How can we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to help us to recognize an ‘axis’ in our evolution?

This Week

   Last week we took a first look at how, despite all the discontinuities that can be seen in our ever-unfolding understanding of the universe, whatever universal process that is at work must, by definition,  be active in all components of the universe.  More importantly, by the same definition it must be active in ourselves.

This week we will take a second look at how Teilhard traces this process through the expansion and compression phases of human history.

‘Compression’ in Human Evolution

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ permits us to see human evolution as powered by the same energy by which the universe has increased its complexity over time.  He begins by stepping back and observing human history through his ‘lens’.

First, a simple look at the history of humans on our planet shows that a key aspect of human evolution has been expansion into every possible nook and cranny of the biosphere.  In Teilhard’s geometric metaphor of the development of human society, humanity starts out from the southern pole of an imaginary sphere, and ramifies into many threads: races, tribes, and nations.  In its expansion northward, it spreads into an ever-increasing space. Because of this it is possible for many centuries for one arm of ramification to remain unaware of the others.

 Second, it is obvious from this simple graphic that as humans reproduce and expand, eventually the threads will reach the midpoint, the ‘equator’ of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere.  As it does the threads begin to converge and hence encounter each other.  When we eventually expand into space occupied by others, we cross the imaginary equator where expansion begins to give way to compression and hence from divergence to convergence.

As is obvious from history, crossing this equator causes the emergence of new tactics of contact, conflict, and conquest.  To this day, many believe that the dire consequences of these tactics are simply an unwanted but inevitable consequence of population increase.

However, as seen in the ‘Axial Age’, (800 BC, early in this new compression stage), new paradigms of cultural evolution begin to emerge.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Great Transformation”, sees civilizations across the globe beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”, and, more importantly, “what it means to be a person among persons”.

The Roman adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift.  While certainly less religious than political, it nonetheless reflected the same rethinking.  As Bart Ehrman explains in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, Constantine saw the integrative potential of Christianity as a political tactic for ensuring the smooth assimilation of the new Northern European Celts and Franks as they were incorporated into his empire.  While not abandoning the ‘compression’ tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation, Rome was beginning to adopt tactics which would add a cultural level of assimilation and accommodation.

Third, that this new paradigm was slow to take hold is obvious, considering the ensuing two thousand or so years of human conflict, particularly in the West, frequently among those espousing the new religion.  The success of the new tactic, however, could be seen in the emergence of the new paradigm of democracy, underpinned by the belief in human equality first envisaged in the Axial Age.

In these three millennia of world history, we can see the ‘crossing of the equator’ and the gradual transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens, this transition from one to the other also maps the evolution of human relationships from ones in which the individual is reduced by this compression to one in which the individual can potentially become enriched by it.

This is truly an astounding paradigm shift, first asserted by Confucius in the Axial Age, and a tactic necessary for human survival as it compresses itself:

“Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”

“In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others”.

   These simple adages are not only reflected in nearly every religion, but they also offer the earliest use of self-reference as essential for understanding the nature of human co-existence.

Teilhard recognizes that as humanity enters the compression stage, the historical relationship between conquerors and conquered, common in the early compression stage, will no longer satisfy the need to continue evolution. The paradigm of ‘enrichment of the conqueror by diminishment of the conquered’ must give way to a different paradigm if the universal rise of complexity is to continue by the enrichment of the human person so essential to the survival of the species.

An approach more in line with Confucius than with Caesar is required.  Teilhard suggests that the tactic required is one which can unite human persons in a way in which increases their potential. In his words

“The human mass on the restricted surface of the earth, after a period of expansion covering all historic time, is now entering (following an abrupt but not accidental acceleration of his rate of reproduction) a phase of compression which we may seek to control but which there are no grounds for supposing will ever be reversed.  What is the automatic reaction of human society to this process of compression?  Experience supplies the answer (which theory can easily explain) – it organizes itself.  To adapt themselves to, and in some sort to escape from, the planetary grip which forces them ever closer together, individuals find themselves compelled (eventually they require a taste for it) to arrange their communal lives more adroitly; first in order to preserve, and later to increase their freedom of action.”

To him, the ‘external’ force of compression must be met by an ‘internal’ force which uses this compression to effect their fuller being; the emergence of a ‘pull’ to counter the ‘push’.  As he puts it in “The Phenomenon of Man”

“Fuller being is closer union.”

