September 29, 2022 – Poverty and Human Evolution

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   How does the reduction of global poverty substantiate Teilhard’s insights on human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw statistics from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’ which documented the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’.  They point not only to a general improvement in human welfare, but also to a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand generations of human existence.  We also saw, once again, how the data of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.

This week we will take a last look at Norberg’s metrics of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records.  Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger, and disease, especially in third world and ‘developing’ countries.

Generally, we have become numb to this phenomenon, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted.  Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as Matthew cites Jesus claiming that “The poor you will always have with you.”

Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising.  As the Economist reports, when asked by the Gapminder Foundation whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half.  This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”

So, what ‘cogent experimental grounds’ might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes.   Only prosperity has causes.”  By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with most of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive.  The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.

Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity.  She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’  Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?

Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’.  He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%.  This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.

In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP.  He puts this into perspective:

“Even if all incomes had been perfectly equally distributed (which they certainly weren’t) it would have meant a life of extreme deprivation for everybody.  The average world citizen lived in abject misery, as poor as the average person in Haiti, Liberia, and Zimbabwe today.”

   So, in 1820, the average percent of poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%.  If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.  (This increase did not emerge because of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time.)

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East:  As the United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.

The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing.  The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty (source: World Bank).  Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.

The reductions over the entire two-hundred-year span show an overall decrease from 94% to 12% by 2018.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years.  The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the remainder required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’.

Seeing This Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

This clearly substantiates the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:

  • Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
  • Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted, and globalization is fostered. Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly.  Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.
  • These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, but also how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing.  Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as seen here.

Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

September 22, 2022 – Life Expectancy and Human Evolution

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   How can human evolution be seen in the improvement of ‘lifespan’?

Today’s Post

   In the last two weeks we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species.  Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:

–  human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of improvements in human welfare over time.

–  the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing

–  these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.

This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg points out:

   “Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish, and short.  More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.”

   Plagues frequently caused massive deaths.  The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population.  Such plagues continued on a regular basis and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century.  In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640.  As Norberg notes

 “Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”

   Considering this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules.  Thus, he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time.  The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state.  Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.

   At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen.  Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.

This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred-thousand-year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees in the curve’.  Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’.  Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles, and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results.  As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly.  Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

Asia:  Increases from 42 to 70 Years

Latin America:  Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa:  Increases from 37 to 57 Years

  We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’.

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

As we saw with the subject of ‘food’, these statistics prove out Teilhard’s insights,

  • Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this appeared first in the West.
  • Such innovation and invention require the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
  • Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted. Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese cultures and early empires of Islam but died still- born because restricted from trade.
  • These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

September 15, 2022 – How Does the Data on Food Substantiate Teilhard’s Perspective?

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   How can Teilhard’s optimistic insights be seen in the human evolution of food?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the phenomena of ‘food’ from Norberg’s perspective, charting the recursive process of innovation, invention and incorporation that underlies the increase of human welfare that he documents.

This week, we will relook at this data to see how it offers an example of the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard suggests is necessary to increase our confidence in the future.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s eight insights into human evolution to see how well they correlate.

   Human Invention As we saw last week, history shows humans as capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction.  Without increasing crop yield, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now.   With the population growth that has occurred, we would have by now required nearly all arable land to feed ourselves.

   Dissemination Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace.  As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control.  The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions.  In general, as Teilhard notes, this is nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

  Psychisms Innovations and inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ (human groups free to innovate) which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.

   Speed.  It’s not just that solutions to the problems were found; note that most of them seen in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years.  In the estimated eight thousand generations which have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three.  Due to Teilhard’s ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading to the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West.  For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years in the West, but in the East, it is proceeding today at twice this rate.

   Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the ‘end of times’ did not occur.  While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially.  Even today, there are still those today who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.

   Changes of State As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time.  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.

Timeliness As we saw in our example of data, each new innovation seems to arrive in time to prevent a critical point after which human evolution would begin to ebb.  With enough malnutrition and famine, the amount of human energy need to deal with problems would wane past the point that it could develop a tactic to do so.

   Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious, and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for an imagined but attractive past can undermine the practices of invention and globalism.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith, if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to reap the crop of fear thought to insure their election.  As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.

