Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

August 23 Summing Up Norberg in the Light of Teilhard’s Vision

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Today’s Post

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

This week, I’d like to wrap up this part of the blog, in which we have looked at the data which substantiate Teilhard’s audacious optimism, with a summary of what we have seen in the past four posts.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   These four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that contrary to ‘conventional wisdom’, human evolution can be seen to be advancing on nearly all fronts.  We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

In the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, for example, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997.  He asserted that “Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history.  Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”  He is saying that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

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

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

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

   And the reason?

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

   And what’s changing?

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

   As Norberg sums it up:

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

…What can we see?

   Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply noted 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 what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas have to start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the noosphere, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be added: “When allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where they are not allowed, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.

…And Why Can’t We See it?

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’.

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

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

August 2 – Food As a Measure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a cursory look at an aspect of human activity that provides a basis for assessing Teilhard’s forecasts for human evolution.  Without going into statistical details, we saw how well Teilhard’s insights are borne out by this cursory look at the topic of ‘Fuel’.

This week we will extend our search to the topic of ‘Food’ but, using Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, this time we’ll include some key statistics that will sharpen the point even finer

Norberg’s Statistics on Food’s impact on Human Evolution

First off, let’s take a look at some of Norberg’s statistics.  In this first look at his evolutionary metrics, he cites over thirty-three statistics which quantify how food, its availability and its production and distribution have increased human quality of life over the span of known human history.  Obviously, we won’t have room go into details on each, but there’s no question that each one is an example of the exponential rise in human welfare.

Famine   Few metrics are more pervasive than the incidence of famine in human history.  Norberg notes that in just four years in the fifteenth century, famine claimed the lives of one out of every fifteen people, just in Europe.  This wasn’t a unique period, with the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century.  The death toll was horrendous.  Between 1870 and 2015 there have been 106 episodes of mass starvation.  With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, it was not unexpected for Thomas Malthus to predict, early in the 18th century, that in a few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail.  However, statistics show an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now.   27M died from 1900-1910.  Then several million due to wartime famine from 1930 to 1943, then several more in the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, with just one major area today, and that is North Korea.    Further, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, it is now based on poor government.  Norberg notes that “No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because, “Rulers who are dependent on voters to 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.  Norberg notes that the discovery that ammonia could be synthesized led to the production of artificial fertilizer which immediately increased crop yield.  The invention of automated product extraction added another boost, such as harvesters and milkers:

o   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

o   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 timeframe, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours.  Further, 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 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 world malnutrition dropping from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

This has also increased human stature.   In both East 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.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

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

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

Globalization 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.  Where the effect of globalization comes in is where such innovation can transfer to other countries where governmental overreach is being reduced by the installation of democratic institutions.  In general, this is nearly always occurs in a West-to-East direction.

Inner Pull  Such amazing 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’ 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 effected.  Note that most of them found in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years.  In the estimated eight thousand generations thought to 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 the ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading in 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, 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 the times did not occur.  While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially.  Even today, there are still writers 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 (eg molecule to cell).  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play inhuman evolution, as the innovations we have seen this week clearly show

Risk  Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for a non-existing but attractive past, the practices of invention and globalism can be undermined.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the paucity of faith which can be seen today.  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.

 The Next Post

This week we took a look at the first of Norberg’s evolutionary characteristics, that of ‘Food’ to see how his statistics show a general improvement in human condition over a very short time, and how Teilhard’s evolutionary forces can be shown to active in them.

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

July 19 – Is Human Evolution Proceeding? How Would We Know?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of evolution in the human species.  We spent two weeks looking at conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, which suggests that things are going downhill.

As we have seen over the course of this blog, Teilhard,  in spite of writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time.  We are now looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed.

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere into several characteristics that he believed to 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 can be brought to bear on his insights.  As we will see over the next several weeks, by looking at quantifiable data from reliable sources his case for optimism is stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history

The Characteristics Of The Structure of the Noosphere

Teilhard’s basic assertion is that the universal thread of evolution continues its fourteen billion year rise thru the human species.  In his vision, Evolution produces products of increasing complexity over time, and this process can reliably be expected to continue through the human, the latest such product.

