put 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 continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will look at this process.

What can happen as we learn to use both sides of our hemispheric brain?

Today’s Post

Last week we used Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how the oft kaleidoscope of history can be fit into a continuous and homogeneous spectrum when placed into Teilhards context of universal evolution.

This week we will begin a look at the great human modes of thought, religion and science, to see how the ‘dualisms’ and ‘contradictions’ of history can be sorted into a focused perception of the threads of this evolution

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 two weeks ago how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome.

Thus, we can see that approaching traditional science and religion concepts through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than as seen in the past. Teilhard saw this as ‘articulating the noosphere’.

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 which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition. We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.

This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the Christian gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John articulates the intimacy of this ground, “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 emerging in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which document how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.

The facets of empowerment which he documents, personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion. This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.

Something else is necessary as well. 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 two hundred thousand 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’. Such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago in 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.”

Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes. It also represents an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, if we’re not careful, can be stomped out) in human society.

Thus, the pace of evolution must be appreciated. Certainly, it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions. On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into Teilhard’s ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put 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 continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how such a relook at religion can help us to do so.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirit’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize the development of matter into increasingly complex arrangements. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides substantiation for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

Teilhard ‘lens’ provides a way to understand who and where we are by placing ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding the roles played by our two great human enterprises, religion, and science in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by ‘right brain’ thinking (instinct and intuition). As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings. Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for 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.

Sacks sees a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking (empiricism and reason) in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

An example of the first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament. Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, 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’ as it is active in each of us. While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure than an 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 application but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the cognitive dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.

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 the primacy of the person nor his need for such things as freedom, faith, and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.

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”.

This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts, but the component parts make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

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 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 continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on where we are today in this process.

How can science and religion, our two great modes of thought, be rethought to help us evolve?

Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

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’ (e.g.: matter, e.g.: humans). With this understanding, the idea of spirituality is freed from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter, to one in which matter is dependent on spirit for its evolutionary rise in complexity and spirit depends on matter as a vehicle for this rise.

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

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

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we will see how this new perspective can lead to a better understanding of where we can go from here.

How do we proceed from ‘articulating the noosphere’ to capitalizing on it to effect our evolution?

Today’s Post

Beginning several weeks ago, we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on the noosphere. We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, initially experiencing an age of expansion, but as the ‘equator’ is crossed, leading to a new age of compression. He notes that as we come to this boundary, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself. In Teilhard’s words, “The noosphere begins to compress.”
We then went on to address the effect of this new phenomenon on human evolution, and the need for developing new skills to turn ‘compression’ into ‘assimilation’. We started with a focus on its manifestation in our lives, then to address the lack of recognition of it in society at large. We ended up last week by addressing Teilhard’s concerns that pessimism presents a specific risk to our continued evolution.
This week we’ll begin to address how all this falls into an integrated context as it is seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

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 its structure. He proposes his ‘lens of evolution’ to take in the warp and woof of the ‘noosphere’, the ‘milieu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human. Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stage of biological life (Natural Selection), he offers a perspective on not only evolution’s continuation in the human species, but how the workings of the stages of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’, the stage of human thought. His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noospheric stage as it was in those of Physics and Biology. This observation, then, is the key to using his ‘lens’ to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’. To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how the ‘complexification’, so clearly seen in the previous spheres, can be understood as active in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.
As we saw last week, Teilhard recognizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we  “…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles (human persons) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”
And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires ever more “harmonious interrelations”. Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to the classical duality, “the one vs the many” is resolved as we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’.
– New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’.
– A rise in interiority (our personal maturity) and liberty (our autonomy)
– Harmonious interrelations (relationships which lead to ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties which result in new arrangements)

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species (which is the same as continuing its evolution) we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to more clearly understand and cooperate with its ‘laws’. As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past hundred fifty years we have seen distinctive examples of increase in both. Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’ is ever increasing. While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also articulate the evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.
Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously renew their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be either used as steppingstones to yet newer arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.
This should come as no surprise when put it into these terms. For the past hundred fifty years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products. They may not have been explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups
contributed to their personal growth, but nonetheless grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit. They were effectively participating in the rearrangements suggested by Teilhard.

