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.

What causes today’s popular skepticism of increasing human welfare?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Steven Pinker (‘Enlightenment Now”) identified three ways in which a current of pessimism flows through contemporary Western culture.

This week we will take a look at the remaining two.

Two More ‘Modes of Pessimism’

The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”. This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”. The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere to confirm the prediction.

Pinker also notes that “Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.” As we saw last week, the affluence of the Graham family (and many Evangelicals like them) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that pessimism is all bad. The fact that there are more of us concerned about harms that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail. The danger that Pinker sees is that

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last example comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli. In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities. They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate. It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases pleasure, as eating chocolate. In a nutshell, indignation feels good. As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

These examples show the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors. It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’ is needed to provide a compass for navigating them.

Teilhard believed that to the extent that we lose confidence in the future, we will be unable to successfully navigate our evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to ‘greater consciousness’ and hence leads to ‘more completeness’.

The Next Post

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s insights, following Norberg and Teilhard, which address our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution. In Pinker’s words (summarizing Norberg)

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

But, he goes on to note that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

The fact that there clearly exists such a plethora of ‘fruits’ (as well documented by Norberg) at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so scarce presents us with yet another ‘duality’. When Teilhard focusses his lens on what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.

Next week we will address risks to this continuation and take another look at Teilhard’s concerns.

Why should so many who profit from progress be so skeptical of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at the pessimism that seems to oppose the insight that, as Johan Norberg documents, ‘the world is getting better’.

This week we will look at three of Steven Pinker’s five possible causes of this pessimism.

Modes of Pessimism

Steven Pinker outlines several ‘modes of pessimism’ In his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented. Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume. As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

And not only does immediate news sell, but negative news also sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant. Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’. For example, we worry more about crime even as crime rates are falling. As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”. He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.””

Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, but also “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias– – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving. This is sort of a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes than it is to imagine it as uplifted, their lot improved, their relationships deepened, or their future made brighter than their past.

Effectively, lack of clarity about the past leads to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work. One reason for such bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains continue to stimulate our modern neocortex brain with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival. Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the limbic and reptilian brains cease to function.

It also doesn’t mean that our 200,000 old skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity. Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution. To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page. Hence Teilhard sees humanity still in an evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Next Post

This week we took note of the first three of Steven Pinker’s ‘modes of pessimism’ which illustrate the currents in contemporary society which reinforce the pessimism common in it.

Next week we will look the remaining two.

Why should those who benefit the most from increasing global welfare be most suspicious of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion year rise in the evolution of the human species.

In doing so, we also saw how such a worldview substantiates Teilhard’s insight that humans can be seen to continue to evolve along the same ‘axis of evolution’ that has been universally followed so far: that of increasing consciousness by way of increasing complexity.

We also noted that despite the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it. Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

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

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature. Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”. Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”. Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person: the “dangerous Id”. Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition. Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger, and Sartre.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand humanity as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions. For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls. Even actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves most Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”. Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation. “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen. On an individual basis, individuals seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large. Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society. Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we began to look at why, with all the data bubbling up in our ‘data-ocracy’ which shows the unprecedented improvement in global human welfare, so many of us fail to factor this information into their view of the world.

Next week we will look into several causes suggested by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

Why does ‘conventional wisdom’ resist the optimistic perspectives of Teilhard and Norberg?

Today’s Post

Last week, we did a brief overview of the third of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species in terms of global welfare. We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

We also saw how, as in Teilhard, the clear-eyed optimism that the data provides is not reflected in the ‘conventional wisdom’ prevalent in the West today.

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to be so poorly reflected today.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

Norberg’s examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front. In addition to the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norberg’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

For example, in the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997. He asserted that

“Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history. Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”

This suggests that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow, and that the resulting gap will increase poverty in poorer countries.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that (the gap) is exactly what has happened. Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually. In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low- and middle-income countries has doubled.”

He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP. Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth. That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism, and protectionism.”

And what’s changing?

“But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour and use of technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how Teilhard’s statement is less a cultural bias that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it. In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere. The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”. As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individuals are “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases. For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame. To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany after its isolation from the West.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years. Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled. Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now clearly seen to be contrary to objective data? More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most. Why should this be true? More to the point, how can such prevalent pessimism undermine the continuation of human evolution?

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

How does the reduction of global poverty substantiate Teilhard’s insights on human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw statistics from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’ which documented the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’. They point not only to a general improvement in human welfare, but also to a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand generations of human existence. We also saw, once again, how the data of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.
This week we will take a last look at Norberg’s metrics of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records. Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger, and disease, especially in third world and ‘developing’ countries.
Generally, we have become numb to this phenomenon, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted. Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as Matthew cites Jesus claiming that “The poor you will always have with you.”
Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising. As the Economist reports, when asked by the Gapminder Foundation whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”
So, what ‘cogent experimental grounds’ might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with most of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive. The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.
Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity. She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’ Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?
Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’. He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%. This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.
In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP. He puts this into perspective:

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

So, in 1820, the average percent of poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%. If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years. By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income. (This increase did not emerge because of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time.)
Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East: As the United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

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

.
The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.
The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing. The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty (source: World Bank). Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.
The reductions over the entire two-hundred-year span show an overall decrease from 94% to 12% by 2018.
Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years. The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the remainder required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’.

Seeing This Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

This clearly substantiates the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:
– Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
– Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted, and globalization is fostered. Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly. Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.
– These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.
This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, but also how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing. Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as seen here.
Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

How can human evolution be seen in the improvement of ‘lifespan’?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:
– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of improvements in human welfare over time.
– the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing
– these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.
We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.
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.”

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.  As Norberg continues:

“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 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.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules. Thus, he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state. Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.
At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.
This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred-thousand-year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations. As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees 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.
He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly. Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

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 rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’.

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

As we saw with the subject of ‘food’, these statistics prove out Teilhard’s insights,

– Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this appeared first in the West.
– Such innovation and invention require the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
– 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 cultures 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 saw another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.
Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

   How can Teilhard’s optimistic insights be seen in the human evolution of food?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the phenomena of ‘food’ from Norberg’s perspective, charting the recursive process of innovation, invention and incorporation that underlies the increase of human welfare that he documents.

This week, we will relook at this data to see how it offers an example of the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard suggests is necessary to increase our confidence in the future. 

From Teilhard’s Perspective

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

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

   Dissemination 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.  The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions.  In general, as Teilhard notes, this is nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

  Psychisms Innovations and 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’ (human groups free to innovate) 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 found; note that most of them seen in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years.  In the estimated eight thousand generations which 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 Teilhard’s ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading to 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 in the West, 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 times’ did not occur.  While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially.  Even today, there are still those today 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.  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.

Timeliness As we saw in our example of data, each new innovation seems to arrive in time to prevent a critical point after which human evolution would begin to ebb.  With enough malnutrition and famine, the amount of human energy need to deal with problems would wane past the point that it could develop a tactic to do so.

   Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious, and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for an imagined but attractive past can undermine the practices of invention and globalism.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith, if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’.  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.

Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to reap the crop of fear thought to insure their election.  As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.

The Next Post

Having seen the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’, we saw this week how Teilhard’s eight evolutionary insights can be shown to be found in them.

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