May 12, 2022 – How Does Teilhard’s Concept of Complexity Show up in Human Evolution?

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   How does universal evolution continue in human life?

Today’s Post

    For the past several weeks we have been exploring Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as a tool which would help us see the whole of existence in a single context so that we could better understand ourselves and how we fit in.  Starting with Teilhard’s unique insights into evolution itself, we have gone on to see how he saw the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ as the underlying characteristic of this evolution, and how he quantifies it.

In the last two weeks we saw how Teilhard’s seven characteristics of ‘complexification’ can be seen in each stage of the evolution of the universe, leading to the essential characteristic of ‘consciousness’.  As a necessary step to understanding evolution holistically, we saw how these characteristics appear in each new step as the universe evolves to each new stage.

This week we will return to the second, ‘biological’, stage of universal evolution (at least on this planet) to take a closer look at what can be seen in the action of ‘biological complexification’ as it increases the ‘coefficient of consciousness’ to that level which distinguishes the human from its ancestors.

Complexity in Living Things

After addressing the nine billion or so years during which the basic elements of the cosmos continuously structured and restructured themselves into the complex architecture of DNA, in the ‘Phenomenon’ Teilhard turns his insights into the ‘complexification’ of living matter as it increases from the cell to the human.

“The stages of this still unfinished march of nature (can be seen in the) unification or synthesis of the ever-increasing products of living reproduction:

– At the bottom, we find the simple aggregate, as in bacteria and the lower fungi

– One stage higher comes the colony of attached cells, not yet centralized, though distinct specialization has begun, as with the higher vegetable forms and the bryozoa,

-Higher still is the metazoan cell of cells, in which by a prodigious critical transformation and autonomous center is established (as though by excessive shrinking) over the organized group of living particles.

– And still further on, to round off the list, at the present limit of our experience and of life’s experiments, comes society- that mysterious association of free metazoans in which (with varying success) the formation of hyper-complex units by ‘mega synthesis’ seems to being attempted.

This last and highest form of aggregation is the self-organizing effort of matter culminating perhaps in society as capable of self-reflection.”

Evolution: A Rose By Any Other Name…

Most evolutionary scientists ignore the ongoing development of human society, or at least avoid the term ‘evolution’ in dealing with it.  This same curious avoidance can be seen in the ‘Standard Model’ of Physics: sciences’ understanding of the development of matter during the ‘pre life’ era.

While the Standard Model maps the phenomenon of universal ‘becoming’, the reference to it as ‘evolution’ seems to be strongly avoided.  To most biologists, the term “evolution” must be restricted to living things, and even then, only to their ‘morphology’, the physio-chemical combinations of cells that produce various classes of life.

To some extent, the emerging science of ‘molecular biology’, even though it falls under the first evolutionary stage of evolution (‘matter’), falls close to the second category (life).  This is due to the ability of very complex (but so far still inanimate) molecules to self-organize and replicate.  The existence of viruses, non-cellular but also containing DNA, also falls into the category of ‘inanimate matter’ but one capable of evolving via Natural Selection.  However, the perspective taken by most biologists is that all other process by which pre-living things ‘become’ fall outside of the label of ‘evolution’.

That aside, the question of whether, and if so how, evolution continues in the third stage (‘thought’) remains.  Human societies are without the DNA seemingly required by Natural Selection, so how can their development be considered as ‘evolution’?

It seems clear that to the extent that human evolution occurs, it does so in ways quite differently from Darwin’s process of Natural Selection.  The state of human society, and the personal acumen both required for and fostered by it, have both evolved today from a degree understood just a few hundred years ago.  But by what process has this happened?  If humans evolve via their society, what is the human counterpart of the ‘genes’ required by Natural Selection?