Here’s how he suggests that we can see it in play:

  1. Evolutionary laws Continue in the Human The ‘laws’ governing universal evolution may have changed as the level of complexity has increased, but the energies themselves continue to morph into ever new manifestations (‘changes of state’)
  2. Inner Pull vs External Push  Evolution is bringing us into ever closer proximity via the ‘compression of the noosphere’ (external compression).  This requires humans to effect paradigms of internal cohesion if the fundamental evolutionary law by which elements are joined in such a way as to continue their ‘complexification’ is to obtain
  3. Evolution from Compression If these paradigms are developed, such ‘compression of the noosphere’ can be expected to not only continue human complexification, but speed it up.
  4. Human Invention As an effect of this internal cohesion, humans can be seen to be ever more capable of inventing what is needed to continue their evolution at a time when it is needed.  “The future may not be able to be predicted, but it can be invented” (John McHale).
  5. Globalization of Invention Once such evolutionary breakthroughs are made, the increasing compression of the noosphere which effected the discovery also makes it quicker to spread
  6. The Risk of Human Evolution Since humans are now in a position to either continue or fail future evolution, there is a risk that lack of confidence in the future may result in the absence of a future.

Metrics of Human Evolution

With all that said, 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 the existence of an ‘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.

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 noted international news magazine 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 Mi- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa, and to the extent possible, from antiquity to the current day.

Then,  Why the Pessimism?

He is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the metrics 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 some depth offer quite a different look at the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
His grandpa in his house of logs
Swore things were going to the dogs.
His dad among the Flemish bogs
Vowed things were 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.”

Our Approach

The approach that I will take in this last section of the blog is to take each of his above categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s characteristics above, and his forecasts for the future, are borne out by them.

 

The Next Post

This week we identified the approach of the last phase of this blog, which is to take an objective, data- supported look at the past, identify current, quantified trends, and begin to see just how prescient Teilhard was in his optimistic vision of the future.

Next week we will begin this process by looking at the first of Norberg’s eight facets of human evolution, ‘Food’.

July 5 – Navigating the North Hemisphere- What Tools Do We Have to Work With?

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded a two week look at crossing our metaphorical equator and progressing into a mileu in which the ground rules of antiquity which seemed to serve us so well as we moved Northward now seem to be less valuable in in this new stage of the journey. The new hemisphere is not seems less favorable to us in our favor but problems seem to mount more quickly as well.

Since it’s Teilhard’s metaphor, it seems reasonable to look at his insight into how the totality of cosmic evolution is playing out on our planet, and his take on what tools we may have available to us in maneuvering among the many rocks into which we seem to be carried.

“Everything Which Rises Must Converge”

This quote from Teilhard (The Future of Man) is rather well known, but given the curvature of his metaphorical sphere, it can now appear as threatening.  The quote we saw last week applies just as well here:

“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 the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As it is the very basic force of evolution that is compressing us on our planet with its finite surface, does this imply that at the heart of cosmic evolution lies a convergence which threatens to extinguish the very flame of rising complexity that it has, thus far, nourished?

And as Teilhard sees it, the source of the damping of this flame can not only be found in the crushing force of convergence from without, but in our response to it from within.  He notes the danger that looms when humans begin to feel helpless in its wake:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is..) 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.”

What we need, he is saying, is a hermeneutic to be able to interpret the new and strange dimensions found North of his ‘equator’.  Such a hermeneutic, a lens for interpretation, a context for making sense, is precisely what Teilhard offers.

Teilhard’s Hermeneutic For Understanding Human Evolution

Teilhard firstly restates the need for such a hermeneutic:

“…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.”

    He then asks us to relook at what is actually happening with human evolution from his expanded and unified context of universal evolution:

“(is it possible that) the individual human brain has, since the end of the Quaternary, really arrived at the limit set by physics and chemistry to its progress in complexity?  Even then, it would still remain true that since that time, as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation.  Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

   In this succinct statement, Teilhard  pinpoints the potential of the evolutionary product of the human neo-cortex, which expands the playing field of evolution from the actions of chromosones to the actions of humans.  While the curvature of our planet may well force us into increasingly uncomfortable proximity, the ‘sphere’ of the human ‘psychism’ offers a seemingly infinite surface onto which it is possible to expand:

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

   Thus, instead of finding danger in the mechanical compression imposed by the Earth’s ‘sphericity’, he sees opportunity:

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

   He sees a cycle in which human person functionality increases with increasing population compression:

“…This increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power (in which man’s compression upon our planet is ultimately expressed) 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.”

