How can Teilhard’s optimistic insights be seen in the human evolution of food?
Today’s Post
Last week we looked at the phenomena of ‘food’ from Norberg’s perspective, charting the recursive process of innovation, invention and incorporation that underlies the increase of human welfare that he documents.
This week, we will relook at this data to see how it offers an example of the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard suggests is necessary to increase our confidence in the future.
From Teilhard’s Perspective
As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s eight insights into human evolution to see how well they correlate.
Human Invention As we saw last week, history shows humans as capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction. Without increasing crop yield, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now. With the population growth that has occurred, we would have by now required nearly all arable land to feed ourselves.
Dissemination Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace. As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control. The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions. In general, as Teilhard notes, this is nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.
Psychisms Innovations and inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ (human groups free to innovate) which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.
Speed. It’s not just that solutions to the problems were found; note that most of them seen in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years. In the estimated eight thousand generations which have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three. Due to Teilhard’s ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading to the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West. For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years in the West, but in the East, it is proceeding today at twice this rate.
Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the ‘end of times’ did not occur. While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially. Even today, there are still those today who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.
Changes of State As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.
Timeliness As we saw in our example of data, each new innovation seems to arrive in time to prevent a critical point after which human evolution would begin to ebb. With enough malnutrition and famine, the amount of human energy need to deal with problems would wane past the point that it could develop a tactic to do so.
Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious, and philosophical resistance. In the yearning for an imagined but attractive past can undermine the practices of invention and globalism. The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith, if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’. In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.
Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to reap the crop of fear thought to insure their election. As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.
The Next Post
Having seen the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’, we saw this week how Teilhard’s eight evolutionary insights can be shown to be found in them.
Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Life Expectancy’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in human welfare. As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary insights that we saw this week.