How do we proceed from ‘articulating the noosphere’ to capitalizing on it to effect our evolution?

Today’s Post

Beginning several weeks ago, we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on the noosphere. We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, initially experiencing an age of expansion, but as the ‘equator’ is crossed, leading to a new age of compression.  He notes that as we come to this boundary, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself.  In Teilhard’s words, “The noosphere begins to compress.”

We then went on to address the effect of this new phenomenon on human evolution, and the need for developing new skills to turn ‘compression’ into ‘assimilation’.   We started with a focus on its manifestation in our lives, then to address the lack of recognition of it in society at large.  We ended up last week by addressing Teilhard’s concerns that pessimism presents a specific risk to our continued evolution.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this falls into an integrated context as it is seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of its structure.  He proposes his ‘lens of evolution’ to take in the warp and woof of the ‘noosphere’, the ‘milieu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human.  Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stage of biological life (Natural Selection), he offers a perspective on not only evolution’s continuation in the human species, but how the workings of the stages of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’, the stage of human thought.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noospheric stage as it was in those of Physics and Biology.  This observation, then, is the key to using his ‘lens’ to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’.  To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how the ‘complexification’, so clearly seen in the previous spheres, can be understood as active in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard recognizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…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 (human persons) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires ever more “harmonious interrelations”.  Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to the classical duality, “the one vs the many” is resolved as we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

• New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)
• A rise in interiority (our personal maturity) and liberty (our autonomy)
• Harmonious interrelations (relationships which lead to ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties which result in new arrangements)

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species (which is the same as continuing its evolution) we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to more clearly understand and cooperate with its ‘laws’.  As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past hundred fifty years we have seen distinctive examples of increase in both.  Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’ is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also articulate the evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously renew their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be either used as steppingstones to yet newer arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.

This should come as no surprise when put it into these terms.  For the past hundred fifty years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products.  They may not have been explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups

contributed to their personal growth, but nonetheless grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit.  They were effectively participating in the rearrangements suggested by Teilhard.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks, we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out today.  We’ve looked at both examples and risks.  While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will train Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on science and religion, our two great modes of human thought, to explore how they can be revitalized to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.