The Next Post

Having seen the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’, we saw this week how Teilhard’s eight evolutionary insights can be shown to be found in them.

Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Life Expectancy’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in human welfare.  As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary insights that we saw this week.

 

September 8, 2022 – Quantifying Human Evolution: Food

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How can the history of food be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s evolutionary insights?

Today’s Post

Last week we considered whether the immense volume of data available today from such resources as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the World Economy Historical Statistics, The US Food Administration, and many others, reflects Teilhard’s optimistic insights on human evolution or does this data support the common and ubiquitous pessimism that seems to pervade our society.  Using the example of ‘fuel’ last week, we saw not only how the data seems to substantiate Teilhard’s optimistic projections, contradictory to ‘conventional wisdom’, but agrees with Teilhard’s eight insights into how this data can be seen from his ‘evolutionary lens’.

This week we will go into more detail, summarizing the similarly optimistic insights of Johan Norberg, in his recent book, “Progress” in which he seeks to show

“..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.”

   We will begin with a look at three of Norberg’s nine metrics of evolution, introduced last week, and see as we did last week how Teilhard’s insights play out in all of them.

Food

Famine   Few metrics are more pervasive in human history than famine.  Norberg cites the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century.  Between 1870 and 2015 this has fallen  to 106 episodes of mass starvation on our planet.

With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, Thomas Malthus, reflecting conventional wisdom, predicted early in the 18th century that in a very few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail, dooming humanity to extinction.

The data, however, shows an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now.   27M died from 1900 to 1910.  Several million more due to wartime and communist state mismanagement from 1930 to 1943.  Today famine persists in just one major area, and that is North Korea.

Today, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, and now more often results from poor government.  Norberg notes that

“No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because “Rulers who are dependent on voters do everything to avoid starvation and a free press makes the public aware of the problems”.

Product Yield   So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic.  One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods.  Another is the invention of automated product extraction such as harvesters and milkers:

  • In 1850 it took 25 men, 24 hours to harvest 1,000 pounds of grain. In 1950 one man could do it in in six minutes
  • In that time frame, it took one person 30 min to milk 10 cows. By 1950 it was down to one minute.

As a result, in the same time frame, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours.  From 1920 to 2015 the cost of this supply was reduced by fifty percent.

Better strains of wheat have also led to increased yield.  In the last fifty years the production of Indian crops has increased by 700%; in Mexico by 600%, moving these countries from importers to exporters of wheat.

The combination of better crops and improved extraction has also led to a slower increase of land dedicated to growing crops.

Malnutrition   Not surprisingly, increased production has led to decreased malnutrition.  The average Western caloric intake per person increased by 50% in the last hundred years; in the world by 27% in the past fifty years.  This has resulted in a reduction in world malnutrition from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

This has also increased human stature.   In both Eastern and Western countries, average height was about the same until about 1870, when it began increasing in the West by 1cm per year to the present day.  The same level of increase did not begin in Asia until the forties and is still continuing to this day.  However, in countries with poor governments, such as in Sub Saharan Africa and North Korea, it has slightly decreased.

The Next Post

This week we began our search for Teilhard’s ‘cogent experimental grounds’ which would enable us to better focus his ‘evolutionary lens’ on our own evolution of ‘food’.

Next week we will relook at Norberg’s data from Teilhard’s perspective to see how it substantiates his eight insights into human evolution.

September 1, 2022 – Seeing Human Evolution Through Global Data

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   How can a look at the human use of fuel illustrate Teilhard’s projections for human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we identified the “tornado of statistics” that Johan Norberg assembles in his book, “Progress” as substantiating Teilhard’s optimistic view of human evolution.  In doing so, it would also offer the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard saw as needed to firm up our faith in the future.

This week we will take a first step by applying this approach to the subject of ‘fuel’.

Example: A Brief History of Fuel

Few issues are closer to our everyday lives than that of fuel.  Every person on this planet uses fuel every day for such things as heating or cooling their homes, cooking their meals, transporting themselves and communicating.   As the issue of fuel is so ubiquitous, its history provides an excellent metric for putting our evolution into an objective perspective.

The discovery of fire a few hundred thousand years ago was a monumental moment in human history.  The availability of cooked, rather than raw, food led to improved health, and the ability to heat habitats led to an increase in habitable area.  It is obvious that both led to general improvements in human life.

