What can happen as we learn to use both sides of our hemispheric brain?

Today’s Post

Last week we used Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how the oft kaleidoscope of history can be fit into a continuous and homogeneous spectrum when placed into the context of universal evolution.

This week we will begin a look at the great human modes of thought, religion and science, to see how the ‘dualisms’ and ‘contradictions’ of history can be sorted into a focused perception of the threads of this evolution

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’.  We saw two weeks ago how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome.

Thus, we can see that approaching traditional science and religion concepts through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than as seen in the past.  Teilhard saw this as ‘articulating the noosphere’.

So, we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.

This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the Christian gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John articulates the intimacy of this ground, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the World”.  It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine emerging in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which document how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.

The facets of empowerment which he documents, personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion.   This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.

Something else is necessary as well.  Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some two hundred thousand years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’.  Such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago in a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

   Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes.  It also represents an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, if we’re not careful, can be stomped out) in human society.

Thus, the pace of evolution must be appreciated.  Certainly, it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into Teilhard’s ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how such a relook at religion can help us to do so.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirit’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize the development of matter into increasingly complex arrangements.  We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides substantiation for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

Teilhard ‘lens’ provides a way to understand who and where we are by placing ourselves into the context of universal evolution.  This includes understanding the roles played by our two great human enterprises, religion, and science in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by ‘right brain’ thinking (instinct and intuition). As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

Sacks sees a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking (empiricism and reason) in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

An example of the first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament.  Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ as it is active in each of us.   While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure than an evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right- and left-brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early application but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the cognitive dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.

Science in its own way is also stuck.  Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion.  Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers.  However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for such things as freedom, faith, and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.

As Sacks puts it,

 “To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

   This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts, but the component parts make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on where we are today in this process.

How can science and religion, our two great modes of thought, be rethought to help us evolve?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as steppingstones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.”

But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards Johan Norberg’s continued improvement in human welfare, powered by Teilhard’s increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Religious skeptics of ‘secular progress’ see such progress as meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue. As we have seen, such negativity compromises progress in favor of superficial improvements.  They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’.  From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken ness’.  We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’.  This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more, and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.  Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position of many scientists that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by Religion and the ‘progress’ equally prized by Science.  He does not seem them as opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, such spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.  From his perspective, it can be seen as essential to every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness.
   John Haught, in his book, “The New Cosmic Story’, restates this perspective.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Thus, the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (e.g.: matter, e.g.: humans).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality is freed from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter, to one in which matter is dependent on spirit for its evolutionary rise in complexity and spirit depends on matter as a vehicle for this rise.

With this new approach, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ human welfare can now be seen as not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, but also actually a result of it.  And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported.  However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will undermine the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.    Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, spirituality is expanded from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will see how this new perspective can lead to a better understanding of where we can go from here.

    How is human evolution more risky than cosmic evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the underlying agency of ‘increased complexity’ in universal evolution can be seen as ‘risky’, and how introduction of yet a new requirement, that of ‘choice’, adds yet another risk to its continuation.

This week we will look at Teilhard’s assessment of this new ‘risk’.

So, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

If, as Teilhard asserts, evolution needs to be ‘chosen’ to continue, what’s involved in choosing it?  Restating and simplifying the Teilhard quote from last week:

“(we need) to be quite certain… that the (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.  Confidence is required when making choices that affect our evolution toward the ‘fuller being’ that both Jesus and Teilhard cite as our goal.

We saw in Pinker’s survey on ‘pessimism’ how common it is to engage in denial of progress and how such denial reflects a fear of the future.  We also touched on the fact that such fear can be (and so often has been) seized upon by populists who offer themselves as bulwarks against the woes of the future if only we would trust them.  Their first move is to insist that there is much to be feared, then to begin to use this fear to undermine trust in the Western structures of society (effectively a grouping of ‘memes’) which they claim to have unleashed such social dangers as can be found in the free press, individual freedoms, and open immigration.   Other Western liberal practices are also denigrated, such as the development of a global infrastructure by which every advance, such as those reported by Norberg in his book, “Open”, can be shared globally and hence contribute to worldwide progress.  The wall which separates us from the rest of the world may well shut us in, but it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ (identified as not only one of the fruits of these norms but an essential component of continued evolution) will become less efficacious and over time will begin to fail to mitigate the inevitably unwanted side effects that result from future inventions such as new sources of energy.

So, while Norberg’s quantification of human progress is in optimistic agreement with Teilhard’s projections, the risks are nonetheless substantial and cannot be overlooked.  Evolution is in our hands, and stewardship of its continuation requires a clear-headed knowledge of the past, recognition of and a commitment to the energy of evolution as it rises in the human species, and confidence in the future.  In the words of Teilhard:

“..the view adopted here of a universe in process of general involution upon itself comes in as an extremely simple way of getting past the dead end at which history is still held up, and of pushing further towards a more homogenous and coherent view of the past.”

Yuval Harari opines in his book, “Sapiens” that consciousness is an “evolutionary mistake” and is certain to lead to an early (by evolutionary standards) extinction of the human species.  While his book shows ignorance of evolutionary history (as seen in Teilhard’s ‘lens’) and recent human history (as documented by Norberg), the fact cannot be denied that human consciousness is a two-edged sword.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the second and more serious category of risks to human evolution.  Recognizing the ‘fragility’ of evolution, we acknowledged the ongoing risks of fixing what we have broken (the ‘structural’ risks). But we also noted the greater risk, the ‘Noospheric’ risk, which lies in the possibility of losing faith in our historically proven ability to, as Teilhard says,

 “…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 that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   In short, the interruption of this “rise in interiority and liberty” will stifle the flow of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will sum up where we’ve been in tracing Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ from Norberg’s enumeration of the articulations and arriving at the risks which evolution introduces as it overflows into the realm of the human.