Today’s Post
For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.
This week we’ll sum up these nine posts.
Why Pain?
We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.
The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and alone. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied denied us.
In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles. The need for re-connection is countered with the need for de-connection.
As Yuri Harari points out in his book, “Sapiens”, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.
With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself. And even worse, our ancestors dealt with population growth by simply disseminating, a tactic that we can no longer employ as once-empty spaces disappear.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.
Toward Happiness
We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:
- Happiness from the material perspective
There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than being highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.
- Happiness from the evolutionary perspective
We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still alive in human evolution, then some optimism in the future can be justified. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness. As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.
- Happiness from the ‘spiritual’ perspective
We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, spending more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen to overlap. As we have addressed many times, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.
We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.
We ended our look at happiness by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.
We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifest in every step of evolution from the big bang to the human person, can be seen as active in us when we reinterpret Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.
Finally, we reinterpreted Paul’s ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of nine facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer an outline for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness’.
In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.
From Blondel,
“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”
Then Haught,
“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”
Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it.
The Next Post
This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.
John Haught proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos can also bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.
“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story. Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith. Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.
Thus the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the ongoing process of complexification, certain in confidence in a future that somehow will be better than the past. Placing the universe into the context of becoming requires us to understand that
“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being. It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized. It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”
Albere’s “paying attention” is echoed in Haught’s tapping into this ‘reservoir of possibilities”. As Teilhard puts it, “Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea”.
Next week we move on to the idea of living life in a way in which Albere’s “paying attention” can bring us into a closer resonance with the energy of evolution that Teilhard asserts rises in us.