Next Week

This week we saw Teilhard’s insights into the historical spread of humanity from an ‘expansion’ stage to one of ‘compression’, and how this introduced yet a new danger to human evolution that would require humans to develop new modes of relationships to overcome.

Next week we will look at how the dangers of the compression phase of human history can be not only mitigated but forged into new modes of evolution.

How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us put human evolution into the context of universal evolution?

This Week

   Over the past few weeks, we have looked at human history from Teilhard’s four ‘levels’ of human evolution:  The ‘monad’, the ‘dyad’, the ‘psychism’, and finally, the ‘noosphere’.  At each of these levels the march of universal evolution can be seen to continue in the ‘complexification’ of the human person and society.

This week, we will step back and review this drama of universal unfolding from a broader perspective.

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

While Teilhard recognizes an ‘axis of evolution’ in the rise of universal ‘complexity’’, he also notes that this rise is highly discontinuous.  He cites the many ‘jumps’ in evolution that science has uncovered, such as the sudden appearance of mass, the new ability of molecules to fabricate themselves, the astounding appearance of the cell, and the unprecedented arrival of the human person, marked by a consciousness that is aware of itself.   These ‘jumps’ would seem to contradict the idea of a steady undercurrent in which such discontinuities are simply brief surface eddies.

While Teilhard acknowledges the occurrence of discontinuity in evolution, he also shows how an underlying fundamental activity flows beneath these discontinues, a continuous current which powers the ‘axis of evolution’.  He notes that at each such step, the evolved element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ (atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, humans) rises not only in its complexity, but in its uniqueness.  Each new product of evolution, while initially retaining its similarity to its parent, eventually becomes more distinct and sharply distinguishable from the other products. This applies to evolution at every phase, from the Big Bang to the present.

This characteristic is very important to the recognition that human evolution occurs in the same way that all such steps have occurred in universal evolution.

Thus, an important step in seeing human evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ is to recognize that human life is powered by a cosmic agent by which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted toward ‘fuller being’.  In Teilhard’s words:

 “I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Understanding this essential current in human life helps us to recognize how we fit naturally and fundamentally into the fourteen-billion-year process which has raised the universe, as Richard Dawkins observes, “into its present complex state”.   So, if we are to understand ourselves as Teilhard suggests, we need the ‘scales to fall from our eyes’ so that we can not only take in the breadth and scope of the universe, but recognize that we fit into it naturally, as a child to a loving parent.

However, our history has shown that such a ‘descaling’ exercise is difficult to undertake.  How can a look into human history show any movement toward it?

Next Week

This week we began a look at human history in which Teilhard’s assertion that seeing ourselves through his ‘evolutionary lens’ will aid us in a ‘descaling’ exercise by which we uncover the rise of evolutionary evolution in both our lives and that of our species.

Next week we will refocus our look at human evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.

How do Teilhard’s projections for the future help us to gain a correct perspective on our lot today?

This Week

Today I’m departing from Teilhard’s insights into the phenomenon of universal evolution to focus on one a little closer to home.  How can we read today’s events in the context of his universal perspective?  In short, is there any way that we can see the world today as ‘the best time to be alive”?  We will see next month a long list of statistics from Johan Norberg (“Progress”) which substantiate Teilhard’s optimism (and today’s data), but after reading Nicholas Kristoff’s article in today’s New York Times, I’m jumping the gun in presenting Norberg’s thoughts on this subject.

Kristoff begins his article with a sentiment that I regularly receive from readers of this blog.  As he puts it, such optimism

“..sees it as disrespectful of all the tragedies around us.”

   He lists such tragedies as:

• The suffering of children in Gaza
• The atrocities in Sudan
• The wildfires in Los Angeles

And finally, one particularly tragic to a liberal such as himself:

• An unstable threat to Democracy moving into the White House

So how to put such grim news in perspective?   He begins with what he considers the worse thing that can happen: “the loss of a child”.  He follows this with an unexpected statistic that seems highly orthogonal to conventional wisdom.

“2024 seems to have been the year in which the smallest percentage of children died since the dawn of humanity.”

   As we will see later from Norberg in more detail, Kristof offers a timeline:

150 years ago: over 50% of global newborns died

70 years ago: 25% of global newborns died

Today: 3.8% of global newborns died (All United Nations statistics)

   Another way to look at this is that since 2000, eighty million children’s lives have been saved.

