Today’s Post 

    Last week we looked at the ‘dualism’ between a positive assessment of the human person, as taught by Jesus and ‘politicised’ by Jefferson on the one hand, and the contrasting negative assessment asserted by Luther and promulgated by Freud and Nietzsche.  We noted that, unlike the other dualisms we have examined in this blog, this one can’t be reconciled by putting the dualism into Teilhard’s ‘evolutionary context’.

We also noted that such a chasm between beliefs undermines the future of human evolution, in both the human person and society.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, those societies built upon the negative perspective of Nietzsche have now been unequivocally shown to be anti-evolution: under them the human person is crushed, and therefore the society collapses on itself.  The boon in human welfare as documented by Johan Norberg in the West not only fails to happen, human welfare at the personal and societal level is degraded.

However, in the post- Enlightenment period, even with the successes chronicled by Norberg, we also saw how Nietzsche’s negative hermeneutic still endures.  This week we will look a little deeper into this persistence.

Quantifying the Divine Spark

One of the gifts of the Enlightenment has been the rise of importance of ‘empiricism’ over that of ‘intuition’.  In short, our adherence to a belief becomes more a function of how such belief can not only be quantified, but grounded in proven fact.  One of the reasons for the success of the ‘scientific method’ has been its insistence on objective verification of postulation.  For a belief to be worthy of our adherence, it must first be objectively tested.  This obviously works in most cases, especially those in which human consciousness is not itself the subject of such a method.  It is critical to the ‘innovation and invention’ so well chronicled by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This was (and still is) considered to be a leap forward in human thinking, as it seemingly eliminated the need for religion as a source of beliefs.  Since religion, especially in the West during the period preceding the Enlightenment, was seen as the cause of much turmoil, even to the point of human slaughter, with religious beliefs seen to be at the root of such carnage.  This same religious-based carnage can be seen today in the middle East.

The rise of Atheism is one product of the Enlightenment, with its insistence of the lack of God’s provable tangibility mixed with the history of Western religious wars.  This is compounded by the huge disparity of understanding of the concept of God, immense across the spectrum of world religions, and huge even within the loose category of ‘Christianity’.  Such an unprovable God, especially one of seeming amorphousness, belief in which is the basis of such chaos in humanity, is not worthy of adoration.

That said, even the fathers of the Enlightenment did not take this need for provability of tangibility so far as to undermine their confidence in the human person’s ability to ‘articulate the noosphere’, even if such confidence was beyond the scope of empirical reason.  Their belief in the potential of the human person to make sense of his surroundings and act accordingly to move society forward was quite robust.

Jefferson goes one step further, unequivocally postulating the positive value of the human person as the basic building block of democracy.

However, this still leaves the basis for such postulation in question.  What is the basis for any confidence that the human person is indeed ‘endowed’ with such rights as claimed by Jefferson, or that he is indeed a “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”?  Don’t the examples of failed, illiberal governments around the world, especially in ‘developing’ countries, show many examples of this not being the case?

We have seen that the data presented by Norberg shows an unarguable correlation between human invention and innovation and the improvements in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years.  Norberg attributes this remarkable and unprecedented rise in human welfare to the legally grounded increase in personal freedoms and societal norms for human relationships.

Norberg also goes on to document how these freedoms and social norms have spread into the developing world, and stresses that this is occurring at a rate much faster than they initially came to fruition in the West.

Teilhard, as we have seen, goes even further in mapping this now well-articulated phenomena of increasing freedom and improved human relationships directly to his ‘axis of evolution’.  In the context of this axis, such phenomena is simply the latest manifestation of the universal metric of evolution: ‘increasing complexity’.   Whether we are doing it consciously or unconsciously, Norberg clearly shows that we are collectively pursuing Teilhard’s vision of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and learning to cooperate with it.  Norberg also clearly identifies that one measure of this increasing complexity is ‘increased human welfare’.

