December 15, 2022 – How Do We Ensure Our Own Evolution?

How can science and religion, our two great modes of thought, be rethought to help us evolve?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as steppingstones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.”

But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards Johan Norberg’s continued improvement in human welfare, powered by Teilhard’s increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Religious skeptics of ‘secular progress’ see such progress as meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue. As we have seen, such negativity compromises progress in favor of superficial improvements.  They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’.  From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken ness’.  We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’.  This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more, and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.  Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position of many scientists that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by Religion and the ‘progress’ equally prized by Science.  He does not seem them as opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, such spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.  From his perspective, it can be seen as essential to every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness.
   John Haught, in his book, “The New Cosmic Story’, restates this perspective.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Thus, the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (e.g.: matter, e.g.: humans).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality is freed from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter, to one in which matter is dependent on spirit for its evolutionary rise in complexity and spirit depends on matter as a vehicle for this rise.

With this new approach, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ human welfare can now be seen as not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, but also actually a result of it.  And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported.  However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will undermine the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.    Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, spirituality is expanded from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will see how this new perspective can lead to a better understanding of where we can go from here.

 

December 8, 2022 – We’re Evolving, We’re Pessimistic, What’s Next?

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.

December 1, 2022 – How Can Risks to Human Evolution Be Seen?

    How is human evolution more risky than cosmic evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the underlying agency of ‘increased complexity’ in universal evolution can be seen as ‘risky’, and how introduction of yet a new requirement, that of ‘choice’, adds yet another risk to its continuation.

This week we will look at Teilhard’s assessment of this new ‘risk’.

So, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

If, as Teilhard asserts, evolution needs to be ‘chosen’ to continue, what’s involved in choosing it?  Restating and simplifying the Teilhard quote from last week:

“(we need) to be quite certain… that the (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.  Confidence is required when making choices that affect our evolution toward the ‘fuller being’ that both Jesus and Teilhard cite as our goal.

We saw in Pinker’s survey on ‘pessimism’ how common it is to engage in denial of progress and how such denial reflects a fear of the future.  We also touched on the fact that such fear can be (and so often has been) seized upon by populists who offer themselves as bulwarks against the woes of the future if only we would trust them.  Their first move is to insist that there is much to be feared, then to begin to use this fear to undermine trust in the Western structures of society (effectively a grouping of ‘memes’) which they claim to have unleashed such social dangers as can be found in the free press, individual freedoms, and open immigration.   Other Western liberal practices are also denigrated, such as the development of a global infrastructure by which every advance, such as those reported by Norberg in his book, “Open”, can be shared globally and hence contribute to worldwide progress.  The wall which separates us from the rest of the world may well shut us in, but it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ (identified as not only one of the fruits of these norms but an essential component of continued evolution) will become less efficacious and over time will begin to fail to mitigate the inevitably unwanted side effects that result from future inventions such as new sources of energy.

So, while Norberg’s quantification of human progress is in optimistic agreement with Teilhard’s projections, the risks are nonetheless substantial and cannot be overlooked.  Evolution is in our hands, and stewardship of its continuation requires a clear-headed knowledge of the past, recognition of and a commitment to the energy of evolution as it rises in the human species, and confidence in the future.  In the words of Teilhard:

“..the view adopted here of a universe in process of general involution upon itself comes in as an extremely simple way of getting past the dead end at which history is still held up, and of pushing further towards a more homogenous and coherent view of the past.”

Yuval Harari opines in his book, “Sapiens” that consciousness is an “evolutionary mistake” and is certain to lead to an early (by evolutionary standards) extinction of the human species.  While his book shows ignorance of evolutionary history (as seen in Teilhard’s ‘lens’) and recent human history (as documented by Norberg), the fact cannot be denied that human consciousness is a two-edged sword.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the second and more serious category of risks to human evolution.  Recognizing the ‘fragility’ of evolution, we acknowledged the ongoing risks of fixing what we have broken (the ‘structural’ risks). But we also noted the greater risk, the ‘Noospheric’ risk, which lies in the possibility of losing faith in our historically proven ability to, as Teilhard says,

 “…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 that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   In short, the interruption of this “rise in interiority and liberty” will stifle the flow of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will sum up where we’ve been in tracing Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ from Norberg’s enumeration of the articulations and arriving at the risks which evolution introduces as it overflows into the realm of the human.

