Today’s Post

Today, we return to thread we were following before we took a side trip to review the optimistic thoughts of Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer laureate, in Sunday’s New York Times.

In the initial post on the subject of quantifying human evolution, Teilhard acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of the human race is nonetheless balanced by risk. As we saw in the last two weeks, while there is considerable data to quantify optimism, there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.

This week we will take a look at some of these risks and see how they could play out to undermine the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which supports 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 effected their own demise.   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, 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 suggest 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?”

The risks that we are discussing are ‘structural’ risks. One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

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’ is directly related to this fear.

   Each human innovation that has been cited in this series has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback. 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 trends 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. Nowadays, 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 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. In order to continue our evolution, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the 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.

Today’s Post

Those who have been following this blog know that one of the most frequently addressed topics is the correlation between current events, contemporary writers and the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French theologian and paleontologist from the early twentieth century.

Today I’d like to apply this focus to the current pandemic that is consuming resources across our world even as it saps our sense of well-being.

In today’s New York Times’ editorial, Thomas Friedman, recipient of three Pulitzer prizes, offers a perspective on today’s society and the terrifying forecasts for this global epidemic. As with almost any voice of optimism, the correlation with Teilhard is unmistakable.

The Risks of World ‘Flattening’

Friedman first takes on the rapid growth of ‘globalization’. He notes the exponential growth in the way we have seen things change from the way we saw them only sixteen years ago:

“Twitter was only a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, applications were what you sent to colleges, Skype was a typo, and Big Data was a rap star All these connectivity tools, not to mention global trade and tourism, exploded after 2004 and really wired the world. Which is why our planet today is not just interconnected, it’s interdependent, and in many ways even fused.”

   But he goes on acknowledge that while globalization comes with economic benefits,

“..when things go bad in one place, that trouble can be transmitted further, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before.”

   Further, the fact that the rate of such transmission is exponential only adds to the quantum of mind boggle. With such a phenomenon, how can we avoid seeing the near future as not only pandemic, but exponentially leading to pandemonium?

The Other Side of ‘The Exponential’

Friedman uses ‘Moore’s Law’ as another facet of “the exponential’. In 1965, the co-founder of Intel, George Moore, forecast the doubling of the power of computer processors every two years as superior processing hardware was developed. This forecast has been well borne out by the fifty year innovation and invention uplift seen in the computer industry that permits each of us to hold in their hand a device the size of a pack of cards that exceeds the processing power of room-sized, thousand BTU-cooled IBM 360-94 with twenty washing machine-sized memory drums in 1965.

The relevance to Covid-19? Friedman notes comments today by Nitin Pai, director of the Takshashila Institution, an Indian research center:

“Advances in computer technology and synthetic biology have revolutionized both detection and diagnosis of pathogens, as well as the processes of design and development of vaccines, subjecting them to Moore’s Law-type cycles. They will…drive more talent and brainpower to the biological and epidemiological sciences.”

      Effectively, Pai is saying, we can expect the process of finding, developing and disseminating treatments for and cures of new diseases to speed up in the same way as (and because of) more rapid development of our tools.

As we have seen in the past several blog posts, a common factor of the exponential rise in human welfare mapped in benumbing detail by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress” occurs when

“..people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital”.

   The advance of such progress, he is saying, is natural to humans when they are allowed to pursue it.

Teilhard’s astonishingly optimistic view of the future is based on his insight that humans have inherited the universal principle of ‘complexification’ by which products of evolution (such as human persons and atoms) continue the universal uplift of evolution by joining together in such a way that they fulfill their potential for growth. Positing the underlying ‘energy of evolution’ as alive and well in each human person, he is confident that in the entity formed by humans when they come together (his word for is it ‘psychisms’), such groups innovate and invent tools to insure our future.  As Teilhard puts it, for millennia humans have been able to

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

Effectively, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, the nature of the ‘noosphere’ is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. Norberg marvels at

“..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.”

   Friedman’s example of Moore’s Law and Nitin Pa’s insights into the fruits of human research substantiate such optimism. There is no reason to believe the reservoir human evolution will run dry any time soon, and every reason to believe that its exponential rise as mapped in detail by Norberg will continue unabated.

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.”

   A greater danger from such global crises is that we fail to believe this, and as a consequence retreat into an insular, nationalist withdrawal from the world stage.

While, as Friedman observes above, the risks of globalism are decidedly non-trivial, Norberg prefers a different perspective:

“Globalization makes it easier for countries to use the knowledge and technology that it took generations and vast sums of money to generate. It is difficult to develop cellular technology, the germ theory of disease or a vaccine against measles, but it is easy to use it once someone else has. The infrastructure that has been created for trade and communication also makes it easier to transmit ideas, science and technology across borders in a virtuous cycle”

   It is such a ‘virtuous cycle’ that Teilhard celebrates; the recognition of which can light the lamp of the path to our future.

   And ‘dealing with the complex planetary society’ is indeed the bottom line. Thanks to Friedman, Pai, Norberg, McHale and Teilhard for providing a compass that points in this direction.

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 rise in the evolution of the human species.

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

We also noted that in spite of 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 the human race 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, showing clearly that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited in the last two posts. Even actual, tangible and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of 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

Pinker 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? Pinker offers a few suggestions.

   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, negative news 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.

Mscalibration – 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’, it is “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 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 brains continue to stimulate us 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 ‘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 to confirm the prediction, somewhere.

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 tbat

“…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. Failing to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human 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

“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 addresses 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.