Norberg recognizes the risk that we take as we move forward, and the need to insure that democracy is more than ‘the will of the people’:

“Democracy is not a way to sanctify the majority opinion, but to limit the damage any group can do to others, so it has to be combined with the rule of law, rights for minorities and strong civil institutions.”

  Other than acknowledging the need for such articulation of the thread of evolution as ‘the rule of law’, Norberg offers no prescription on how to go about it.  While the ‘rule of law’ is certainly an end result which can channel human activity in the direction of the freedom and improved relationships which Norberg cites as the building blocks of progress, how do we get there?

Virtues: How We Get There 

To talk about ‘getting there’, I’d like to return to the discussion on the ‘Theological Virtues’, which addressed how the virtues (summarized by Paul from the teachings of Jesus) are essential for the conduct of human life which insure our future evolution.  These three ‘virtues’, aspects of human psychological life, are much more than that prized by traditional religion as practices which justify our ‘salvation’, they are attitudes or ‘stances to life’ in which we align our lives to ‘the axis of evolution’, or as Teilhard put it:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   As the reference above addresses, Faith simply becomes the practice of trusting the axis of evolution (trusting that the ground of being is ‘on our side’).  Hope is the expectation of the outcome of evolution (Paul’s ‘Fruits of the Spirit’, Norberg’s ‘”Progress’’), and the most important, Love.

In Teilhard’s view, Love is much more than an emotion shared between individuals, it is the practice of relationship in which both individuals become what they are capable of.  It is the energy which underlays personal evolution, as Norberg later goes on to quantify.  He clearly identifies human relationships, along with personal freedom, as the two essential building blocks of continued human evolution.

By believing that there is indeed a basic, fundamental, principle of increased human evolution, and that by learning to articulate it and acquiring the discipline to cooperate with it, we are advancing our own evolution, we are subscribing to what we have been addressing as ‘The Divine Spark’.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.  We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus continue the enterprise of human evolution,

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how recognition of what we have been calling. ‘The Divine Spark’ is not only key to our personal evolution, but even more so to the evolution of the state towards a democracy.  As we saw, Thomas Jefferson’s embrace of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society” has become the cornerstone of what has become, so far, the most successful form of government by nearly every measure possible.  We saw how the metrics assembled by Johan Norberg not only delineate a distinct increase in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years, but how societies based on his fundamental assumption, the recognition of an ineffable quality of the human person, are essential to this burst of progress. 

Denial of the Divine Spark

We also saw last week, in opposition to such progress-oriented vision, a movement which would return societies to governments led by Nietzsche’s ubermensch, one step away from rule by ‘royals’.  We how his mistrust of the ‘Divine Spark’, the common human denominator recognized by Jefferson, played out in his writing, but here’s another, from his book, “Twilight Of The Idols”

“The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.”

   One would think that Nietzsche’s bitter and negative philosophy, especially in contrast to the success of one based on Jefferson’s recognition of the divine spark, would have fallen out of vogue in the intervening hundred years marked by the success of democratic forms of government.  As seen in the rise (and fall) of such regimes as Nazism and Communism, embracing his illiberal tenets , there is plenty of evidence that Nietzsche continues to be read today.  Some of his negativism can be seen in the recent resurgence of nationalism in many parts of the globe.

From where does such a negative and contrary-to-data outlook arise?  Undoubtedly, some blame falls on the failure of Western religion to focus on the divine spark first identified by Jesus in the gospels and promoted by Jefferson.  This failure eventually led to hundreds of years of ‘Christian on Christian’ fratricide.  To the fathers of ‘The Enlightenment’, the rise of empirical science as a building block of society must have seen like a safe shore after the storm tossed years of religious wars.