The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, addressed this question in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, by proposing that human society evolves via “transmission of units of cultural imitation and replication”.  His name for the ‘unit of transmission’ was ‘meme’.  The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up a ‘meme’ makes treatment by science somewhat problematic, but he recognizes that the concept is sufficient to identify a third aspect of evolution: how it can be seen to proceed ‘non-morphologically’ in the human species.  As he distinguishes it from Darwinist evolution, human culture

“…  “evolves in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution. but has nothing to do with genetic evolution.”

   Thus, with ‘memitic evolution’, we are provided an example of the last of the three phases of the process of evolution in the cosmos:

  • via the increasing organization of matter in the first, pre-life stage (‘matter’)
  • followed by the process of Natural Selection through genetic changes in biologic entities during the second stage (‘life’)
  • and finally, via the transmission of ideas in human culture in a third stage (‘thought’)

Science, in its ‘Standard Model’ shows a strong belief in the underlying unity of the cosmos but thus far has failed to quantify it as it broadens its view to these three distinct manifestations of universal evolution.

Are these, as many claim, three different processes, or can they be somehow seen, as Teilhard suggests, as three manifestations of a common, underlying thread?

Next Week

This week we took a closer look at what can be seen in the second stage of universal evolution, ‘life’, as the ‘coefficient of consciousness’ increases to that level which distinguishes the human from its ancestors.

Next week we will apply Teilhard’s seven levels of ‘complexification’ to this third phase of evolution, ‘thought’.

 

April 28, 2022 – How Does Teilhard Articulate Complexity?

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   How does complexity manifest itself in the evolution of the universe?

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Last week we saw Teilhard’s first step toward understanding evolution as recognizing that its common denominator in every phase of the unfolding of the universe is ‘increase in complexity’.  We saw how he sees the appearance of the cell as a specific instance of a ‘step of complexification’.  As he put it, the cell is just one example of

“… the stuff of the universe reappearing once again with all its characteristics- only this time it has reached a higher rung of complexity”.

      Given that the cell illustrates one step of the billions needed to grow the universe to its current complex state over fourteen billion years, how can the characteristics of complexity be seen as active in each of the steps?

This week we will review two of seven of Teilhard’s insights into how complexity can be objectively observed as a general phenomenon present in every stage of evolution.

The Cell as a Specific Example of Universal Complexification

In the ‘Phenomenon’, Teilhard lists seven characteristics of the cell that can be seen as ‘new’ when compared to its molecular ancestor.

– Thrust forward in spontaneity

– Luxuriant unleashing of fanciful creations

– Unbridled expansion

– Leap into the improbable

– Essentially new type of corpuscular grouping

– More supple and better centered organization of an unlimited number of substances

– Internal onset of a new type of conscious activity and determination

   Having recognized these characteristics, we can go on to see how each can be seen as active in each and every step of universal evolution from the quark to the human person.

Thrust forward in spontaneity

The cell clearly shows an increase in spontaneity when compared to the molecular ‘replication’ process from which it emerged.  With its greater potential for connectivity, the cell is now able to carry the simple molecular activity of ‘replication’ into the biological activity of ‘ramification’.

It requires the repackaging of DNA into a configuration with more potential for branching into ever more complex forms.  As Richard Dawkins explains, DNA itself cannot evolve.  It can only provide instructions to RNA to manufacture proteins.  However, these ‘instructions’ are susceptible to occasional failures, such as seen in tissue growths induced by x-rays.  The cell provides a vehicle for the modified DNA to prove its worth as it is exposed to the environment by the increased mobility of the cell.

Each new step of evolution, from the formation of atoms from electrons, proteins, and neutrons to the formation of brains from neurons, is accompanied by such an increase of functionality as well as potential for more complexity.  A simple metric which illustrates this phenomenon can be seen in the increasing number of ‘new’ products that result from groupings of their fewer number of precedents.  Examples include the hundred eighty types of atoms that result from groupings of their four constituent components, or the thousands of types of molecules that result from these hundred eighty atoms.  The hundred million neurons in the human brain also provides quantification of this phenomenon.