A second way to put today’s news in Kristoff’s perspective: reduction in global extreme poverty.  We will look at Norberg’s more extensive data later, but Kristoff points out that last year this figure has plummeted to 8.5%.  Another way of looking at this is

“Every day over the past couple of years, roughly 30,000 people moved out of extreme poverty.”

Still another perspective is in the areas of education and literacy, “the greatest forces empowering human beings, yet when I was  a child, the majority of human beings had been  illiterate.”  He sees a distinct contrast in today’s literacy rate.  “Now we’re approaching 90% literacy worldwide, and the number of literate people is rising by more than 12 million people each year.  Every three seconds, a person becomes more literate”.

Summarizing a few other topics:

• • While AI is evolving rapidly, with its perceived threats, so is its applicant to new medical breakthroughs.
  • While threats to the environment continue to mount, for the first time in history paths to the decarbonization of the glove are emerging.

Kristoff suggests that we take a deep breath and make a New Year’s resolution to look at the data and recognize that

   “For all the challenges we face, there is no better time to be alive.”

   Happy New Year!

How is the noosphere an active agent in human evolution?

 This Week

Last week we saw how Teilhard and others recognize the influence of  ‘accumulated cultural wisdom’ on our evolution as humans.

This week we will look at human history to see how this ‘noosphere’ contributes to our continued evolution even as we contribute to its development.

The Noosphere in Human History

In antiquity, societies which were rising certainly contributed to their noosphere, which in turn empowered their rise.  History is rife with examples. Early on, once these early isolated bubbles of ’rise’ popped, adjacent societies had few means of continuing their fragile body of practices, ideas, and insights they had built.  It wasn’t until general modern times before the ‘fruits of the noosphere’ of a successful culture, such as those contributed by religion, could begin to take root in adjacent rising cultures.  It was not that other ‘bubbles’ did not emerge in history outside of the West, such as can be seen in the great cultures of Sumeria, Egypt, Phoenicia, and China, or that their contributions to the noosphere had less value.  But it was only in the relatively recent West that the bubbles rose less in isolation than in congregation.  By recent times, the state of the globe had reached an unprecedented level of stability in which books were no longer burned by invaders or by inquisitors, enabling the survival of insights so necessary to an ‘opening’ process.

As Lord Action saw it in his “The History of Freedom”, an early indication of this shift can be seen as Europe emerged from its ‘Dark Ages”.

“”Western Europe lay under the grasp of masters, the ablest of whom could not write their own names.  The faculty of reasoning, of accurate observation, became extinct for 500 years, and even the sciences most useful for society, medicine and geometry, fell into decay, until the teachers of the West went to school at the feet of Arabian masters.”

   In the reconquering of Spain in the 15^th century, intellectually impoverished Europe began to uncover the riches that the world of Islam had recovered from a ‘fallen’ West and continued their enrichment.  As Johan Norberg puts it

“No treasure in conquered Spain meant more for medieval Europe that all the manuscripts by Arab, Jewish, Greek, Persian and Indian authors that lined the shelves of Muslim libraries.  European scholars marveled at the breadth of the intellectual heritage and scientific findings they discovered.”

   He goes on to see this as pivotal to the eventual rise of Europe.

“This was in effect the Renaissance foot in the medieval door, since it supplied reason and empirical research with its own domain and gave latitude to curious philosophers and scientists to explore the world empirically.”

   As Norberg relates the general rise of collective wisdom seen in the evolution of European thought from the Renaissance to the arrival of the age of ‘Enlightenment’, it offers an example of not only such continuation, but of the subsequent rise of human welfare that resulted from it.

 “We humans innovate, and we imitate, rinse and repeat, until we create something special.  Enlightenment ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tore down barriers to intellectual and economic open-ness, which supercharged innovation and brought unprecedented prosperity.  In the last two hundred years, life expectancy has increased from less than thirty years to more than seventy, and extreme poverty has been reduced from around 90 percent of the world’s population to 9 percent today.”

   We will go on to later see objective and empirical evidence of this rise, but this example of ‘rise and fall’ in human history exemplifies one of the earliest effects of Teilhard’s fourth level of evolution’s convergent spiral, the ‘noosphere’.

Unlike earlier ‘rinse and repeat’ historical cycles, some manifestation of the ‘noosphere’ managed to survive from the ‘fall’ of Europe into the ‘rise’ of Islam and returned, elaborated and enriched, to Europe to precipitate the Renaissance.

