Today’s Post

Those who have been following this blog know that one of the most frequently addressed topics is the correlation between current events, contemporary writers and the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French theologian and paleontologist from the early twentieth century.

Today I’d like to apply this focus to the current pandemic that is consuming resources across our world even as it saps our sense of well-being.

In today’s New York Times’ editorial, Thomas Friedman, recipient of three Pulitzer prizes, offers a perspective on today’s society and the terrifying forecasts for this global epidemic. As with almost any voice of optimism, the correlation with Teilhard is unmistakable.

The Risks of World ‘Flattening’

Friedman first takes on the rapid growth of ‘globalization’. He notes the exponential growth in the way we have seen things change from the way we saw them only sixteen years ago:

“Twitter was only a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, applications were what you sent to colleges, Skype was a typo, and Big Data was a rap star All these connectivity tools, not to mention global trade and tourism, exploded after 2004 and really wired the world. Which is why our planet today is not just interconnected, it’s interdependent, and in many ways even fused.”

   But he goes on acknowledge that while globalization comes with economic benefits,

“..when things go bad in one place, that trouble can be transmitted further, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before.”

   Further, the fact that the rate of such transmission is exponential only adds to the quantum of mind boggle. With such a phenomenon, how can we avoid seeing the near future as not only pandemic, but exponentially leading to pandemonium?

The Other Side of ‘The Exponential’

Friedman uses ‘Moore’s Law’ as another facet of “the exponential’. In 1965, the co-founder of Intel, George Moore, forecast the doubling of the power of computer processors every two years as superior processing hardware was developed. This forecast has been well borne out by the fifty year innovation and invention uplift seen in the computer industry that permits each of us to hold in their hand a device the size of a pack of cards that exceeds the processing power of room-sized, thousand BTU-cooled IBM 360-94 with twenty washing machine-sized memory drums in 1965.

The relevance to Covid-19? Friedman notes comments today by Nitin Pai, director of the Takshashila Institution, an Indian research center:

“Advances in computer technology and synthetic biology have revolutionized both detection and diagnosis of pathogens, as well as the processes of design and development of vaccines, subjecting them to Moore’s Law-type cycles. They will…drive more talent and brainpower to the biological and epidemiological sciences.”

      Effectively, Pai is saying, we can expect the process of finding, developing and disseminating treatments for and cures of new diseases to speed up in the same way as (and because of) more rapid development of our tools.

As we have seen in the past several blog posts, a common factor of the exponential rise in human welfare mapped in benumbing detail by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress” occurs when

“..people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital”.

   The advance of such progress, he is saying, is natural to humans when they are allowed to pursue it.

Teilhard’s astonishingly optimistic view of the future is based on his insight that humans have inherited the universal principle of ‘complexification’ by which products of evolution (such as human persons and atoms) continue the universal uplift of evolution by joining together in such a way that they fulfill their potential for growth. Positing the underlying ‘energy of evolution’ as alive and well in each human person, he is confident that in the entity formed by humans when they come together (his word for is it ‘psychisms’), such groups innovate and invent tools to insure our future.  As Teilhard puts it, for millennia humans have been able to

“…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 (‘psychisms’) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

Effectively, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, the nature of the ‘noosphere’ is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. Norberg marvels at

“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”

   Friedman’s example of Moore’s Law and Nitin Pa’s insights into the fruits of human research substantiate such optimism. There is no reason to believe the reservoir human evolution will run dry any time soon, and every reason to believe that its exponential rise as mapped in detail by Norberg will continue unabated.

John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes both Teilhard and Norberg when he notes

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   A greater danger from such global crises is that we fail to believe this, and as a consequence retreat into an insular, nationalist withdrawal from the world stage.

While, as Friedman observes above, the risks of globalism are decidedly non-trivial, Norberg prefers a different perspective:

“Globalization makes it easier for countries to use the knowledge and technology that it took generations and vast sums of money to generate. It is difficult to develop cellular technology, the germ theory of disease or a vaccine against measles, but it is easy to use it once someone else has. The infrastructure that has been created for trade and communication also makes it easier to transmit ideas, science and technology across borders in a virtuous cycle”

   It is such a ‘virtuous cycle’ that Teilhard celebrates; the recognition of which can light the lamp of the path to our future.

   And ‘dealing with the complex planetary society’ is indeed the bottom line. Thanks to Friedman, Pai, Norberg, McHale and Teilhard for providing a compass that points in this direction.