Luxuriant unleashing of fanciful creations

In capitalizing on the ‘replication’ potential of DNA, the cell offers another example of complexification.  Teilhard uses the word ‘fanciful’ to denote the ‘branching’ (or ‘ramification’) of biological products into ever more complex arrangements. With the increased complexity of the cell, the environment becomes radically more open to its activity.  Many attempts have been made to show the staggering proliferation of biological configurations (the ‘tree of life’) that science believes to have emerged from the one or two original cellular prototypes that emerged some three or so billion years ago on this planet.  Again, this can be seen to a lesser extent in ‘pre biological’ evolution (as in fabricating proteins from amino acids) and becomes even more so with the ramification seen at the other end of the biological scale: in human culture.

Next Week

This week we began a look into how Teilhard understood the action of ‘complexification’ which is active in all stages of evolution as it unfolds in the universe.

Next week we will expand this list of ‘complexification’ actions on the way to seeing them as active in the current phase of evolution, ‘thought’.

April 21, 2022 – Complexity as the Fundamental Axis of Universal Evolution

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   What does Teilhard see as the single underlying phenomenon in cosmic evolution?

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Last week we began to see how Teilhard’s insight into evolution departs significantly from that of traditional science and religion.  From science, it broadens the scope of evolution from the biological era to the whole era of existence of the known universe.  For religion, it adverts to a process by which the underlying agency of this evolution can be seen as active in each human person, and if acknowledged, can lead us on to, as Karen Armstrong suggests, “a greater possession of ourselves’.

But such a vision requires some sort of ‘metric’, a tangible activity which is active in all stages of the uplifting of the universe.  This week we will begin to address Teilhard’s insights into such a metric.

‘Complexification’ as the Essence of Evolution

Teilhard understood the process of evolution in all stages, at all times of the universe to be captured in the increase of complexity of the elements of matter.

The term can be a little slippery.  We live in a ‘complicated world’, one in which the complexity of our environment continually invades our calm even while it is adding to our comfort.  Who among us does not long for ‘simpler times’?  Using the term ‘complexity’ to suggest some sort of improvement in our lot over time can seem somewhat contradictory.

Teilhard uses the term rigorously, as he does with all those he uses to address his insights into the organization and processes of the universe.  He simply notes that in the process of evolution

“In each particular element energy is divided into two distinct components: a tangential energy which links the element with all others of the same order (that is to say, of the same complexity and the same centricity) as itself; and a radial energy which draws it towards ever greater complexity and centricity- in other words: forwards.”

   He takes note of the scientific concept of evolution that new things come from the connectivity of precedent things, but adds the missing agency: the new things can be more complex than their individual precedents.  This should be obvious: if the new things remained at the same level of their precedents, the universe would not evolve.  For example, if atoms remained at the elemental organization of their precedent neutrons, protons and electrons, there would be no stars, planets, molecules, cells, or brains in the universe.

He goes on to say

“In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law .. to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.

Explaining Complexity

If we are to differentiate between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’, a little more description will help.  Teilhard’s definition goes well beyond the simple addition of structure, and addresses how complexification can be seen in the universe.

“In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature.  The curve doubles back, the surface contracts to a point, the solid disintegrates, the liquid boils, the germ cell divides, intuition suddenly bursts on the piled-up facts…Critical points have been reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change of state-jumps of all sorts in the course of development.  This is the only way in which science can speak of a ‘first instant’.”

   In ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ he uses the cell to describe a specific example of ‘complexification’ in the evolution process.  With the cell,

“We find a triumph of multiplicity originally organically contained within a minimum of space.”

   As Richard Dawkins explains it in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, matter has reached a ‘rung of complexity’ seen in the complex arrangements of amino acids into such products as proteins, DNA and RNA.  This arrangement of matter has itself evolved to the point that not only can its components unite in ways which increase their complexity, they can also replicate it.