 

November 17, 2022 – How Is Universal Evolution ‘Risky’?

   How can risks be seen in the rise of the universe towards increased complexity?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, although there are risks to the continuation of human evolution in our perennial (but so far successful) break-fix-break cycle, faith in our ability to manage this cycle is more important than the expertise we develop to invent fixes to those things we break.

This week we will take a second look at these ‘Noospheric’ risks from the perspective of our place in the upsweep of cosmic evolution.

The Fragility of Evolution

Looking at universal evolution from either Teilhard’s ‘lens’ or that of science, the enterprise of cosmic evolution can be seen to be ‘risky’.  Science sees evolution occurring when the ‘stuff of the universe’ which emerges from the ‘big bang’ seemingly thumbs its nose at entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics by which each unification of particles of like matter comes at a cost of available energy.  Such unification may well, says science, contribute to evolution by an increase in complexity, but at the same time is accompanied by a small loss of energy.  By this understanding of Physics, the universe begins with a certain quantum of energy, and as soon as it begins it starts running down.

In seeming opposition, not only do things evolve while this is happening, but they evolve from simple configurations to more complex ones.  As Steven Pinker points out in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, since there are obviously many more ways for things to be un-complex (disorderly, even chaotic) than there are for things to be complex (more orderly), the very existence of evolution seems counter to the Second Law.  According to Pinker, “Evolution occurs against the grain.”

Worse yet, complex entities are clearly more fragile than simpler ones.  In the example of DNA molecules, which contain the ‘data’ which guide a living entity toward its development, it employs such a stunning magnitude of components that it is more susceptible to cosmic radiation and random fluctuations than a simple molecule.  Any ‘rise in complexity’ clearly is in opposition to the ‘rise in chaos’ potentially resulting from such effects.

Still worse yet, as Teilhard observes, while nature seems to have a built-in ‘agent of complexity’ by which its elements can unite to increase their complexity, (and without which evolution could not proceed) this factor becomes secondary to continued evolution when it enters the realm of the human and now requires conscious ‘cooperation’.  As Richard Dawkins sees it, “Genes are replaced by ‘memes’ as the agent of evolution in humans”.

Once humans acquire the capability of ‘reflective consciousness’, by which they are ‘aware of their awareness’, the rules change once again.  In the human person, evolution no longer depends on the instincts which served our ancestors so well.  To continue in the human, it must now be chosen, and thus introduces yet a new area of ‘risk’.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the ‘risky’ nature of an evolution which leads to increased complexity.

Next week we will look a little deeper at these universal risks play out in human evolution

November 10, 2022 – The ‘Noospheric’ Risks of Pessimism

  What kind of risks to our evolution do we incur when fail to believe in the future? 

Last week we began to address the risks that can be seen when we focus Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on human life.  We looked at those that could be considered as ‘structural’, such as those addressed by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.

This week we will move onto a second category of risks, those that appear with Teilhard’s identification of the ‘noosphere’, the realm of human thought that emerges as humans find new ways to express and retain their cultural and technological insights.

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series several weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over.  Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil.  The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.

This recoil from increased compression is an indication of the fear that in the future we will be subsumed into the horde, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’, resulting in a future which seems far less secure than the past.

The prevalence of ‘pessimism’ that we have addressed in the past few weeks is directly related to this fear.

   Each human innovation that we have cited has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism, clear ‘fruits of evolution’, can be undermined.

The fact that they have historically prevailed over the institutionally entrenched pessimists is evidence of the strength of such beliefs., but what happens when such optimism ‘runs dry’ in the well of human evolution?

The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the danger to such faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics, McHale’s forecasts and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed).

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

“…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.”

   With this insight, penned some eighty years ago, he correctly forecasts the fault lines which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West.  He goes on to elaborate:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time (we are) becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of (our) future on earth, what (we) need before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species.  As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented, historically proven knack for problem-solving and lead us down a “a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”  Today, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as ‘even more unreasonably dogmatic’ (Pinker) than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders.  After all, as David Brin points out,

“..the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

   And exactly how does this jeopardize our continued evolution?  Again, Teilhard explains how human evolution is shifting from the neurological increase in brain size to the cultural ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:

“.. as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation.  Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

   In short, significant evolutionary risk can be seen in sharp ideological divisions as they undermine the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and as a result weaken their power to solve problems.