Following the many thousands of years in which wood was the only fuel, coal began to take its place, increasing in use as the Bronze age led to the Iron age, and continuing a key role to this day.

Today other types of fuel, principally gas but including nuclear, wind and solar extraction, provide fuel for the many applications of the modern era.  Newer, cleaner sources, such as Hydrogen, are on the horizon.

While fuel offers an example of how human evolution can be seen to continue, how can it be seen to serve as an example of ‘cogent experimental grounds’ needed by humans if we are to see evidence of and have confidence in evolution in our species?  Applying Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to ‘fuel’, eight insights can be seen.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

The first is that of Human Invention.  The history of fuel offers an articulation of the steps of human evolution:  first ‘discovery’, then ‘extraction’, then ‘application’ and finally ‘dissemination’.  Some early humans discovered that certain stones would burn, and over time developed methods of extraction and dissemination that made it possible to use coal as an improved method of heat (more BTU per volume). This required improved methods of extraction and dissemination, such as mining coal vs gathering wood.

The second is that of the Human Psychism.  Each of these steps required an increase in complexity not only of the technology but more importantly an increasing development of what Teilhard refers to as ‘human psychisms’.  By this he is referring to the aspects of human society which are the core of the Inner Pull of compression addressed last week.  By psychism Teilhard refers to the human groups which effect the

 “.. increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

 “.. new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   This does not only pertain to the management of fuel, but to the exponential rise in the uses of fuel: from cooking and heating to such things as the smelting of ores and the powering of engines.  Each such step required yet another ‘new way’ of thinking, an increase in the organization and the depth of knowledge of the ‘psychism’ and the need to draw on the resources of the noosphere (such as education) for their success.

The third insight can be seen in the dissemination of the resulting “new ways” over the face of planet.  While coal, for example, was ‘discovered’ in China approximately in 4000 BC, it wasn’t until the advent of expanding empires before, for example, the discoveries of the Romans could spread far and wide. The third example can be seen in Globalization.

The fourth of Teilhard’s insights is his observation that compression of the noosphere not only results in globalization, but also in the increase in the speed of the spread of invention.   Hundreds of thousands of years of wood burning, followed by a few thousand years of coal dependency followed by a few hundred years of transition to other sources of fuel.  Not only can evolution be seen to rise, but to converge, and the increasing convergence can be seen to stimulate its increasing speed.

The fifth Teilhard insight is the Timeliness of Invention, the recognition that humans invent as necessary to insure their continuing evolution.  Had humans not discovered the advantages of coal, the dependency upon wood would have left our planet by now denuded and bereft of oxygen.  We would be extinct.  Had not new sources of fuel come available in the Eighteenth century, the exclusive use of coal would have doomed us to asphyxiation, choking on the effluvia of civilization.  (A poignant example can be seen in the ‘Great Smog’ of London which killed over twelve thousand people in 1952.)

The sixth Teilhard insight is the recognition of the failure of forecasts that do not consider the six above phenomena.  Such an example is Thomas Malthus, whose dire predictions from the early 1800s are still read today.  Malthus depended on historical data for his end-of-times predictions (increase in population outstripping production of resources) but failed to recognize the basic human capability of invention, by which production would rise exponentially and unwanted side effects mitigated.  Malthus provides an example of the failure of any forecast which uses the past to predict the future without taking human invention into account.

The seventh insight is that of Change of State.  As Teilhard notes, the journey of cosmic evolution from the big bang is not a linear one.  At key points, not only does the “stuff of the universe” change, but it changes radically.  The transition from energy to matter, from simple to complex atoms, from molecules to cells and from neurons to conscious entities, are profound.  Further, the energies on which they depend are profoundly different as well.  In our simple example of ‘fuel’, this can be seen to be happening literally before our eyes.  The result of each step from wood to coal to gas and onto future sources could not have been predicted from evidence of the past.  The changes are highly nonlinear.

The eighth and last Teilhard insight is that of Risk.  Human evolution is not guaranteed to continue.  Continued innovation and invention, deepening insight into the structure of the noosphere provided by new human ‘psychisms’ and improvements in globalization which tighten communications all require closer cooperation.  None of these will happen unless humans continue to have faith in their future.