But as we have previously noted in this blog the human brain is not a simple organ, but exists as three tiers ‘stacked’ one on the other, and all contributing stimuli to our consciousness.  The reptilian layer contributes ‘survival’ stimuli to insure that we fly or flight, for example; the limbic layer contributes emotional stimuli to insure that we, unlike the reptiles, nourish our more complex young; and the neo cortex layer, unique to humans, enables us, when we are so disposed, to base our responses to the ‘lower brain’ stimuli on what we understand to be ‘true’ of a certain circumstance.   As humans, we can choose our actions based on what we have learned about our environment, and choosing the ‘correct’ actions is an essential skill in insuring both our personal and societal continued evolution.

Or, as Teilhard would put it, as humans we have the capacity to ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we can learn how to cooperate with it and thus insure our continued evolution.

Unfortunately, however, we can allow these lower-brain stimuli to distort our neo-cortex conclusions which might arise from such articulations.  Fear, as almost every belief system recognizes, cannot only be much more powerful than hope, it can be a much more successful motivator to action.

Thus our negative experience with religion combined with the need to properly balance our neurological stimuli with our ability to ‘know that we know’ offers many paths to a decidedly negative comprehension of what it means to be a ‘person’.

Dualisms

In the two hundred fifty years delineated by Norberg, we saw a sharp rise in human welfare, which we interpreted as quantification of evolution in the human species.  During this same time frame, we also saw the appearance of philosophical paradigms antithetical to the principles identified by Norberg, – for example, in the writings of Nietzsche – and the resultant rise of systems like Nazism and Communism which were based on his illiberal principles.

In this blog we have addressed many ‘dualities’- antithetical beliefs historically held in tension- such as science-religion, body-soul, grace-sin, damnation-redemption, human-divine, this life-the next, salvation-damnation, and many others.  We have shown in each case how the evolutive hermeneutic of Teilhard operates as a perspective by which these dualities can be seen not as opposites, but perceptions of facets of a single thing.  When we come to such a duality as ‘Jefferson- Nietzsche’, or more basically ‘human personal equality-inequality’, however, no such integrated understanding is possible.  Either the divine spark exists or it doesn’t, and whichever side one comes down on makes all the difference.

And this is the ultimate conundrum before which mankind is currently ‘marking time’:  Shall we continue to trust in Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”, or do we to move to Nietzsche’s dark opinion of these “people themselves”?

Note that this irreconcilable duality of the human person has risen in Western religion alongside that articulated so positively by Jefferson.  It is one assessment shared by the father of Christian Protestantism (and exists in threads of teaching found therin) and is shared by those expressions of psychology which hold Freud’s negative assessment of the human to be authoritative.

On the one hand, we have the positive assessment by Jesus, which proved valuable in constructing Western society beginning with Rome, but was diluted by the rigid Church hierarchy and demands for adherence to dogma influenced by Greek thinking.  On the other hand we have the insidious creep of what Richard Rohr identifies as the ‘penal substitutionary atonement theory’ in which the death of Jesus was necessary to appease a God angry at the imperfections of his creation.  We have addressed in several places in this blog how this theory festered into Martin Luther’s assessment of the human person as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”, and by Freud as ‘basically dangerous’.  It is not surprising that such elements in Nietzsche’s Teutonic culture would have influenced his disdain for the person.

Even though, as we have pointed out throughout this blog, Western religion contains nuggets of a positive humanism which underpin such progress as chronicled by Norbeg, the history of Christianity in the West shows facets which can, and have in the past, inhibit such progress.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into the aspects of a ‘nationalism’ which can be seen in the West which threatens the continuation of improvements of human welfare documented in such detail by Norberg.  We showed how a ‘dualism’ between the tenets of thinkers like Nietzsche and those of Jefferson are not simply ‘two sides of a coin’, they are true opposites which cannot be ‘held in suspension’ and understood in in an integrated context such as the many others we have addressed in this blog.

Next week we will move on to looking a little more closely at what we have been calling “The Divine Spark’ to understanding its persistence in universal evolution.  Such a perspective is necessary to understand how its presence in the human person is deeply rooted in the billions of years in which the universe has grown a ‘personal’ face.