   To Teilhard, therefore, this external compression effects an internal complexification in which new levels of both consciousness and relationships are possible:

“Thus through the combined influence of two curves, both cosmic in nature- one physical (the roundness of the earth) and one psychic (the reflective’s self attraction), mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.”

   So, not unlike how the stars compress simple atoms into complex ones more capable of even more complex arrangements in the form of molecules, instead of the impersonal crush of human masses he notes:

“Man is now realizing that this cosmic spindle corresponds, on the contrary, to the concentration upon itself of a force that is destined to find in the very heart released by its convergence sufficient strength to burst through all the barriers that lie ahead of it- whatever they may be.”

   This is the heart of Teilhard’s  great optimism,  that the agency of evolution, the principle by which evolution increases the complexity of its products, steadily increasing its irradiance through billions of years, and is still alive and well and working in the human species.  As he puts it a bit more poetically:

“Like those translucent materials
which can be wholly illumined
by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests to the christian mystic
as bathed in an inward light
which brings out its structure,
its relief, and its depths…
a tranquil, mighty radiance.”.

I Read The Newspapers.  Is Such Audacious Optimism Warranted?

This is a perennial criticism of Teilhard.  Conventional science shows no ‘improvement’ in the human as an evolutionary product with time, so surely evolution, if it still continues, isn’t changing us in any particular direction.  And even the most casual glance at daily news offers any consolation.  So it can be legitimately asked, “is there really anything to such increased complexification via Teilhard’s ‘psychism?”

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The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on.  Next week we will continue casting the net for other counter-intuitive perceptions, but this time by looking at current events.

June 28 – The Future of the Past

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the future.  As we noted, on the surface, it’s not necessarily pretty.  Even though we are some eighty years out of a global quagmire from which, for a while, seemed capable of destroying civilization as we knew it, other threats seem to incessantly loom.  Last week we considered, “with all this, can there be a basis of optimism?”

This week, we will continue to explore Teilhard’s metaphor of the sphere as a surface that we must navigate is we move increasingly Northward from open territories and plentiful resources into a space that closes up on us even as we continue to multiply and consume.

Crossing the Equator

   Let us focus for a moment on that critical point, the ‘equator’ of the sphere: the point at which each new wave of expansion is met by a reduction of space and an increase in tension.  The massive two ‘world wars’ of the past century certainly seem to reflect the inevitable conflagration that occurs when literally the whole world, with all of its arms of expansion, seems to be bent on conquest.  The sheer size of the conflict intensified by the destructive efficiency enabled by advancements in technology, made the carnage so unbelievable that still, some eighty years later, it is very difficult to put it all into perspective.  Literally every family in our United States was impacted by the loss of life or property that resulted from these wars.  In Europe and Asia, the effects were even more devastating.  Although it may be true that ‘literally’ the whole world was not bound up in them, they were significant enough to register as true ‘world’ conflicts.
Can we say with some confidence that the past few hundred years mark the ‘crossing’ of Teilhard’s ‘equator’?  The histories of clashing civilization in antiquity all point to an increase in human conflict as time goes on.  Now that we can forecast the loss of space and resources to be expected as we enter the North half of our metaphorical sphere, it seems safe to expect yet more of what we have come so vividly to see in the past.  Is the future of the past the past?  As the tensions of the increasing pressures from human expansion continue to grow, can we expect even more such ‘world wars’?

As Teilhard sees it, the perception that we are surely moving into uncharted territory is well warranted:

“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 the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As Teilhard points out, it’s not just that things are becoming tighter and less comfortable as we cross over into this new mileu, it’s that they are happening at an increasing rate.  No sooner do we become inured to some new and uncomfortable aspect of our society than some new innovation is discovered to have a negative impact on our lives.  Our homes become more comfortable as our environment is endangered, our wealth increases even as the number of people dissatisfied with life increases, those behaviors that, in retrospect, brought us safely through adolescence into responsible adulthood, now seem to have become antiquated, even injurious, to our children.  Our acquisitions, now easier to acquire, offer less and less satisfaction.  While such changes have always occurred in history, never before have they seemed to be so drastic so quickly.  In a single lifetime, we now see, it seems that the world we live in has changed drastically from the one into which we were born.

