Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, as we began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.   We began with the ‘material’ view of happiness, and looked at several aspects from the viewpoints of psychology (such as surveys of this highly subjective subject) and biology (especially genetics), and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ is still evasive.

This week we will look at human happiness from the viewpoint of cosmic evolution. If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

• Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
• and this increase can be measured by the increase of consciousness,
• then the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products can’t be ignored.

Whatever it is that has effected the rise of complexity in the ‘stuff of the universe’ must be active in each of its products. As one of these products, it must be active in us. If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Can humans, An Evolved Species, Ever be happy?

If we are to understand our evolution as persons and as of society from the context of universal evolution, our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well. How can our capacity for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Allerbee, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Last week we saw how Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, believes that humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged. He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of flouresence, on the order of several million years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment. This insured, he thinks, a continuing and long lasting ‘accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost. The result, he goes on to opine, is the existential unease that makes is almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and hence will result in untimely extinction.

While I disagree with his conclusion, the idea that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment has some merit. This week we will take a look at this aspect of the potential for happiness.

It’s not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play by our reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as fhey did for our ancestors. This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

   As we have cited several times, Teilhard charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, than cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness. With each new change of state, new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of the precedents. Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the molecule: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”. It takes some time before the new capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

It is in this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’. Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still in development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ was addressed earlier in this blog. The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ was addressed last June, but can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains. It’s not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’. It’s more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival. This is a ‘skill’ which we are still learning.

Thus the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about human nature and how it works (or should work) in the context of an evolved universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it fits harmoniously into the ‘forces of evolution’. Both humans and their environment have evolved over billions of years in which products have increased their complexity, and most recently when this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural’ selection in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person. As Teilhard points out (and Davies and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.   In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s pessimism suggested that humans could never be truly happy due to the wide chasm that they have created with their environment. While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’, but is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution.

Next week we will take a look at evolution from a third perspective as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’.