Dawkins notes that the next step, that seen in the further encasing of this complex molecular machine into a ‘sheath’ of skin which encloses it and increases its sphere of activity. is not such a great step as science has thought.  He would seem in agreement with Teilhard, who saw it this way:

“In this cell…what we have is really the stuff of the universe reappearing once again with all its characteristics- only this time it has reached a higher rung of complexity and thus, by the same stroke…advanced still further in interiority, ie in consciousness.”

Next Week

This week we began a look at Teilhard’s groundbreaking concept of ‘complexity’ as the underlying metric that allows the universe’s unfolding into what we are discovering today.  He uses the cell as a specific example of how the increase in complexity can be unequivocally seen in the appearance of the cell.

Next week we will expand this example into a more general look at Teilhard’s ‘complexification’ process to see how occurs not only in biological evolution but in our personal and cultural evolution as well.

April 14, 2022 – What’s Different About Teilhard’s View of E volution

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   How does Teilhard see ‘evolution’ differently from traditional science and religion?

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Last week we saw that Teilhard considered his ‘lens of evolution’ to offer a way to clarify the reality in which we are enmeshed.  The concept of ‘evolution’, however, especially as Teilhard understood it, itself needs to be clarified.

This week we will look at how his insight is quite different from traditional perspectives, and move to the integrated and wholistic perspective that Teilhard developed.

The Evolution of Evolution

Nearly all scientists and many religious thinkers (at least from the liturgical Christian expressions) recognize that the things we see around us emerged as part of a process generally referred to as ‘evolution’.  Simply stated, this term refers to the assertion that all things come to be from things which preceded them.  This simple assertion is the starting point for Teilhard’s insight that evolution offers a lens to understand reality:

“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.”

That said, there is a decidedly wide spectrum of understanding how this action of ‘coming from’ can be seen to occur.  At one end of the spectrum, strongly held in the conservative religious camp, a supernatural being simply created, ‘from nothing’, everything that exists.  To conform to the scientific fossil record, it all didn’t occur instantaneously but was sequentially created to give the appearance of doing so.  At the other end, strongly held by the more materialist scientists, the process by which things come to be what they are is understood as governed by pure chance, combined with ‘Natural Selection’ in which those random combinations of cells which survive will engender offspring and those that don’t will not.

Another issue which separates these two poles is the question of time span.  In the former, God can create what he wants in any order, beginning with the finest grains of ‘the stuff of the universe’, in as little as six thousand years.  To the scientist, this ‘stuff’ must somehow get to a very high degree of organization before Natural Selection can kick in, and this requires billions of years.  For example, it is necessary for evolution to first effect very complex inorganic molecules, such as amino acids, proteins and DNA before the emergence of the very first, most simple cells can begin.

The concept of evolution is so common today that it is difficult to realize just how recently it has risen in our collective consciousness.  It was only a little over a hundred years ago that Darwin published his thesis on biological evolution, an evolutionary ‘blink of the eye’, and this thesis, albeit with many variations, still stands as the most accepted scientific approach to understanding the origin of living things.

Within fifty years after Darwin, however, Science began to extend its inquiry into the nature of entire cosmos.  With thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, supplemented by advanced instruments and computational systems unimaginable in Darwin’s time, Science has begun to grasp the true immensity of the universe, not only in space but in time as well.

This new awareness of the seemingly infinite duration of time that it took the universe to organize into the configuration we see today also opened the question of “how did this happen?”  The discipline of Physics has continued the task of expanding our understanding of this organization with its ‘Standard Model’.  The Standard Model of the late twentieth century identifies the basic building blocks of matter, the order of their appearance and their energies of interaction, although with several gaps still to be filled.  Many of its basic assumptions have been independently tested and verified, thus offering our best and most comprehensive understanding of matter in a universal context.  Its underlying assumption is that the universe becomes what it is via the processes identified in the Standard Model; from such minute granules as quarks, through increasingly intricate components such as electrons, atoms and molecules into those which are capable of supporting the functions that we refer to as ‘living’.