The Next Post

This week we began to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to focus a two-pronged look at how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species:  The first of which is to look objectively at what we know about our history so far, and the second to see how in this view such data bears out Teilhard’s insights into human evolution.  This week we looked at a rather simple example, ‘fuel’ to illustrate this approach.

Next week we will begin a much more detailed look at the data from Norberg’s book, “Progress” to see how its statistics substantiate Teilhard’s optimistic worldview while providing the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ necessary for our faith in the future.

 

August 25, 2022 – How Can We Tell We’re Evolving?

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Are there “cogent experimental grounds’ which support Teilhard’s optimistic vision of evolution?

Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s optimistic assessment of the future of human evolution.  We have also seen how conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, suggests a much more dystopian human future.

As we have applied Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to human history, despite writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, he managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time.  Having seen how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed, we can now use the astonishing volumes of data available today to look into how they are being playing out in human evolution.

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere, into six characteristics that constitute the ‘structure of the noosphere’.

This week we will begin a survey of this noosphere as it appears today to see how contemporary objective data, Teilhard’s ‘cogent experimental grounds’, can be brought to bear on his insights.  As we will see, quantifiable data from reliable sources not only strongly substantiates his case for optimism it does so stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history.

Human Evolution Metrics

How do we go about quantifying human evolution?  One very relevant approach can be found in “Progress”, a book by Johan Norberg, which seeks to show:

“..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.”

   In doing so he alludes to a causality quite consistent with Teilhard’s ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

   Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard or cite religious beliefs.  Instead, he refers to findings from public surveys, government data, international media and global institutions such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, World Bank, UNESCO, OECD, and UNAIDS.

His approach is to parse the ‘metrics of human evolution’ into nine categories.  They are:

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

For each of these categories he provides, as the international news magazine The Economist notes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species.  He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to near- and mid- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa.  And, to the extent possible, he extends trends from antiquity to the current day.

Norberg is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the areas of human life listed above, are profoundly contrary to conventional wisdom, and he acknowledges the human tendency toward pessimism.  He quotes Franklin Pierce Adams on one source of this skepticism:

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

   His prodigious statistics clearly, and to considerable depth, offer a look quite different from the nostalgic, sepia-tinged memories the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
…

The cave man in his queer skin togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state
The dogs have had an awful wait.”

Seeing The Data Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

Over the next few weeks, we will address three of Norberg’s nine categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how they provide the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard saw as needed for us

“..to be quite certain ..that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

  This objective and verifiable historical data will serve to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test.  Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve?  If so, in what ways, how quickly, and is the trend positive or negative?

This week we will take a simple example, one not listed by Norberg but simple enough to illustrate our process:  that of ‘fuel’

The Next Post

This week we began to address Teilhard’s need for ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that would support our recognition that human evolution is proceeding in human life.  We identified the statistics that Johan Norberg has assembled on the increase in human welfare as examples of these grounds.

Beginning next week we will provide examples of how such data can be seen to support Teilhard’s optimistic projections.

 

August 18, 2022 – Using Teilhard’s ‘Lens’ to See ‘Compression’ as an Evolutionary Step

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How does Teilhard see the process of compression as enabling human evolution?

This Week

Last week we saw how Teilhard recognizes an ‘interrelation ’ thread in the ‘compression’ of the human species which underlies the action of his ‘convergent spiral’ as it spills over into human evolution.

This week we will apply his ‘lens of evolution’ to take a closer look at how it plays out in the ‘compression’ phase of human history.

   Compression, Evolution, and The Human Person

There’s much to be concerned about in the compression phase of our evolution on this planet.  The anxiety which seems so prevalent in our society today is surely not misplaced as we cautiously tread upon the bridge to the future while we are building it. Teilhard acknowledges the anxiety that arises as we move from expansion to compression:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which … divergence… still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which .. is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

At the same time, Teilhard asserts, if we know how to see it, the very compression that causes such concern can be seen as an agency necessary to our continued evolution.