Without a doubt, this was not without the resistance of dogmatists and had to survive their attacks on the now-threatening ideas first promulgated by pagans such as Aristotle.  As late as 1231, for example, Aristotle’s books were banned by Pope Gregory until they had been examined and ‘purged of errors’.

Even with this, books, and more importantly their seemingly seditious ideas, survived as the noosphere became more robust as the overall rise of social order fermented in the West began to spill over across the face of the planet.

Thus, in Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’, we can see an insight later elaborated by Richard Dawkins’ concept of ‘cultural evolution’ and substantiated by Johan Norberg’s statistics.  Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’ is exactly the ‘vehicle’ that Dawkins proposed as the ‘transporter’ of human ‘memes’ which carry us to the future.  Norberg’s statistics offer copious examples of how it is doing so today.

Next Week

This week we saw examples of how Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’ serves as the new ‘vehicle’ for expanding universal evolution into the milieu of human life.

Next week we will refocus our look at evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.

How can the ‘noosphere’ be seen to play a role in human evolution?

This Week

Last week we introduced Teilhard’s fourth ‘level’ of human evolution in his concept of the ‘noosphere’, which acts not only as the retention of evolutionary ‘information’, but as an agency in its own right which acts to stimulate our personal and collective evolution.

This week we will look more closely at how this ontological relationship between humans and their collective cultural information trove can be seen to play out in history.

Recognizing the Noosphere in Human Evolution

There are fewer compelling images in human history than that of the recurring ‘rise and fall’ of civilizations.  Johan Norberg, in his book, “Open”, goes to great lengths to show how human history proceeds by way of recurring cycles of growth and decay in human society.  In a nutshell, he outlines the ever-recurring path taken by a society which ‘rises’ as its ‘psychisms’ flourish by way of cultural norms which value the independent and unique nature of individual thought.  He then shows how such societies begin to ‘fall’ as the value of human freedom and independent thought become replaced by the seeming security provided by the structural rigidity of increased dogmatism.

He charts these recurring cycles of human society in terms of rising ‘openness’ followed by increasing ‘closedness’, and hence from ‘growth’ to ‘decay’.  In his view, once a society begins to ‘close’, the ‘safety’ of the walls that are erected to protect orthodoxy undermines the ‘vitality’ required for continued growth.  He also emphasizes how the ossified characteristic of religious dogmatism contributes to the ‘decay’ side of the curve, with particular attention to the example of Rome and the Christian Church.

In the case of Rome and Christianity, Norberg documents how Christianity’s increasing drive for orthodoxy eventually contributed to the ‘closing’ of Rome.  He does not address the other side of the coin.  In its infancy, Christianity offered a novel and highly ‘open’ approach to religion which allowed Constantine to leverage it in Rome’s expansion into the less civilized North.  As Bart Ehrman addresses in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, this approach proved highly successful in ensuring the continuation of social stability as Rome expanded into uncharted territory.

Christianity’s fundamental belief in the value of the human person and the necessity for productive relationships, while rising and falling in the endless historical cycles of growth and decay, can be seen to show a slow increase from cycle to cycle when history is seen from a wider perspective.  Glimmers of this belief can be first seen in the Axial Age, with Confucius’ assertion that humans are enhanced by their relationships, thus bringing the value of the person and his relationships to the fore for the first time.  Strands of this thread can be seen to be entwined in nearly all religious expressions but stand out most clearly in the early writings of Christianity.   These can be seen to tie the human and the ‘ground of being’ together in a totally new way with the writings of John.

While Norberg clearly documents the growth/decay cycle as it recurs through World history, he focuses on the negative influence of Christianity’s increasing dogmatism in the West.  In an unintentional reference to the ‘noosphere’, he documents the damage that structural Catholicism did to the accumulated wisdom of the West (its ‘noosphere’) with its attempt to cement its quest for orthodoxy by burning huge libraries not only found in Islam but those in the West itself.

But underneath the growth/decay cycles, he does not acknowledge the underlying phenomenon which feeds the slow increase of those cultural norms that seek to protect the value of human person by building legal structures that enhance his relationships.  As Friedrich Hyek references this incorporation in his book, “Law, Legislation and Liberty”,

“Civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge that we do not possess”.

Thus, the more of this knowledge that is retained from cycle to cycle, the more the next cycle will build a more advanced form of society.  From this perspective, Teilhard’s third vector of his evolutionary spiral, the ‘rise’, can be seen to take place beneath the seemingly endless cycles of ‘open’ and ‘close’ that Norberg painstakingly documents.