Science’s monumental expansion of insight into cosmic reality, however, still possesses a gaping hole.  While the evolution of living things is somewhat explained by Natural Selection, there is no underlying concept for how the elemental granules identified by the Standard Model came to be configured into complex entities, such as DNA, which are necessary for the emergence of the cell.  The passage of time alone cannot alone account for the rungs of complexity mounted by the elemental ‘stuff of the universe’ as it precipitated sequentially from a featureless quantum of energy into such increasingly complex entities as electrons, atoms and molecules.

There’s a third stage of evolution to be considered in addition to the material and biological, that of ‘thought’.  The theory of Natural Selection works well in explaining the evolution of living things, but less so in explaining the rise in biological complexity leading up to the human, seen in such phenomena as ‘consciousness’ and ‘culture’.  Further still, the principles of biological Natural Selection would seem to apply poorly to the explanation for the subsequent evolution of the individual human person in the context of society.  The phenomenon of consciousness and an understanding of how it plays out in human culture therefore continues to be at the edge of the grasp of biology.   It is common for biologists to simply ignore human evolution at the level of consciousness, other than in the biological sense of random genetic mutation of human ‘morphology’.  That humans continue to evolve, however, cannot be denied even if the underlying principles of their evolution remain obscure.

Thus, we can see that while the term, ‘evolution’ is quite commonly used, the actual process to which it refers is much more comprehensive than can be seen at first glance.

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by recognizing that the term, “evolution” does not have a common meaning

Next week we will use Teilhard’s lens of evolution to see how this ‘phenomenon’ is the essential activity in the universe as it unfolds into its current state.

 

April 7, 2022 –  Teilhard’s Vision of Cosmic Evolution

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  To understand Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we must first look at how he defines ‘evolution’

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard asserted that to make sense of things in a way that our skills at navigating the winds and currents of life become more successful, we must learn to see these things more clearly.  He offers his ‘lens of evolution’ as a tool for doing so.

As we will see this week, Teilhard’s concept of evolution goes well beyond that commonly found in the scientific as well as the religious communities.

Teilhard’s Understanding of Evolution

Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to undo and heal the many ‘dualisms’ that have risen in humankind’s attempt to understand reality, we must first address his comprehensive understanding of ‘evolution’.  In his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he emphasizes in very strong terms how he considered evolution as such an underlying hermeneutic for understanding reality.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow: such is evolution.”

   His repetition of the term ‘all’ indicates his belief that putting everything that can be seen into the context of evolution will result in a significant clarification of the reality which surrounds us.  Such a context, however, is not one that can be easily found in ‘conventional wisdom’.

To begin with, the term ‘evolution’ itself is not one which on which significant agreement exists.  The most common use seems to be that of biology’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, first proposed by Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the universal small time scale of a few billion years.  Teilhard, recognizing the incompleteness of such an approach, insists that any perspective which purports to address all of reality must by definition address, as Julian Huxley says in his introduction to the “Phenomenon”

“…the material and physical world,… the world of mind and spirit.. the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many and the one.”

      Thus, if Teilhard’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is to meet his lofty intent it must offer an approach to understanding all phenomena over all stretches of time and all expanses of space.

Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ everything can be seen in a natural context which can be approached in empirical terms, from physical events in the past, to the oft confusing cacophony of current human affairs.  It goes forward to address the bridges to a future that will take us to the ‘fuller being’ that the fourteen billion years of uplift in the universe suggests is possible.

To identify evolution as the underlying principle which explains the appearance of things as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, neutrons, humans, poems songs and cultures, it is necessary to first identify a metric which is common to all, and therefore by which all things can be seen in a unified context.   Again, from Teilhard

“Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   And in that ‘elaboration’, Teilhard suggests, can be found the missing metric.

“There is not one term in this long series (from quarks to persons) but must be regarded, from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and electrons.  This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes.

    In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.

Hence, recognizing that the universe unfolds in the direction of increased complexity is a necessary first step for understanding how everything fits together.  The “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by understanding that the fundamental metric at work in the evolution of the universe is the ‘phenomenon of increased complexity’.

