Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our series of posts on the structure and navigation of the milieu in which we are immersed, the noosphere.  We followed the sacraments, values and morals which humans have (so far) fabricated in an attempt to order the seeming cacophony of personal human energies in ways beneficial to both the person and society on the one hand, and the attitudes and stances that can be taken in order to receive the maximum benefit of our noospheric navigation on the other.  The question can be asked, however, “To what end?”
This week we will begin to take a look at the future.  Although Teilhard’s mystical experience of the ground of being was balanced by a strong empiricism, heavily informed by his deep scientific bent, he applied both of these strengths in a vision of how those religious and scientific perspectives can be seen as guides to moving us towards the future.

Surveying the Status

A good way to begin to look at the future is to understand the past and the present.  Teilhard offers a wonderful use of metaphors in his writings, and one excellent example is that of ‘the sphere’.  He develops this metaphor to peer into the future at the end of his book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, which he presented as a somewhat simplified rewrite of his “Phenomenon of Man”.

Consider, he proposes, a geometric sphere with north and south poles, meridians from south to north, and an equator ‘round the middle.  In this metaphor, the axis from south to north represents time, with the south pole representing the past, and the north the future.

In this metaphor, he sees the human race beginning as a small population at the south pole, and as it branches  into its various (‘manifold’) manifestations of families, tribes, cities, states and countries, it ‘ramifies’, spreads out, seeking unsettled territory and available resources as it enlarges, and as it grows it progresses towards the equator.

As this wave of human expansion approaches the equator, due to the curvature of the surface of the sphere, the amount of available territory necessarily decreases with the increase in human population.  This of course increases the tensions among the branches of human population as they begin to compete with each other for the remaining space and resources.

At the same time, consider, he suggests, that the individual human entity (the ‘person’) does not appear as a finished product of evolution, with any particular expertise in utilizing the unique capability with which he has been endowed, the neo-cortex brain.  Just as with the cell at its birth resembles the molecule from which it evolved (“it arrives ‘dripping in molecularity’”), an onlooker at this first moment of human evolution would have been hard pressed to distinguish the new human ‘person’ from its predecessor ‘higher anthropoids’.

As a result, it should not be surprising that in these early years, the human was more subject to the influences of the same instinctual stimuli which served ancestors so well, than able to modulate these stimuli with actions stemming from the new level of brain which is unique to the human species.   And, further, given the slow increase in the tensions resulting from closer contact with humans from other, alien. and potentially dangerous, social units, it’s not surprising that the instinctual needs for resources and survival would outweigh any thoughts of cooperative engagement at this early stage of development.

Then, there is the agency of basic human mistrust.  We do not seem to ‘naturally’ seek closeness with those outside our closely-knit family or clan groups.  We recoil from being forced into closeness with others that we did not initiate ourselves.  And, as a result, when it becomes more necessary for our small, familiar groups to federate into larger states, the problem of ‘cohesion vs aggression’ begins to rise.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbors, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character.  The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?”

One answer, repeated over and over in history, is that you don’t.  In order to assure the stability of a society which grows in size as it increases in diversity, one tactic is total control over the individuals that make it up.  The objective is not ‘trust’, which comes from within, it is ‘control’, which is imposed from without.  The police state, which insures order at the expense of personal autonomy, has been common to nearly all civilizations going back to antiquity, and still can be found today.   Even in those societies which have tried to equitably accommodate the person and the state, there are many who abhor the ‘closing in’ of outsiders.   As Teilhard remarks, in terms that are as applicable to  today’s Western societies as they were when he expressed them seventy years ago:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   Given this state of affairs, what sort of light does Teilhard see ahead?  Can there be a basis for optimism?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at where the flow of evolution which we have been addressing may be taking us.  At first glance, it might well seem that the future of an increasing human population on a world of decreasing space and resources is one to be considered with some trepidation.  Is the future of the past the past?  Do we anticipate ‘more of the same, only moreso’?

As we will see in the remaining posts of this blog, however, based on the picture we have constructed, anchored firmly on Teilhard’s clear-headed foundations, there is indeed a strong case for optimism in both our lives as persons who make up this population and the organization of our human energy which makes up our societies.