Teilhard can make this seeming counterintuitive assertion based on his six observations of the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human influence on our planet:

  1. We are the latest products of evolution, and certainly subject to the same rise of complexity seen by our precedents.  Therefore, we can expect to see in ourselves the continuation of the energy of evolution that we saw at work in the previous products.  Put simply: the agency of evolution as increased ‘complexification’ will continue to find ways to assert itself in us as it had in our evolutionary precedents.
  2. Just as the ‘laws’ that worked so well for these precedents in each of their evolutionary stages were not replaced, but expanded in each new stage, this trend can be expected to continue in the ‘human stage’.
  3. Therefore, the inevitable compression in the human stage must contain some means of moving us forward. ‘New laws’ must be discovered.  As Teilhard puts it, humanity is

“…vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

  1. Thus the ‘outer push’ of compression must somehow be accompanied by an ‘inner pull’ which occurs if the human elements are to find new ways to connect which expand their ‘personness’ and become more of what they are capable of becoming. This transition from an external force which pushes us ever closer, to an internal force which pulls us together by freeing us from our limited possession of ourselves, allows compression to effect complexification. In this way Teilhard understands love as the latest manifestation of the basic force of evolution:  the only energy capable of not only uniting us by what is most unique in us but in doing so increasing our uniqueness.
  2. Human ‘invention’ is a manifestation of ‘finding new laws’ (# 3 above). John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes Teilhard 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.”

  1. Teilhard does not underestimate the risk, stressing the importance of choice, which requires the existence of faith:

“At this decisive moment when, for the first time, man… is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

Teilhard sees the need for “cogent experimental grounds” for us to have faith in the evolutionary process in which we are enmeshed.  The problem of course is that neither traditional science nor religion have thus far developed a clear picture of how evolution proceeds through the human, much less the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ which would articulate it.  In many cases, both often question the concept that it may do so at all.

It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for optimism about the evolutionary future of the human species.  Since then, human society has become ever more proficient at gathering data; we are drowning in it today.  With all the facts at our hand, is it possible to find some ‘cogent experimental grounds’ in this data to meet the need that Teilhard identifies?

The Next Post

This week we turned from using Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ from seeing ourselves as moving from expansion to compression to a more detailed look at how he sees this transition manifesting itself in the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human-induced changes to our world.  We noted his identification of both the risks that are present in this transition, as well as the need for faith in the fourteen billion year rising tide of evolution that will usher in a new phase in which compression brings complexity in the form of ‘personization’.  We noted that with all the data generated in today’s ‘dataorcacy’, is it possible to see examples of such a counterintuitive process occurring?   Next week we will begin to overview how examples of such ‘personization’ can be seen in today’s events.

August 11, 2022 – Teilhard and the Positive Side of Planetary Compression

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   How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to see the benefits hidden in human compression?

This Week

Last week we saw how human history presents the development of the human species as an ever-increasing compression as we fill up the globe, but how the application of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ helps to uncover its potential benefits..

This week we will use his ‘lens’ to recognize the continued rise of evolution’s fourteen billion march toward ‘fuller being’

A Second Look at Compression

As mentioned last week, the idea of ‘compression’ continues to have negative overtones today.  In the past few hundred years, humanity has experienced many examples of ‘compression’ which degrade human life.  In 1800, Thomas Malthus, citing such examples, predicted that future population increases would doom humans to extinction in a very short time.  Mao Zedong demonstrated that the deliberate political compression of society would lead to the deaths of millions.
Teilhard takes a different view of ‘compression’.

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   From his viewpoint, the external forces of ‘compression’ must be countered by ‘inner’ tactics of ‘interrelation’ if human evolution is to continue.

“…what appeared at first no more than a mechanical tension and a quasi-geometrical re-arrangement imposed on the human mass ..” must “.. now take the form of a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   The obvious question to one caught up in the compression of society is, how can our ‘rise in interiority and liberty’ take place in a ‘whole made up of reflective particles’?  Further, how can these reflective particles (human persons) become more ‘harmoniously interrelated’?

Part of Teilhard’s answer falls into his identification of a positive aspect of societal compression.  He relates ‘compression’ to human evolution when he states that compression

“…simultaneously and inevitably increases each human element’s radius of action and power in penetration in relation to all the others; and in proportion as it does so, it has as its direct effect a super-compression itself of the noosphere.  This super-compression, in turn, automatically produces a super-organization, and that again a super-‘consciousisation’: that in turn is followed by super-super-compression and so the process continues.”

