How is the noosphere contribute to human evolution?
This Week
Last week we saw how Teilhard, and others recognize the influence of a ‘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 their ‘rise and fall’ cycles. 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 15th 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 see later how objective and empirical evidence of this rise can be seen, but in this example of ‘rise and fall’ in human history can be seen 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’.