Then, the problem seems to be greater with ‘resources’.  It seems today that we are ‘running out of everything’.  Even more importantly, as Richard Rohr frequently observes, we are running out of ‘love’.   Even the most casual review of current events reveals a seemingly endless increase in scorn, bullying and disdain in our social norms.  It has become commonplace to revile competitors, demonize enemies (a class in which more and more others seem to belong) and disparage those not in our ‘class’.

This ‘casual review’ also surfaces another aspect of our new Northern Hemisphere.   The increasing cheek-to-jowl packing of the noosphere speeds up the dissemination of information.  As a commodity, to compete for the eyes and ears of subscribers, the news must be increasingly ‘clickworthy’.  ‘Bad news’ sells much better than ‘good news’.  Not only do we get much more of it, but what’s alarming about life (and there is much to cause us alarm) occupies an increasing percentage of what we read.

Indeed, the ‘tightening’ of the noosphere as we cross over into this uncharted territory seems to be squeezing the capacity for forbearance, patience. out of our lives.  As the news is so quick to print, such breakdown of tolerance shows up frequently in acts of personal violence.  The ownership of half the world’s billion guns by the citizens of a single nation, especially one evidentially so irritable, surely is a recipe for instability.

Given all this, such aspects of life as Paul’s ‘fruits of the spirit’ (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness) now seem antiquated, suitable for another time when seen in the light of current events, even at the exact time when they are most needed.

The Next Post

   This week we took a closer look at this unique and danger-filled era of human history when we seem to be crossing Teilhard’s metaphorical equator.   Teilhard cites the error of looking to the past for the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that will serve our navigation of this new, Northern hemisphere.  As we saw last time:

 “…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   For this new hemisphere, he sees the need for new articulations, more appropriate to the new terrain that we are entering.  Next week we will continue our exploration of this new terrain, not by looking further into the dangers that lie ahead, but into the human capabilities for managing life that we are only recently (in evolutionary terms) becoming aware of.

June 21 – Where Is All This Taking Us?

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our series of posts on the structure and navigation of the milieu in which we are immersed, the noosphere.  We followed the sacraments, values and morals which humans have (so far) fabricated in an attempt to order the seeming cacophony of personal human energies in ways beneficial to both the person and society on the one hand, and the attitudes and stances that can be taken in order to receive the maximum benefit of our noospheric navigation on the other.  The question can be asked, however, “To what end?”
This week we will begin to take a look at the future.  Although Teilhard’s mystical experience of the ground of being was balanced by a strong empiricism, heavily informed by his deep scientific bent, he applied both of these strengths in a vision of how those religious and scientific perspectives can be seen as guides to moving us towards the future.

Surveying the Status

A good way to begin to look at the future is to understand the past and the present.  Teilhard offers a wonderful use of metaphors in his writings, and one excellent example is that of ‘the sphere’.  He develops this metaphor to peer into the future at the end of his book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, which he presented as a somewhat simplified rewrite of his “Phenomenon of Man”.

Consider, he proposes, a geometric sphere with north and south poles, meridians from south to north, and an equator ‘round the middle.  In this metaphor, the axis from south to north represents time, with the south pole representing the past, and the north the future.

In this metaphor, he sees the human race beginning as a small population at the south pole, and as it branches  into its various (‘manifold’) manifestations of families, tribes, cities, states and countries, it ‘ramifies’, spreads out, seeking unsettled territory and available resources as it enlarges, and as it grows it progresses towards the equator.

As this wave of human expansion approaches the equator, due to the curvature of the surface of the sphere, the amount of available territory necessarily decreases with the increase in human population.  This of course increases the tensions among the branches of human population as they begin to compete with each other for the remaining space and resources.

At the same time, consider, he suggests, that the individual human entity (the ‘person’) does not appear as a finished product of evolution, with any particular expertise in utilizing the unique capability with which he has been endowed, the neo-cortex brain.  Just as with the cell at its birth resembles the molecule from which it evolved (“it arrives ‘dripping in molecularity’”), an onlooker at this first moment of human evolution would have been hard pressed to distinguish the new human ‘person’ from its predecessor ‘higher anthropoids’.