To continue our evolution, he insists, we must continue to believe in it.

The Next Post

This week we took another look at risks to our continued evolution.  We saw how the (so far) successful ‘fix-break-fix:’ cycle of ‘structural’ evolution can be weakened by the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.

Next week we will look a little deeper at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.

November 3, 2022 – What are the Risks to Our Continued Evolution?

How do Teilhard and Johan Norberg see risks to continuing human evolution?

Today’s Post

As we have seen in Teilhard’s unique but increasingly comprehensive insights into evolution, he acknowledges that his audacious optimism for the future of humanity is nonetheless balanced by a recognition of its risks. As we saw in in Norberg’s comprehensive analysis, there is considerable data to justify optimism, but Steven Pinker showed that there is also considerable resistance to the data which supports this optimism.

This week we will address some of these risks and see how they could impede the continuation of human evolution.

The Structural Risks To Human Evolution

As we have seen in a few of his many examples of human progress, Johan Norberg identifies a “Tornado of Evidence” (The Economist) which substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic projection for the future of human evolution.  But even as he goes through the numbers which show exponential growth in human welfare in nine distinct and critical categories of human existence over the last two generations of human evolution, he also notes that every such aspect of ‘progress’ comes with an unplanned and unwelcome consequence.  A few examples:

  • Humans learned to replace wood with coal for fuel, which avoided the deforestation of the planet, and probable human extinction, but at the same time led to the near asphyxiation of those living in cities as population increased along with density.
  • Advances in sanitation, agriculture and medicine exponentially lowered the death rate of both mothers and children in childbirth, which then led to a huge growth in human population, which then threatened to overtax food production and lead to widespread famine.
  • And today we see the threat of global warming (at least partially) caused by dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping heat, possibly leading to the rising of the seas and the drowning of millions.

However, as Norberg and many others note, forecasts of the effects of such consequences have historically failed to materialize as predicted.  Such forecasts, such as those of Malthus, who predicted population growth overwhelming food production and leading to global famine by now, did not factor in the human ability to innovate and invent.  Even though improvements in crops have led to a global decrease in hunger, the population did not continue to grow at the predicted rate.

Why didn’t such dire consequences happen?

As Norberg points out in the example of overpopulation, the reduction in childbirth deaths actually led to a decrease in the rate of population growth as parents no longer felt the necessity for large families when such a large percentage of children began to survive the vulnerable early years.

And, as we have seen, the introduction of coal did indeed lead to deaths caused by foul air, but of course, once again, innovation and invention produced methods of cleaning coal smoke, and new technologies to produce more BTUs with fewer side effects, such as the extraction and management of gas.

But what about global warming?  The CO₂ content in the air may take centuries to dissipate naturally, and by then humans may well have effectively caused their own extinction.   Again, such a forecast fails to factor the ability of humans to invent.  Considering the number of initiatives under development today, such as wind, solar and nuclear power, and Hydrogen power, such prophesies may well be premature.  There are also studies underway to not only extract CO₂ from the air, but to market it as a source of fuel as well.  All these, of course, are optimistic forecasts, and all subject to unplanned consequences which will set off new rounds of invent-pollute-clean up.  Can humans win this war, or will the inevitable consequences rule out in the end?

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.”

   While this point of view definitely suggests optimism, the question can legitimately be asked, “What costs are we prepared to pay for progress?”  This is followed by the more significant question. “How can we be sure that we will continue, as McHale suggests above, to find fixes for the things we break?”

These are ‘structural’ risks.  One key to perspective on this conundrum is to address the other type of risk: the ‘Noospheric Risks’.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the risks that can be seen as we apply Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to human life, beginning with those that he and Norberg saw as ‘structural’.

Next week we will refocus this lens on the deeper risks that occur when humans, as ‘evolution become aware of itself’, begin to lose faith in its ability to bring us into a fuller realization of our potential.

October 27, 2022 – The Causes of Disbelief in Human Evolution

What causes today’s popular skepticism of increasing human welfare?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Steven Pinker (‘Enlightenment Now”) identified three ways in which a current of pessimism flows through contemporary Western culture.

This week we will take a look at the remaining two.

