Monthly Archives: July 2018

July 26 – Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution

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 Today’s Post

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

A Brief History of Fuel

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

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

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

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

From Teilhard’s  Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love as the Energy of Human Psychisms

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

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

 required to find and employ

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

July 19 – Is Human Evolution Proceeding? How Would We Know?

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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’.

July 12 – Mapping The Structure of The Noosphere

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Today’s Post 

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

Outlining the Noospheric Structure 

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

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

The Structure

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

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

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

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

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

Teilhard’s Characteristics of Noospheric Structure 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Measure of Human Evolution

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

The Next Post

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

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

July 5 – Navigating the North Hemisphere- What Tools Do We Have to Work With?

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded a two week look at crossing our metaphorical equator and progressing into a mileu in which the ground rules of antiquity which seemed to serve us so well as we moved Northward now seem to be less valuable in in this new stage of the journey. The new hemisphere is not seems less favorable to us in our favor but problems seem to mount more quickly as well.

Since it’s Teilhard’s metaphor, it seems reasonable to look at his insight into how the totality of cosmic evolution is playing out on our planet, and his take on what tools we may have available to us in maneuvering among the many rocks into which we seem to be carried.

“Everything Which Rises Must Converge”

This quote from Teilhard (The Future of Man) is rather well known, but given the curvature of his metaphorical sphere, it can now appear as threatening.  The quote we saw last week applies just as well here:

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

   As it is the very basic force of evolution that is compressing us on our planet with its finite surface, does this imply that at the heart of cosmic evolution lies a convergence which threatens to extinguish the very flame of rising complexity that it has, thus far, nourished?

And as Teilhard sees it, the source of the damping of this flame can not only be found in the crushing force of convergence from without, but in our response to it from within.  He notes the danger that looms when humans begin to feel helpless in its wake:

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

What we need, he is saying, is a hermeneutic to be able to interpret the new and strange dimensions found North of his ‘equator’.  Such a hermeneutic, a lens for interpretation, a context for making sense, is precisely what Teilhard offers.

Teilhard’s Hermeneutic For Understanding Human Evolution

Teilhard firstly restates the need for such a hermeneutic:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

    He then asks us to relook at what is actually happening with human evolution from his expanded and unified context of universal evolution:

“(is it possible that) the individual human brain has, since the end of the Quaternary, really arrived at the limit set by physics and chemistry to its progress in complexity?  Even then, it would still remain true that since that time, 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 this succinct statement, Teilhard  pinpoints the potential of the evolutionary product of the human neo-cortex, which expands the playing field of evolution from the actions of chromosones to the actions of humans.  While the curvature of our planet may well force us into increasingly uncomfortable proximity, the ‘sphere’ of the human ‘psychism’ offers a seemingly infinite surface onto which it is possible to expand:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to continually find new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   Thus, instead of finding danger in the mechanical compression imposed by the Earth’s ‘sphericity’, he sees opportunity:

“…what appeared at first no more than a mechanical tension and a quasi-geometrical re-arrangement imposed on the human mass, now takes the form of a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   He sees a cycle in which human person functionality increases with increasing population compression:

“…This increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power (in which man’s compression upon our planet is ultimately expressed) simultaneously and inevitably increases each human element’s radius of action and power in penetration in relation to all the others; and in proportion as it does so, it has as its direct effect a super-compression itself of the noosphere.  This super-compression, in turn, automatically produces a super-organization, and that again a super-‘consciousisation’: that in turn is followed by super-super-compression and so the process continues.”

   To Teilhard, therefore, this external compression effects an internal complexification in which new levels of both consciousness and relationships are possible:

“Thus through the combined influence of two curves, both cosmic in nature- one physical (the roundness of the earth) and one psychic (the reflective’s self attraction), mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.”

   So, not unlike how the stars compress simple atoms into complex ones more capable of even more complex arrangements in the form of molecules, instead of the impersonal crush of human masses he notes:

“Man is now realizing that this cosmic spindle corresponds, on the contrary, to the concentration upon itself of a force that is destined to find in the very heart released by its convergence sufficient strength to burst through all the barriers that lie ahead of it- whatever they may be.”

   This is the heart of Teilhard’s  great optimism,  that the agency of evolution, the principle by which evolution increases the complexity of its products, steadily increasing its irradiance through billions of years, and is still alive and well and working in the human species.  As he puts it a bit more poetically:

“Like those translucent materials
which can be wholly illumined
by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests to the christian mystic
as bathed in an inward light
which brings out its structure,
its relief, and its depths…
a tranquil, mighty radiance.”.

I Read The Newspapers.  Is Such Audacious Optimism Warranted?

This is a perennial criticism of Teilhard.  Conventional science shows no ‘improvement’ in the human as an evolutionary product with time, so surely evolution, if it still continues, isn’t changing us in any particular direction.  And even the most casual glance at daily news offers any consolation.  So it can be legitimately asked, “is there really anything to such increased complexification via Teilhard’s ‘psychism?”

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The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on.  Next week we will continue casting the net for other counter-intuitive perceptions, but this time by looking at current events.