This vector announces itself not only in the elaboration, but more significantly in the increasing robustness of the ‘noosphere’.

Next Week

This week we saw how Teilhard, and others, recognize the presence of an accumulated storehouse of accumulated cultural wisdom is at play in the advance of human evolution despite its ‘rise and fall’ cycles.

Next week we will look more closely at this phenomenon to see how it does so.

   If the transmission of cultural values is necessary for human evolution, how can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ clarify it?

This Week

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s three ‘levels’ of universal evolution (monads, dyads and psychisms) play out in human evolution, but that both he and Richard Dawkins suggest that the phenomenon of ‘culture’, a product of human interaction, plays a large part.

This week we will take a closer look at this fourth of Teilhard’s ‘levels’ as we address his concept of the ‘noosphere’.

The Agency of Human Cultural Transmission

Karen Armstrong addresses one of the new insights of the Axial Age in the recognition of Teilhard’s third level of human evolution (psychisms) that we addressed in Chapter 3.

“When they (group rituals) were perfectly executed, something magical occurred within the participants that gave them intimations of divine harmony”.

Thus, we are introduced to Teilhard’s fourth level of human evolution.  The first two levels, the monad and the dyad apply as equally to the vitality of subatomic matter as it does to that of the human person.  The appearance of the third level, Teilhard’s psychism, captured in the United States’ motto of “E pluribus unum”, can be faintly seen in the ‘higher’ mammals.  But the fourth level, which can be seen as encompassing the ‘monistic’, ‘dualistic’ and ‘psychism’ phenomena, is unique to human evolution.  At this level the result of the activities of the first three levels, the products of their respective unifications, are accumulated into what Teilhard refers to as the ‘noosphere’. While traces of these three phenomena can be found in our immediate pre-human ancestors, they take a significant leap in the human not only in the degree of complexity of the products, but more importantly in the retention and interaction of them as well.

Our prehuman ancestors relied on their evolutionary instincts, with stirrings of group ‘culture’ in the latter hominids, as guides to life.  With the human ability to accumulate objective cultural insights, as oral traditions are supplemented by written materials and formal education, the results of the progress made by monads, dyads and psychisms become increasingly available to their offspring as fuel for further development.

This ‘noosphere’ is unique to the human species but is much more than a simple bank of ideas, as valuable as this can be seen to be.  As Teilhard points out, human evolution not only contributes to the noosphere, but it also draws on it as a catalyst for further evolution.  Thus, as the vectors of human evolution can be seen at work in monads, dyads and psychisms, the recursive nature of the convergent spiral can be seen in the interaction between the human person and the noosphere.

The very nature of the noosphere leads to new methods of articulation, such as book printing and formal education.  These inventions themselves are further elaborated and intensified by expanded communication, which provides an increase in both the volume and the accessibility of information.  The amount of information not only increases but at the same time becomes more intimate and ultimately inextricably woven into the texture of human culture.

A parallel can be drawn with the increase of ‘information’ in the universe.  As Paul Davies sees it in “The 5^th Miracle”, universal evolution occurs because each grain of matter possesses some small quanta of ‘information’ by which it can be ushered into a connection with other grains.  He notes that the entity which results from such connection not only possesses the aggregated ‘information’ provided by its predecessors, but a new facet of information also emerges by which the next interconnection can result in an even more complex product.  This application of Teilhard’s convergent spiral can be seen in the appearance of complex molecules from amino acids, resulting in compounds such as DNA, which instructs RNA in the production of proteins, necessary for cellular function.

Thus, the noosphere can be understood as a latter manifestation of such subcellular activity.  It can be envisioned as the collection of all the ‘information’ that it has been possible for humans to assemble to date.  It is no longer necessary for each product of evolution itself to contain the increased information by which it has evolved.  With the noosphere, each product now can benefit from the accumulation of other products as well.

Such information as can be seen in this manifestation does not consist of just factual data, but also the insights, and therefore the meaning of the data which permits its valuable function as catalyst to future human evolutionary steps.  This information is not only accumulated but assimilated as humans become more adept at navigating their evolution.  In doing so, it is recursive as it is fed back into us as fuel for our continuing journey.

Next Week

This week we introduced the fourth level of Teilhard’s human steps of evolution, the ‘noosphere’, and explored its recursive contribution to human evolution.

Next week we will take a closer look at how the noosphere is active in human evolution.