   This assertion is quite a mouthful, but points back to his ‘convergent spiral’ and four levels of human evolution.  The phenomenon of ‘compression’ is very real and can be seen daily in the plethora of news which engulfs us.  He suggests, however, that the compression itself, since it pushes us closer together, unleashes a new phenomenon, that of ‘super-consciousisation’.  Effectively, by coming closer together, our individual ‘radius of action’ is extended, and those more economical ‘arrangements of elements’ can spread more quickly and efficiently.  While beneficial to the ‘monad’ and ‘dyad’ levels of human evolution, it is of immense value to the ‘psychism’ and ‘noosphere’ levels.

This reflects Richard Dawkins grasp of the advancement of human evolution by the spread of ‘memes’ (units of insight) through the ‘vehicle’ of human culture.  The tighter the fabric of human society is woven, the greater the opportunity for transmission of those insights which will most benefit it.

Once again, this reflects Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral” and shows the recursive influence of each of his four levels.

At the ‘monad’ level, the individual person becomes ‘fuller’ by assimilation of the cultural values available in the noosphere.

At the ‘dyad’ level, his insights, and hence his maturity, are enhanced by the close relationship afforded by love.

At the ‘psychism’ level, this fullness is increased by the extension of this dyadic energy to a wider group.

At the level of the ‘noosphere’, the collective insights from the individual’s enrichment from the noosphere, through enhancements afforded by his relationships, are refined and added to the noosphere.

Thus, the ‘super-compression’ speeds up and intensifies this recurring activity, leading not only to its ‘convergence’ but to an ever increasing enrichment of not only the individual, but the pairs, the groups and ultimately to the noosphere.

One of Teilhard’s familiar insights can be seen anew in this ontological dance.

“Fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being.”

To return to our fears of increased compression, this recurring action also illustrates the ‘interrelation’ phenomenon precisely required to offset the ‘compression’ and therefore insure our continued evolution.

Next Week

This week we saw examples of how Teilhard’s four levels of human evolution, from the ‘monad’ to the ‘noosphere’ serve as the ‘inner pull’ which counters the ‘external force’ of compression as universal evolution spills over into the milieu of human life.

Next week we will refocus our look at evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.

August 4, 2022 – Focusing Teilhard’s ‘Lens’ on Human History

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How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us place our evolution into a wider context?

This Week

   Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at human history through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  This week we will look a little more closely at how the universal rise of evolution can be seen to be active in the evolution of the human person.

A Second Look At Human Evolution

Teilhard’s vision permits us to see human evolution as powered by the same energy by which the universe has increased its complexity over time.  He begins by stepping back and observing human history through his ‘lens of evolution’.

First, a simple look at the history of humans on our planet shows that a key attribute of humans has been to expand into every possible nook and cranny of the biosphere.  In Teilhard’s graphic metaphor of the development of human society, humanity starts out from the Southern pole of an imaginary sphere, and ramifies into many threads: races, tribes, and nations.  In its expansion Northward, it spreads into an ever-increasing space. Because of this it is possible for many centuries for an arm of the ramification to remain unaware of the others.

 Second, it is obvious from this simple graphic that as humans reproduce and expand, eventually the threads will reach the midpoint, the ‘equator’, of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere.  As it does the threads begin to encounter each other.  (The resonance of this imaginary sphere with our own very real planet is obvious).  When we eventually expand into space occupied by others, we cross the imaginary equator where expansion begins to give way to compression and hence from divergence to convergence.

As is obvious from history, new tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation emerge as the stage of compression begins.  A belief persists to this day that the dire consequences of these tactics are simply an unwanted but inevitable consequence of population increase.

However, as seen in the ‘Axial Age’, (800 BC), early in this new compression stage, new paradigms of societal evolution begin to emerge.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Great Transformation”, sees civilizations across the globe beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”.

The adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift.  While certainly less religious than political, it nonetheless reflected the same rethinking.  Constantine saw the integrative potential of Christianity as a political paradigm for ensuring the smooth assimilation of the new Northern European Celts and Franks as they were incorporated into his empire.  While not abandoning the ‘compression’ tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation, Rome was beginning to adopt tactics which would add a social level of assimilation and accommodation to its tactics.