As a result, it should not be surprising that in these early years, the human was more subject to the influences of the same instinctual stimuli which served ancestors so well, than able to modulate these stimuli with actions stemming from the new level of brain which is unique to the human species.   And, further, given the slow increase in the tensions resulting from closer contact with humans from other, alien. and potentially dangerous, social units, it’s not surprising that the instinctual needs for resources and survival would outweigh any thoughts of cooperative engagement at this early stage of development.

Then, there is the agency of basic human mistrust.  We do not seem to ‘naturally’ seek closeness with those outside our closely-knit family or clan groups.  We recoil from being forced into closeness with others that we did not initiate ourselves.  And, as a result, when it becomes more necessary for our small, familiar groups to federate into larger states, the problem of ‘cohesion vs aggression’ begins to rise.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbors, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character.  The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?”

One answer, repeated over and over in history, is that you don’t.  In order to assure the stability of a society which grows in size as it increases in diversity, one tactic is total control over the individuals that make it up.  The objective is not ‘trust’, which comes from within, it is ‘control’, which is imposed from without.  The police state, which insures order at the expense of personal autonomy, has been common to nearly all civilizations going back to antiquity, and still can be found today.   Even in those societies which have tried to equitably accommodate the person and the state, there are many who abhor the ‘closing in’ of outsiders.   As Teilhard remarks, in terms that are as applicable to  today’s Western societies as they were when he expressed them seventy years ago:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   Given this state of affairs, what sort of light does Teilhard see ahead?  Can there be a basis for optimism?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at where the flow of evolution which we have been addressing may be taking us.  At first glance, it might well seem that the future of an increasing human population on a world of decreasing space and resources is one to be considered with some trepidation.  Is the future of the past the past?  Do we anticipate ‘more of the same, only moreso’?

As we will see in the remaining posts of this blog, however, based on the picture we have constructed, anchored firmly on Teilhard’s clear-headed foundations, there is indeed a strong case for optimism in both our lives as persons who make up this population and the organization of our human energy which makes up our societies.

June 14 – Summing Up: “Articulating the Noosphere” and Living the “Theological Virtues”- Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard understood  the ‘spheres’ of existence (and the difficulty that both science in religion have dealing with them) as the first part of summing up the last fifteen posts.  This week we will review how he saw overcoming the duality in such traditional approaches and how such an understanding can lead to our navigation of the noosphere not only successfully, but joyfully.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it’s not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident between all the different perspectives of the spheres of existence,, but the lack of a more comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution affords the possibility of bringing all four of these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them.  (See the posts on “The Teilhardian Shift” for a more comprehensive treatment of his unique insights).

So from this unique insight Teilhard sees the noosphere in need of a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  If this can be done, it is possible that whatever structure which underpins this context will provide the light that we need in order to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence to be in need of our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require.   In his words

 “The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.” (Parentheses mine)

   More to the point, he goes on to say

“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”

  with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to

“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Navigating the Noosphere

In a quote I have frequently used, Teilhard remarks that

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

  As we saw in the post on “Grace and the DNA of Human Evolution”, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ that Jesus offers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution.  This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing for the past fifteen weeks, come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we saw in the posr on “Hope” those wonderful ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ which are promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  In our secular context, they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following His (sic) laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a wonderful way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’.  The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still under construction) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’

The Next Post

In the last fifteen posts we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it.  The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.

But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin  explore it as we begin to conclude this blog by looking at where evolution is taking us.

May 10 – Virtues: Love, Part 4, Evolution Become Conscious of Itself

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how in Teilhard’s insights into evolution as a truly universal process, he understood each step of evolution as resulting from a union which produced something new.  He refers to this critical step (without which the universe would be static, unchanging, and effectively ‘still born’) as ‘complexification’.  From such a vision of the past, he extrapolates to a vision of human love as ‘nothing more’ (and he would add, ‘nothing less’) than the continuation of such a universal dynamic in each human life.

This week we will continue our exploration of this dynamic a little further, seeing how while such a process indeed continues in our lives, it becomes more complex in itself.

Excentration and Centration as The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Person

The Excentration-Centration reciprocal activity is drawn from two Teilhard insights.  First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’.  In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, nuclei in cells, central nervous systems in animals, and brains in higher animals.  Second, he notes that “. .in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness.. by a sort of inward turn towards the Other (as) its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration”.
Effectively, centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but they unite in order to increase their own complexity as well. This recursive action, such increase in ‘centricity, however,’ requires an increase in ‘excentricity’ in order to effect the increased complexity of both partners.

Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships.  Such a dynamic seems to have first been recognized by Confucius some five hundred years BCE,

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

   Jesus himself asserted that we must ‘lose’ ourselves in order to ‘find’ ourselves.

In such a dynamic, “excentration” can be seen to foster a renewed “centration“, which in turn fosters a continued “excentration” and so on.  In this rich recursive rondo, both persons become more complete, more “realized of their potentials” than before.  Essentially, in this way our relationships are the fertile ground for our growth. This growth in turn fosters the deepening of our relationships, which further fosters our growth.

Such a process goes far beyond responding to instinctive urges to procreate, or to fulfilling emotional needs for comfort.  It is the essential act by which we become what it is possible for us to become.

But, It Ain’t Easy

That said, if the current state of the world offers any clue, it is not a trivial undertaking.  As many of our popular love songs suggest, if it were easy they’d be more of it.

Love as understood by Teilhard does not come without work: it requires a conscious decision to rise above the comforting scaffolding of ego.  As the Marriage Encounter movement stresses, “Love is a decision”, and such decision requires trust that the energy of love will carry us forward to more completeness.  As we have suggested previously, one of the principle mechanisms of our personal ‘complexification’ is development of the skill of using our neocortex brains to moderate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains,  Such skill in ‘decision making’ is a critical facet of this evolutionary skill.

As we only have to look into our own lives to verify, these dynamics of excentration and centration are not without cost.  The process of excentration, traditionally of “loss of one’s self”, “transcendence of egoism”, or even more descriptive of the difficulty, “dying to self”, does not come easy.  As Khalil Gibran says, “The pain you feel is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”.  One aspect of a secular approach to sin can be seen in the resistance, even the avoidance, that we offer to such a painful undertaking.

The acknowledgement of the difficulty of such an undertaking better delineates the domains of the ‘Theological Virtues”.  In order to take the risks that Love requires, we must have Faith in our power to do so and Hope in the ensuing outcome before we can take the leap that Love requires.

So, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ and ‘differentiated’, we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first assemblages of electrons.  There are, in the human however, two significant exceptions.

The first can be seen in that, while primitive particles could unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, human ‘particles’ can unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of themselves.

The second, which is much more important, is that these human entities must first understand, then trust and finally consciously cooperate with this complex energy to effect such complexity.  This is where the three ‘Theological Virtues’ come in.

Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’

As we have seen, the ‘Theological Virtues’ have an importance that goes far beyond the conventional religious goal of qualification for the next life.  In our secular reinterpretation, they represent the stances, attitudes that are necessary for our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.

Teihard stresses the need for Faith in this process of understanding and cooperating in the excentration/centration: belief that the self will not be lost in this journey from past to future; it will be enhanced.  The true, underlying, core nature of the human person that results from the long rise of consciousness mapped by our knowledge of the past continues to follow the thread of cosmic evolution which leads to the Hope of greater possession of ourselves in the future.  This thread of complexity which has manifested itself in the current which runs through life, awareness and consciousness now continues as Love which powers the engine of our becoming.  While the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as mapped by the concepts of sacraments, values and morals can be seen as the early markers of the pathway of the axis of evolution as it rises in our lives, the ‘Theological Virtues’ offer an increased understanding of how these articulations can be ‘lived out’ in our personal ‘complexification’.

The Next Post

This week we continued to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fifthl look at the Theological Virtues by seeing how Love can be seen as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope.

April 19 – Virtues: Love, Part 1 – Cooperating With the Energy of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of Faith and Hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ spiral that extends our knowledge of the past to confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, Love.

The Traditional Approach to Love

   Paul, who first delineated these three ‘attitudes’, saw Love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was essential to Jesus’s message.  While he saw Faith and Hope as necessary to fullness of being, he understood that Love was that which brings the whole picture together.  Paul goes into some detail in his description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:

“Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

   As is commonly understood in contemporary society, the traditional theological approach to Love treats as an ‘act’.  We are to “love one another” as one of the many criteria for eternal life after death.  As Jesus taught, we are to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves, restating Confucius’ statement of the Golden Rule from some 500 years earlier.

