­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been decomposing Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral of evolution’ from the cosmic, universal, level to that of ‘ordinary’ human life.  In doing so we saw how we can begin to envision how the fourteen million years of cosmic evolution continues not only in the human species, but in our individual lives as well.

We have navigated this terrain by the use of models.  Teilhard’s spiral model offers an insight into how ‘lesser’ things become things ‘greater’ in complexity over cosmic eons of evolutionary time.  As convergent it also illustrates how this increase occurs ‘exponentially’, how it becomes ‘tighter’ as it continues through the noosphere.

In doing so we have moved from the cosmic spiral model to the personal model of ‘the virtues’, in which we can begin to envision the ‘attitudes’, the three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.’  We saw how the three attitudes of Faith, Hope and Love show up in the human as manifestations of Teilhard’s three universal components of the convergent spiral: fruitful unity, resulting complexity and increasing response to the agency of universal ‘complexification’.

This presents a highly unified and coherent concept of how universal evolution ‘changes state’ as it becomes more complex, resulting in an insight into how the human person fits into cosmic evolution, not as imposed from without, or emerging from chance and chaos, but a as a ‘natural’ entity.  Or as the song goes, “No less than the trees or the stars”.

However, as we have also noted, this comes with a price: the need for human ‘volition’ if this tendril of evolution is to continue.  And as so many philosophers have noted, the growth to human maturity is marked with difficulty.

In this blog, we have addressed many of the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution which constitute the locus for this difficulty. We have also noted that many of them present themselves as ‘dualities’ in which human life is depicted as options or positions that we can take which are in significant opposition.  Such dualities are seen in such concepts as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’, ‘damnation’ vs ‘redemption’, and many more.

These dualities demark the occasions of our maturity that call for us to make choices.  As Teilhard has noted, making the choices which overcome such ‘ontological’ dualities is one of the necessary steps toward our increased personal and social evolution.  And further, one of the steps toward such overcoming occurs when we begin to better understand both the universal process of evolution and our part in it.  As Teilhard notes, understanding evolution in this way permits us to see these ‘dualities’ as simple ‘spectra’: less ‘this vs that’ than ‘this and that’, with both present in some cohesive way.

This week we will continue the ‘decomposition’ of Teilhard’s evolutionary spiral as it manifests itself in the human person.  We will move from the ‘virtues’ to addressing how we can use the gifts of evolution more fruitfully in moving toward a cohesive and integrated mode of being.

Thinking ‘Objectively’: Beyond Duality, Towards Complexity

We have looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (and hence human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.  This finding illustrates the action of the three virtues discussed last week:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of Love as the action of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human

–          Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan

–           Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification:  Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level

Norberg also highlights an aspect of this welfare that is less ‘championed’ by Western liberals: the role of wealth in this increase.  Generally, the liberal position calls for a more ‘equitable’ distribution of wealth as a necessary facet of human welfare in opposition to the conservative valuation of capitalism as necessary for the health of society.  Norberg’s extensive and well-cited data shows a different dialectic: Increased wealth as necessary for increased welfare.  Capitalism isn’t, in his view, the opposite of poverty, but rather the underlying solution to it.  Yes, the inequity remains, but not in such a way that poverty increases as a result of the rise of wealth, as if the rich add to their wealth by taking it from the poor.  He sees the rapid (and unprecedented) decrease of world poverty as a direct result of increase of world wealth.

This is an example of the overcoming of a traditional duality: ‘rich’ vs ‘poor’, in which there may be an unequal distribution of ‘rich’, but this is occurring today with an unprecedented decrease in the number of ‘poor’.

This is another example, as well, of Sacks’ observation that to become whole, which implies that we are evolving, we must think with both sides of our brain.  The ability to objectively see both sides of an issue, for example, often requires accessing the issue both intuitively and empirically, from both the left and right brain hemispheres.  Sacks sees such integrated action as looking at a dualism ‘wholistically’.

As he understands such ‘wholism’:

“It is not incidental that Homo Sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   In this statement, Sacks is illustrating the overcoming of several traditional dualisms: subject/object, emotion/reason, love/justice, and attachment/detachment.

Sacks offers a highly integrated insight into human evolution as seen in the increasing skill of thinking with both sides of the brain.  He traces the modes of human thinking through the development of written language from the Semitic to the Roman languages, from right-to-left expression and from the appearance of empirical (left-brain) conceptualization as it emerges from the legacy intuitional (right-brain) legacy.   The trick, he notes, is to find the ‘right’ balance between the two human powers of understanding represented by the skills of empiricism and intuition.

While this is one of the ways that we can increase our skill of using the human resources provided to us by evolution, there is yet another aspect to consider.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will look at an extension of this model which addresses the rest of the human brain system as we consider ‘thinking with the whole brain’.