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 today. We’ve looked at both examples and risks. While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?
Next week we will train Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on science and religion, our two great modes of human thought, to explore how they can be revitalized to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

How is human evolution more risky than cosmic evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the underlying agency of ‘increased complexity’ in universal evolution can be seen as ‘risky’, and how introduction of yet a new requirement, that of ‘choice’, adds yet another risk to its continuation.

This week we will look at Teilhard’s assessment of this new ‘risk’.

So, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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

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

Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’. Confidence is required when making choices that affect our evolution toward the ‘fuller being’ that both Jesus and Teilhard cite as our goal.

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

What kind of risks to our evolution do we incur when fail to believe in the future?

Last week we began to address the risks that can be seen when we focus Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on human life. We looked at those that could be considered as ‘structural’, such as those addressed by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This week we will move onto a second category of risks, those that appear with Teilhard’s identification of the ‘noosphere’, the realm of human thought that emerges as humans find new ways to express and retain their cultural and technological insights.

The Noospheric Risks

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

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

The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ that we have addressed in the past few weeks is directly related to this fear.

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

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

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

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

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

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

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

And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species. As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented, historically proven knack for problem-solving and lead us down a “a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.” Today, 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 cultural ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:

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

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

To continue our evolution, he insists, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

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

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

How do Teilhard and Norberg see risks to continuing human evolution?

Today’s Post

As we have seen Teilhard’s unique but increasingly comprehensive insights into evolution, he acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of humanity is nonetheless balanced by a recognition of its risks. As we saw in in Norberg’s comprehensive analysis, there is considerable data to justify optimism, but Steven Pinker showed that there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.
This week we will address some of these risks and see how they could impede the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks To Human Evolution

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic projection for the future of human evolution. But even as he goes through the numbers which show exponential growth in human welfare in nine distinct and critical categories of human existence over the last two generations of human evolution, he also notes that every such aspect of ‘progress’ comes with an unplanned and unwelcome consequence. A few examples:
– Humans learned to replace wood with coal for fuel, which avoided the deforestation of the planet, and probable human extinction, but at the same time led to the near asphyxiation of those living in cities as population increased along with density.
– Advances in sanitation, agriculture and medicine exponentially lowered the death rate of both mothers and children in childbirth, which then led to a huge growth in human population, which then threatened to overtax food production and lead to widespread famine.
– And today we see the threat of global warming (at least partially) caused by dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping heat, possibly leading to the rising of the seas and the drowning of millions.
However, as Norberg and many others note, forecasts of the effects of such consequences have historically failed to materialize as predicted. Such forecasts, such as those of Malthus, who predicted population growth overwhelming food production and leading to global famine by now, did not factor in the human ability to innovate and invent. Even though improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.
Why didn’t such dire consequences happen?
As Norberg points out in the example of overpopulation, the reduction in childbirth deaths actually led to a decrease in the rate of population growth as parents no longer felt the necessity for large families when such a large percentage of children began to survive the vulnerable early years.
And, as we have seen, the introduction of coal did indeed lead to deaths caused by foul air, but of course, once again, innovation and invention produced methods of cleaning coal smoke, and new technologies to produce more BTUs with fewer side effects, such as the extraction and management of gas.
But what about global warming? The CO₂ content in the air may take centuries to dissipate naturally, and by then humans may well have effectively caused their own extinction. 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, and Hydrogen power, such prophesies may well be premature. There are also studies underway to not only extract CO₂ from the air, but to market it as a source of fuel as well. All these, of course, are optimistic forecasts, and all subject to unplanned consequences which will set off new rounds of invent-pollute-clean up. Can humans win this war, or will the inevitable consequences rule out in the end?
John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes
“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

While this point of view definitely suggests optimism, the question can legitimately be asked, “What costs are we prepared to pay for progress?” This is followed by the more significant question. “How can we be sure that we will continue, as McHale suggests above, to find fixes for the things we break?”
These are ‘structural’ risks. One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the risks that can be seen as we apply Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to human life, beginning with those that he and Norberg saw as ‘structural’.
Next week we will refocus this lens on the deeper risks that occur when humans, as ‘evolution become aware of itself’, begin to lose faith in its ability to bring us into a fuller realization of our potential.