Two More ‘Modes of Pessimism’

The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”.  This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”.  The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere to confirm the prediction.

Pinker also notes that “Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.”  As we saw last week, the affluence of the Graham family (and many Evangelicals like them) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that pessimism is all bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about harms that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail.  The danger that Pinker sees is that

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

   The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last example comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli.  In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities.  They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases pleasure, as eating chocolate.  In a nutshell, indignation feels good.  As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

These examples show the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors.  It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’ is needed to provide a compass for navigating them.

Teilhard believed that to the extent that we lose confidence in the future, we will be unable to  successfully navigate our evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to ‘greater consciousness’ and hence leads to ‘more completeness’.

The Next Post

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s insights, following Norberg and Teilhard, which address our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution.  In Pinker’s words (summarizing Norberg)

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

   But, he goes on to note that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such a plethora of ‘fruits’ (as well documented by Norberg) at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so scarce presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard focusses his lens on what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.

Next week we will address risks to this continuation and take another look at Teilhard’s concerns.

 

October 20, 2022 – Why Be Pessimistic About Progress?

Why should so many who profit from progress be so skeptical of it?

Today’s Post 

Last week we began a look at the pessimism that seems to oppose the insight that, as Johan Norberg documents, ‘the world is getting better’.

This week we will look at three of Steven Pinker’s five possible causes of this pessimism.

Modes of Pessimism

Steven Pinker outlines several ‘modes of pessimism’ In his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

   Ubiquity of NewsWe are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented.  Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume.   As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

And not only does immediate news sell, but negative news also sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant.  Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’.  For example, we worry more about crime even as crime rates are falling.  As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”.   He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.””

Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, but also “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias– – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving.  This is sort of a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes than it is to imagine it as uplifted, their lot improved, their relationships deepened, or their future made brighter than their past.

Effectively, lack of clarity about the past leads to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work.  One reason for such bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains continue to stimulate our modern neocortex brain with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival.  Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the limbic and reptilian brains cease to function.

It also doesn’t mean that our 200,000 old skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity.  Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution. To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page.  Hence Teilhard sees humanity still in an evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Next Post

This week we took note of the first three of Steven Pinker’s ‘modes of pessimism’ which illustrate the currents in contemporary society which reinforce the pessimism common in it.

Next week we will look the remaining two.

October 13, 2022 – With all This Progress, Why All The Pessimism?

   Why should those who benefit the most from increasing global welfare be most suspicious of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion yea rise in the evolution of the human species.

In doing so, we also saw how such a worldview substantiates Teilhard’s insight that humans can be seen to continue to evolve along the same ‘axis of evolution’ that has been universally followed so far: that of increasing consciousness by way of increasing complexity.

We also noted that despite the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

This week we will take a closer look at this phenomenon.

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.  Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition.  Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger, and Sartre.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand humanity as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls.  Even actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves most Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation.  “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, individuals seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

  This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we began to look at why, with all the data bubbling up in our ‘data-ocracy’ which shows the unprecedented improvement in global human welfare, so many of us fail to factor this information into their view of the world.

Next week we will look into several causes suggested by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

 

October 6, 2022 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism

   Why does ‘conventional wisdom’ resist the optimistic perspectives of Teilhard and Norberg?

Today’s Post

   Last week, we did a brief overview of the third of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species in terms of global welfare.  We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

We also saw how, as in Teilhard, the clear-eyed optimism that the data provides is not reflected in the ‘conventional wisdom’ prevalent in the West today.

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to be so poorly reflected today.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   Norberg’s examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front.  In addition to the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norberg’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

For example, in the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997.  He asserted that

“Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history.  Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”

   This suggests that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow, and that the resulting gap will increase poverty in poorer countries.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that (the gap) is exactly what has happened.  Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually.  In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low- and middle-income countries has doubled.”

   He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP.  Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

   And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else.   A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth.  That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism, and protectionism.”

   And what’s changing?

 “But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour and use of technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

   As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

   Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how Teilhard’s statement is less a cultural bias that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individuals are “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.  To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany after its isolation from the West.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now clearly seen to be contrary to objective data?  More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?  More to the point, how can such prevalent pessimism undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next week we will look at this phenomenon and its roots in today’s Western culture.