As Teilhard insists, however, even though humanity may be only in the early stages of such ‘articulations of the noosphere’, at least in the West the values of the uniqueness of the person and the necessity of relationships that enhance this uniqueness are paramount.  Any approach to regulation or enhancement of this relationship that impedes this understanding of personal growth also impedes the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

Nearly all the ancient thinkers recognized that a key to human maturity lay in the person’s rise above “egoism” both as a building block for personal growth and as a necessary component of relationship.  The concept of “losing” oneself, overcoming ‘ego’, as a step toward spiritual fulfillment is common in many venerable systems of thought.  The actual practice in which these results occur varies significantly among the religions and philosophies in which they are critical, but all the thinkers of the “Axial Age” (900-200 BCE) recognized that you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. As Confucius put it:

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

   Karen Armstrong sees this perspective as common to the thinkers of the Axial Age.

“In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.  They understood that this reciprocal process required that we treat others as we would be treated.  This requires us to be able to rise above the limitations of our self, to become less focused inward and more open to “the other”: the overcoming of egoism.”

  Gregory Baum rephrases Blondel on this process:

 “At the moment when we shatter our own little system and recognize another person, we become more truly a person ourself.  What takes place here is a conversion away from self-centeredness to the wider reality of life and people.”

Understanding Love – From Relating to Becoming

Of course, even the most emotional treatment of love would acknowledge its effect on our personal development, but the traditional approach tends to emphasize the action itself over the effect.  As we have seen in the two  posts on Love (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201701) John proposes a more fundamental understanding of both Love, the nature of God and the nature of man in his astounding assertion (1 John 4:16) that:

“God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

As Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this is an aspect of Love which has been less stressed in favor of Christianity’s seemingly endless need for the promulgation of rules and society’s need for the stability that it affords.  As a result, it is far more common to see Love treated by religion as an act which gains favor with God than as an ontological force with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.

The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept i of ‘immanence’ but provides a much more universal context to the idea of Love itself.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and explored the historical development of this undeniable but bewildering aspect of human life.  We saw how the popular concept of Love focusses on the ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected by instinct and emotion for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  We also saw how Teilhard’s insight opens it up to be seen as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution that it truly is.

Next week we will continue our shift from seeing Love as simple relationship to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

April 12 – Virtues: Faith and Hope- From Past to Future

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Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look at the ‘Theological Virtues’ by addressing that of Hope, which we saw as one of the attitudes that we take when we set about mapping the dimensions of human life, ‘articulating the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals.
We noted that “Faith and Hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous.’”  At this intersection, drawing on the energies of life which are ‘gifted’ in the flow of evolution, we become able, as Blondel puts it,  “..to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

This week we will look at this powerful intersection in a little more detail.

Faith and Hope: From Interpolation to Extrapolation

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past.  From our experience, we begin to better understand what we are capable of, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to act.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust our experience.   Hence Faith and Hope can be seen in the two ever-repeating stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

We can find examples of this intersection of our “currents of life” from the three great thinkers that we have explored in this blog:  Maurice Blondel, Carl Rogers and of course, Teilhard.
Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of the immensity of the past and the dynamic nature of the universe provided both an opportunity as well as a methodology for reinterpreting legacy Christian teachings into a form not only commensurate with the findings of science but offering a greater relevance to human life.  From science’s discovery of a universal unfolding, he recognized that the human species was better understood when seen in the same dynamic light as that of Science, and whose ‘becoming’ is fueled by the same energy which underpins the entire universe.  In effect, he remapped the empirical insights of science into new spiritual insights, interpolating from science’s view of the past to extrapolating to an optimistic view of the future.  Of course, from Blondel’s viewpoint, this was a religious reinterpretation, from science to religion, from science’s impersonal grasp of the distant past to religion’s deeply personal grasp of human life, and hence from past to future.