Next week we will look a little more closely at how this ‘phenomenon’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.

 

March 30, 2022 –  Teilhard’s ‘Lens of Evolution’

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   How does Teilhard see universal evolution as a hermeneutic for understanding reality?

Today’s Post

We have been looking at how the human person and the society in which we live can be seen by Teilhard in a distinctively optimistic light.  We have also seen that Johan Norberg’s statistics shine this light even brighter but, how there seems to be a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species.   We also saw how Steven Pinker identifies several examples how this headwind is evident in contemporary society today.

These ‘headwinds of pessimism’ that we addressed in the past two weeks are indeed real and impossible to ignore.  They did not appear recently, but depend on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings, and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.

Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to such headwinds.  If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to

“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’.  He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons, and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness.  As he put it (and please forgive my overuse of this quote):

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

   In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be.  As he puts it in more poetic terms, the insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   To experience one’s self as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’.  A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,

“The ground of being is on our side”

    will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift.

But the act of experiencing is somewhat dependent upon understanding.  Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing.  This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’.  It is his ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

This week we introduced Teilhard’s fundamental approach to ‘making sense’ of reality and our role in it: seeing reality through the ‘lens of evolution. From this perspective, he believed that the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.

Next week we will begin to see how Teilhard’s view of evolution was unique in many ways, but how his expanded view enabled the whole of the universe, including the human person, to be understood holistically and therefore lead to a clearer understanding of our part in it.

March 24, 2022 –  Mapping the Headwind of Pessimism

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   Two more facets of pessimism in human society today.

Today’s Post

In answering the question, “Why isn’t Teilhard’s optimism better reflected today?”, we have noted how the seemingly existential need for pessimism in human society inhibits the holistic view of life from which Teilhard derives his great optimism.

Last week we looked into three aspects of such pessimism that Steven Pinker sees in human culture today:  the Ubiquity of News, Miscalibration and the Negativity Bias.  In all three could be seen trends today which tend to color our outlook on life in dystopian ways.

This week we will look an additional two facets that he saw at work in this ‘existential’ outlook.

Progressophobia, Part Two

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 that can be seen 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 two weeks ago, the affluence of the children of Billy Graham, popular Protestant speaker of the last century (and many Evangelicals today) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that all pessimism is bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about evils 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 facet of existential pessimism 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 a pleasure not unlike that from 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.”

Pinker summarizes Norberg when he cites that

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

   But he goes on to cite an underlying cause of pessimism due to the fact that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such ‘fruits of evolution’ as seen in Norberg’s facets of global  welfare at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so rare presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard addresses what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.  Like Pinker, he remarks on what there is to be seen once we have the proper perspective.

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

   Pinker presents us with six distinct examples of such ‘scales’ and how they prevent us from seeing the astounding rate at which our personal and cultural evolution is rising.

The examples that we have seen illustrate 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.  Failure to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to the ‘greater consciousness’ which is necessary to the ‘more completeness’ required by the future.

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will address a more universal aspect of Teilhard.  As noted many times in this blog, Teilhard proposed using the ‘lens of evolution’ to view reality from a single integrated and comprehensive perspective.  From his perspective, the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.

March 17, 2022 –  The ‘Progressophobic’ Headwind of Pessimism

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   Three facets of pessimism in human society which resist Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the future

Today’s Post

Last week we noted that despite the generally positive aspects of human evolution as postulated by Teilhard and quantified by Johan Norberg, there is a steady undercurrent of belief that things are going from better to worse, leading from more perfect past to a dystopian future.

This week we will look at three facets of this phenomenon in which those who have benefited most from Teilhard and Norberg’s articulation of progress seem to be those that most fail to see it.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Stephen Pinker, in his book “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, people 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?  Pinker offers a few suggestions.

