How Teilhard’s Insights on the noosphere are substantiated by Norberg’s wealth of data
Today’s Post
Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’ as the most recent layer of universal evolution on this planet. As John Haught summarizes it in his recent book, “The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin”:
“He (Teilhard) took it for granted that, on our planet at least, natural processes have successively brought about the realm of matter (the geosphere, then life (the lithosphere), then most recently the noosphere, the ‘thinking layer’ of earth history, a network made up of human persons, societies, religions and other cultural, intellectual, artistic and technological developments.”
We have how Johan Norberg, substantiates this insight of Teilhard with examples in human history of this recurring building and rebuilding of human culture as evidence of human evolution.
This week we will look a little deeper into this aspect of human evolution.
The Noosphere as the Milieu of Human Evolution
We saw last week how Teilhard understood human evolution as enabling personal ‘fuller being’ to not only emerge from ‘closer unions’ but to rebound into moving our species toward increased ‘fullness’. As Norberg saw it, this process is much more than one limited to the plane of human relationships as it spills over into cultural evolution. Teilhard, Norberg and Dawkins all recognize the presence of something in the milieu of “human culture” that influences human behavior in a way that moves it forward. Dawkins touches on this phenomenon when he says
“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation. If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”
This ‘propagation’ requires the existence of a means of sharing this data in such a way that it acquires a life of its own. Teilhard uses the word, ‘noosphere’ to connote this milieu.
Norberg, reflecting on Steven Pinker’s insights, addresses how Teilhard’s ‘union-being’ dynamic can be understood in terms of human characteristics.
“A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation. These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment- and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptions”.
– Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills
– A grammatically advanced language allows us to communicate this to others so they can build on our experiences and don’t have to make the same mistakes or to reinvent the wheel.
– This gives us both the means and incentives to cooperate with others.”
Norberg explores this concept of ‘the means’ in his book, ”Open”, where he recounts the rise and fall of nations and empires in our turbulent history. In each case he notes the three well-known phases of ‘rising’, ‘thriving’ and ‘falling’ that can be seen in their history. He relates these three phases to ‘opening’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘closing’. These three phases can in turn be traced to the evolution of the two critical dynamics mentioned above, personal freedom and productive relationships. In essence, these are simply Teilhard’s ‘fuller being’ that causes the ‘closer union’ that leads to ‘fuller being’.
In his look back at human history, Norberg notes that
“In retrospect, it is easy to see that these advances… made our modern world. And that openness in politics, economics and culture is the best way of assuring the continued, open-ended search for improvement.”
As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise their creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control. A key effect of globalization appears in the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions. In general, he notes, as his data clearly documents, this nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.
Teilhard takes this same look at the noosphere, as he cites the role of the noosphere in history:
“…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.”
As Norberg sees it, it is less that the West invented these terms, and more that the increasing robustness of the noosphere is enhanced by the evolving Western norms of democracy. As he sees it, for the first time in human history the ancient insights built up over time by previous waves of civilization are consciously and systematically collected, enhanced, developed, and globalized. Norberg shows a distinct example of how this can be seen as the insights from Greek and Roman empires were folded into Islamic culture and then rose anew in the European Renaissance. And both he and Teilhard show in their statements above how this process continues today.
Next Week
This week we have taken a third look at how Norberg’ insights into the spread of human evolution through culture, and how it substantiates Teilhard’s axial role of the ‘noosphere’ in the continuation of human evolution. In the past several weeks we have seen how Teilhard’s remarkable grasp of how cosmic evolution can be seen to continue its rise through the human species. We have also seen again how Teilhard bases his wonderful sense of optimism on such insights. If Teilhard is correct, and his insights are substantiated by contemporary secular sources, universal evolution is on track to continue its remarkable journey to a future filled with the promise of ‘fuller being’ for both the individual human person and the species as a whole.
Even the most casual look at the data in which we are daily inundated, however, can suggest a quite opposite view.
Next week we take another look at Teilhard’s optimistic view of the future of humanity. Why is it so difficult to see?