Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of evolution in the human species.  We spent two weeks looking at conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, which suggests that things are going downhill.

As we have seen over the course of this blog, Teilhard,  in spite of writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time.  We are now looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed.

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere into several characteristics that he believed to constitute the ‘structure of the noosphere’.

This week we will begin a survey of this noosphere as it appears today to see how contemporary objective data can be brought to bear on his insights.  As we will see over the next several weeks, by looking at quantifiable data from reliable sources his case for optimism is stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history

The Characteristics Of The Structure of the Noosphere

Teilhard’s basic assertion is that the universal thread of evolution continues its fourteen billion year rise thru the human species.  In his vision, Evolution produces products of increasing complexity over time, and this process can reliably be expected to continue through the human, the latest such product.

Here’s how he suggests that we can see it in play:

1. Evolutionary laws Continue in the Human The ‘laws’ governing universal evolution may have changed as the level of complexity has increased, but the energies themselves continue to morph into ever new manifestations (‘changes of state’)
2. Inner Pull vs External Push  Evolution is bringing us into ever closer proximity via the ‘compression of the noosphere’ (external compression).  This requires humans to effect paradigms of internal cohesion if the fundamental evolutionary law by which elements are joined in such a way as to continue their ‘complexification’ is to obtain
3. Evolution from Compression If these paradigms are developed, such ‘compression of the noosphere’ can be expected to not only continue human complexification, but speed it up.
4. Human Invention As an effect of this internal cohesion, humans can be seen to be ever more capable of inventing what is needed to continue their evolution at a time when it is needed.  “The future may not be able to be predicted, but it can be invented” (John McHale).
5. Globalization of Invention Once such evolutionary breakthroughs are made, the increasing compression of the noosphere which effected the discovery also makes it quicker to spread
6. The Risk of Human Evolution Since humans are now in a position to either continue or fail future evolution, there is a risk that lack of confidence in the future may result in the absence of a future.

Metrics of Human Evolution

With all that said, how do we go about quantifying human evolution?  One very relevant approach can be found in “Progress”, a book by Johan Norberg, which seeks to show:

“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”

   In doing so he alludes to the existence of an ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

   Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard, or cite religious beliefs.  Instead he refers to findings from public surveys, Government data, International media and global institutions.

His approach is to parse the ‘metrics of human evolution’ into nine categories.  They are:

Food

Sanitation

Life Expectancy

Poverty

Violence

The Environment

Literacy

Freedom

Equality

  For each of these categories he provides, as the noted international news magazine Economist notes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species.  He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to Near and Mi- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa, and to the extent possible, from antiquity to the current day.

Then,  Why the Pessimism?

He is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the metrics listed above, are profoundly contrary to conventional wisdom, and he acknowledges the human tendency toward pessimism.  He quotes Franklin Pierce Adams on one source of this skepticism:

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

   His prodigious statistics clearly and to some depth offer quite a different look at the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
His grandpa in his house of logs
Swore things were going to the dogs.
His dad among the Flemish bogs
Vowed things were going to the dogs.

The cave man in his queer skin togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state
The dogs have had an awful wait.”

Our Approach

The approach that I will take in this last section of the blog is to take each of his above categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s characteristics above, and his forecasts for the future, are borne out by them.

 

The Next Post

This week we identified the approach of the last phase of this blog, which is to take an objective, data- supported look at the past, identify current, quantified trends, and begin to see just how prescient Teilhard was in his optimistic vision of the future.

Next week we will begin this process by looking at the first of Norberg’s eight facets of human evolution, ‘Food’.