   Ubiquity of News – We 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, negative news sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant.  As an example, 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 (as Johan Norberg documents) 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’, it is “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, to some extent, 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, quality of life improved, relationships deepened, or their future brighter than their past.  Effectively, lack of clarity about the past can be seen to lead to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work.  One reason for such negative bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic brains) continue to stimulate us 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 stimuli from these ‘lower’ brains will cease.

It also illustrates the incomplete maturity of our 200,000-year-old neocortical skills.  Teilhard sees humanity as still in the early stages of its evolution.  He notes that just as the cell emerges in evolution as “dripping in molecularity”, so our human brains emerge as “dripping in animality”.  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 as still in an early evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that after a mere 200,000 years, we have yet to become fully aware of the current that has carried us so faithfully thus far.  Teilhard suggests that as our understanding of the cosmos continues to widen, we will learn to navigate this current more successfully.

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

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will explore Steven Pinker’s parsing of this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 10, 2022 –  The Difficulty in Seeing Evolution in Human Life

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   Why is the optimism of Teilhard and Norberg so difficult to see?   

Today’s Post

   In looking into Johan Norberg’s data on human evolution, Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the human’s place in the universe is clearly substantiated.  Norberg documents several objective and fact-substantiated measures of Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, as it rises through the human species, both in the individual person and the cultural edifices that result.

As both Norberg and Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) point out, however, this data, while factually supporting Teilhard’s optimism, seems to be poorly echoed in the opinions of those who benefit from it the most.

Teilhard mentions the inevitability of a positive outlook on life when he asserts that

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

   But given the amount of pessimism in the world today, it seems evident that either there is little recognition of the ‘universal will’ or that this recognition is not understood as the positive nature of our lives.

This week we will look into what causes such ‘popular dystopia.”

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

In looking at 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.

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. The parallel depictions of a ‘vengeful’ and a ‘loving’ God, alongside those of a ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ humanity in the Bible are obvious.

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’ which will doom us to ‘early extinction’.

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.  This emphasis was in distinct contrast to that of the Reformation, which Pinker sees in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger and Sartre.

In the Protestant Reformation, the essential positive message of Jesus seen in the New Testament became secondary to the need to understand the human species 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 by the same God which created it.

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, evolving aimlessly 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 such as those cited by Norberg.  Even his actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of 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”.

Next Week

This week we took a first look at why the positive view of the ‘ground of being’ so clearly expressed in the New Testament and recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Newt week we will explore this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 3, 2022 –  Teilhard and Norberg on The Direction of Evolution

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   Teilhard is often criticized for his optimistic view of evolution.  How does Norberg substantiate it?    

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have seen examples how human evolution can be placed into the context of the unfolding of universal reality as well as how details can be seen in both science and history.  Teilhard was one of the first to attempt this as he encapsulates in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”. His insights, however, were criticized as ‘too material’ for the Church and ‘too spiritual’ for science.  A criticism found in both milieus found his insights of ‘holy matter’ and ‘a God of Nature’ to be idealistic and naive, and thus unfit for either making sense of reality much less of our place in it.  A particular critique common to both was that, considering the unending evils which surround us, his pervasive optimism was distinctly unwarranted.
Having seen how evolution proceeds through the unfolding of the universe, and how universal causality increases its complexification in the human, how can Teilhard’s optimism, echoed by Norberg, be not only justified, but emerge in human life as a ‘current to the open sea’?

What can we see?

   Teilhard is often 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 this is less a statement 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 emerge simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg quantifies it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered sooner in the West than in the East is evidence that the human potential for betterment 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 individual freedom is “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 Korea where 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 in East Germany following its partition after WW II.

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.”

   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, what is the risk that such prevalent pessimism will undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next Week

This week we began to explore the curious denial of progress that seems strongest among those who have benefited from it the most.  If Teilhard’s optimism, backed by Norberg’s data, is correct, this should be a time for rejoicing in our progress instead of lamenting that ‘we’re still not there yet’.

Next week we will look more closely into why this seems to be the case.