Third, that this new paradigm was slow to take hold is obvious, considering the ensuing two thousand or so years of human conflict, particularly in the West, frequently among those espousing the new religion.  The success of the new tactic, however, could be seen in the emergence of the new paradigm of democracy, underpinned by the belief in human equality first envisaged in the Axial Age.

In this three millennia of world history, we can see the ‘crossing of the equator’ and the gradual transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’.  This transition from one to the other also maps the evolution of human relationships from ones in which the individual is reduced by the contact to one in which the individual can potentially become enriched by it.

This is truly an astounding paradigm shift, first asserted by Confucius in the Axial Age, and a tactic necessary for human survival as it compresses itself:

“Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”

“In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others”.

   These simple adages are not only reflected in nearly every religion, but they also offer the earliest use of self-reference as a hermeneutic for understanding the nature of human co-existence.

Teilhard recognizes that as humanity enters the compression stage, the historical relationship between conquerors and conquered, common in the early compression stage, will no longer satisfy the need to continue evolution. The paradigm of ‘enrichment of the conqueror by diminishment of the conquered’ must give way to a different paradigm if the universal rise of complexity is to continue by the enrichment of the human person so essential to the survival of the species.

An approach more in line with Confucius than with Caesar is required.  Teilhard suggests that the tactic required is one which can unite human persons in a way in which their potential is increasingly realized.

Next Week

This week we saw examples of how Teilhard’s ‘lens’ provides a wider context for seeing our own evolution on this planet.

Next week we will expand this context to better understand how the ‘complexity’ of the human person can continue to rise even as the forces of compression increase.

July 28, 2022 – Refocusing Human Evolution via Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

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How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us put human evolution into the context of universal evolution?

This Week

   Over the past few weeks, we have looked at human history from Teilhard’s four ‘levels’ of human evolution:  The ‘monad’, the ‘dyad’, the ‘psychism’, and finally, the ‘noosphere’.  At each of these levels the march of universal evolution can be seen to continue in the ‘complexification’ of the human person and society.

This week, we will step back and review this drama of universal unfolding from a broader perspective.

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

While Teilhard recognizes an ‘axis of evolution’ in the rise of universal ‘complexity’’, he also notes that this rise is highly discontinuous.  He cites the many ‘jumps’ in evolution that science has uncovered, such as the sudden appearance of mass, the new ability of molecules to fabricate themselves, the astounding appearance of the cell, and the unprecedented arrival of the human person, marked by a consciousness that is aware of itself.   These ‘jumps’ would seem to contradict the idea of a steady undercurrent in which such discontinuities are simply brief surface eddies.

While Teilhard acknowledges the occurrence of discontinuity in evolution, he also shows how an underlying fundamental activity flows beneath these discontinues, a continuous current which powers the ‘axis of evolution’.  He notes that at each such step, the evolved element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ (atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, humans) rises not only in its complexity, but in its uniqueness.  Each new product of evolution, while initially retaining its similarity to its parent, eventually becomes more distinct and sharply distinguishable from the other products. This applies to evolution at every phase, from the Big Bang to the present.

This characteristic is very important to the recognition that human evolution occurs in the same way that all such steps have occurred in universal evolution.

Thus, an important step in seeing human evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ is to recognize that human life is powered by a cosmic agent by which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted toward ‘fuller being’.  In Teilhard’s words:

 “I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Understanding this essential current in human life helps us to recognize how we fit naturally and fundamentally into the fourteen-billion-year process which has raised the universe, as Richard Dawkins observes, “into its present complex state”.   So, if we are to understand ourselves as Teilhard suggests, we need the ‘scales to fall from our eyes’ so that we can not only take in the breadth and scope of the universe, but recognize that we fit into it naturally, as a child to a loving parent.

However, our history has shown that such a ‘descaling’ exercise is difficult to undertake.  How can a look into human history show any movement toward it?

Next Week

This week we began a look at human history in which Teilhard’s assertion that seeing ourselves through his ‘evolutionary lens’ will aid us in a ‘descaling’ exercise by which we uncover the rise of evolutionary evolution in both our lives and that of our species.

Next week we will refocus our look at human evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.