   Rogers, as we saw in the post, “Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3: Finding Self” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201612) also used empirical information to come to his conclusion that the human person was, at his most basic, good, positive and trustworthy.  This was quite orthogonal to the then common Freudian perspective which saw the basis of personal existence, the id, as a dangerous and decidedly untrustworthy force in the human psyche (see the post prior to the one cited above).  Once again, we see an interpolation from past, empirical data (in this case Rogers’ extensive case notes) to an extrapolation to an optimistic, hopeful human future.  We saw last week a list of the characteristics that Rogers observed in his patients as they underwent a process toward healing.   This time, however, Rogers offers a scientific, empirical reinterpretation.
Then of course, we come to Teilhard.  Going well beyond either Blondel or Rogers, Teilhard draws on the same scientific empirical findings, and expands them to the entirety of the life of the universe.  His first step in doing so was to unbind science’s understanding of evolution from the narrow perspective of the theory of Natural Selection and open it up to the immensity of universal evolution.  This unprecedented vision understood the metric of ‘complexification’ as the basic measure to plumb both the universal depths of time as well as the long, slow accretion of ‘fuller being’ which emerged with it.  Once he articulates the many stages now understood to have emerged during the ten or so billion years preceding biological terrestrial life to be connected by a rise in the complexity of its products, he postulates a single, steady, reliable force which precipitates this rise and acts in all the stages leading to the cell.  Having established this basis of universal ontological continuity, he goes on to show how it continues through the biosphere, and eventually emerges in the present noosphere .  In doing so, Teilhard offers an extrapolation from scientific findings to an interpolation, an insight as valuable to the clarification of science as it is to the reinterpretation of religion.

Teilhard and The Continuity of Past to Future: “Spirituality”

This insight into the basis of universal ontological continuity, providing as it does an integrated perspective inclusive of both spirit and matter, science and religion, and ultimately the human person and evolution, is Teilhard’s great contribution to a comprehensive perspective of the universe.  In doing so, he departed substantially from Science’s materialistic menagerie of pre-life stages disconnected from life stages, and its current schizophrenic approach which inhibits the placing of the human person into a cohesive view of the universe.   To Teilhard, these eras can now be seen in a single, connected context, one in which the human person is no less a product of evolution than the stars that glow in the sky.   He also offered a reorientation of Religion’s accumulated closet of dualisms. In a single, cohesive, integrated approach to the universe as ‘becoming’, he showed how the action of God can be seen as the basic life blood of evolution, and hence each individual life partakes of this universal bounty of universal life.

This grand vision deconstructs religion’s great and seemingly indissoluble dualisms.  One example of such deconstruction (healing?) is his explanation of ‘spirit’ vs ‘matter’, found in ‘Human Energy’.  First, he lays out the dualism itself:

“For some, heirs to almost all the spiritualist philosophies of former times, the spirit is something so special and so high that it could not possibly be confused with the earthly and material forces which it animates.  Spirit is a ‘meta-phenomenon’.

For others, on the contrary, …, spirit seems something so small and frail that it becomes accidental and secondary.  In the face of the vast material energies to which it adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured, the ‘fact of consciousness’ can be regarded as negligible.  It is an ‘epi-phenomenon’.”

Then he dissolves the dualism by identifying spirituality as the underlying phenomenon which is essential to universal evolution:

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

He then restates his conclusion, this time answering the assertions outlined in his mapping of the dualism:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

It is worth noting that in this brief exposition, Teilhard not only deconstructs the traditional religious dualism of spirit/matter by moving them from ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’, placing them in a dynamic, ‘becoming’ context in which they are simply different facets of a single phenomenon as it moves from past to future.   He also heals science’s schizophrenic treatment of the human person by recognizing that the state of evolution characterized by ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is simply the latest manifestation of a complexity which has been increasing in the universe since the ‘big bang’.  He addresses this process in the last part of the quote from “Human Energy”:

“The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic change of state.”

So, in this example we can see how Teilhard goes about his ’interpolation/extrapolation’ process, drawing on Science’s study of deep time and evolution to understand the thread of universal life to which our essence is connected, then to extrapolate to a future which we can trust to offer a continuation of such ‘increased complexity’.

He offers an approach to Faith not based on (but also not, as it turns out, orthogonal to) belief in scripture or the church’s ‘Magesterium’, but on a recognition that the fourteen billion year rise of complexity which (so far) has resulted in our own individual person can be expected to continue if we can but trust and cooperate with it.

And this is where Faith and Hope can be seen to intersect in our lives.

The Next Post

This week saw how the intersection of Faith and Hope can be seen to intersect in our lives, from the insights of Blondel, Rogers and Teilhard.

Next week we will move on to a look at the last of the Theological Virtues, that of Love.