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

Today’s Post

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

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

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

Taking Poverty As An Example…

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

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

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

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

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

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

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

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

And the reason?

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

And what’s changing?

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

As Norberg sums it up:

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

…What can we see?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records. Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger, and disease, especially in third world and ‘developing’ countries.
Generally, we have become numb to this phenomenon, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted. Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as Matthew cites Jesus claiming that “The poor you will always have with you.”
Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising. As the Economist reports, when asked by the Gapminder Foundation whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”
So, what ‘cogent experimental grounds’ might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with most of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive. The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.
Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity. She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’ Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?
Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’. He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%. This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.
In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP. He puts this into perspective:

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

So, in 1820, the average percent of poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%. If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years. By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income. (This increase did not emerge because of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time.)
Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East: As the United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

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

.
The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.
The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing. The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty (source: World Bank). Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.
The reductions over the entire two-hundred-year span show an overall decrease from 94% to 12% by 2018.
Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years. The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the remainder required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’.

Seeing This Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

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

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.
This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, but also how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing. Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as seen here.
Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

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

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:
– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of improvements in human welfare over time.
– the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing
– these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.
We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.
This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

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

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

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

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

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules. Thus, he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state. Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.
At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.
This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred-thousand-year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations. As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees in the curve’. Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’. Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles, and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.
He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly. Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

Asia: Increases from 42 to 70 Years
Latin America: Increases from 50 to 74 Years
Africa: Increases from 37 to 57 Years

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

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

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

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

The Next Post
This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.
Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

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

Today’s Post

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

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

From Teilhard’s Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Human Evolution Metrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

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

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

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

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

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

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

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

Seeing The Data Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

This Week

Last week we saw how Teilhard recognizes a ‘cohesion’ which counters the ‘compression’ of the human species which underlies the action of his ‘convergent spiral’ as it spills over into human evolution.

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

   Compression, Evolution, and The Human Person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

This Week

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

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

A Second Look at Compression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week

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

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

How can we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to help us to recognize an ‘axis’ in our evolution?

This Week

   Last week we took a first look at how, despite all the discontinuities that can be seen in our ever-unfolding understanding of the universe, whatever universal process that is at work must, by definition,  be active in all components of the universe.  More importantly, by the same definition it must be active in ourselves.

This week we will take a second look at how Teilhard traces this process through the expansion and compression phases of human history.

‘Compression’ in Human Evolution

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

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

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

As is obvious from history, crossing this equator causes the emergence of new tactics of contact, conflict, and conquest.  To this day, many believe that the dire consequences of these tactics are simply an unwanted but inevitable consequence of population increase.

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

The Roman adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift.  While certainly less religious than political, it nonetheless reflected the same rethinking.  As Bart Ehrman explains in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, Constantine saw the integrative potential of Christianity as a political tactic for ensuring the smooth assimilation of the new Northern European Celts and Franks as they were incorporated into his empire.  While not abandoning the ‘compression’ tactics of contact, conflict, conquest, and subjugation, Rome was beginning to adopt tactics which would add a cultural level of assimilation and accommodation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The human mass on the restricted surface of the earth, after a period of expansion covering all historic time, is now entering (following an abrupt but not accidental acceleration of his rate of reproduction) a phase of compression which we may seek to control but which there are no grounds for supposing will ever be reversed.  What is the automatic reaction of human society to this process of compression?  Experience supplies the answer (which theory can easily explain) – it organizes itself.  To adapt themselves to, and in some sort to escape from, the planetary grip which forces them ever closer together, individuals find themselves compelled (eventually they require a taste for it) to arrange their communal lives more adroitly; first in order to preserve, and later to increase their freedom of action.”

To him, the ‘external’ force of compression must be met by an ‘internal’ force which uses this compression to effect their fuller being; the emergence of a ‘pull’ to counter the ‘push’.  As he puts it in “The Phenomenon of Man”

“Fuller being is closer union.”

Next Week

This week we saw Teilhard’s insights into the historical spread of humanity from an ‘expansion’ stage to one of ‘compression’, and how this introduced yet a new danger to human evolution that would require humans to develop new modes of relationships to overcome.

Next week we will look at how the dangers of the compression phase of human history can be not only mitigated but forged into new modes of evolution.

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

This Week

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

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

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week

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

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

How do Teilhard’s projections for the future help us to gain a correct perspective on our lot today?

This Week

Today I’m departing from Teilhard’s insights into the phenomenon of universal evolution to focus on one a little closer to home.  How can we read today’s events in the context of his universal perspective?  In short, is there any way that we can see the world today as ‘the best time to be alive”?  We will see next month a long list of statistics from Johan Norberg (“Progress”) which substantiate Teilhard’s optimism (and today’s data), but after reading Nicholas Kristoff’s article in today’s New York Times, I’m jumping the gun in presenting Norberg’s thoughts on this subject.

Kristoff begins his article with a sentiment that I regularly receive from readers of this blog.  As he puts it, such optimism

“..sees it as disrespectful of all the tragedies around us.”

   He lists such tragedies as:

• The suffering of children in Gaza
• The atrocities in Sudan
• The wildfires in Los Angeles

And finally, one particularly tragic to a liberal such as himself:

• An unstable threat to Democracy moving into the White House

So how to put such grim news in perspective?   He begins with what he considers the worse thing that can happen: “the loss of a child”.  He follows this with an unexpected statistic that seems highly orthogonal to conventional wisdom.

“2024 seems to have been the year in which the smallest percentage of children died since the dawn of humanity.”

   As we will see later from Norberg in more detail, Kristof offers a timeline:

150 years ago: over 50% of global newborns died

70 years ago: 25% of global newborns died

Today: 3.8% of global newborns died (All United Nations statistics)

   Another way to look at this is that since 2000, eighty million children’s lives have been saved.

A second way to put today’s news in Kristoff’s perspective: reduction in global extreme poverty.  We will look at Norberg’s more extensive data later, but Kristoff points out that last year this figure has plummeted to 8.5%.  Another way of looking at this is

“Every day over the past couple of years, roughly 30,000 people moved out of extreme poverty.”

Still another perspective is in the areas of education and literacy, “the greatest forces empowering human beings, yet when I was  a child, the majority of human beings had been  illiterate.”  He sees a distinct contrast in today’s literacy rate.  “Now we’re approaching 90% literacy worldwide, and the number of literate people is rising by more than 12 million people each year.  Every three seconds, a person becomes more literate”.

Summarizing a few other topics:

• • While AI is evolving rapidly, with its perceived threats, so is its applicant to new medical breakthroughs.
  • While threats to the environment continue to mount, for the first time in history paths to the decarbonization of the glove are emerging.

Kristoff suggests that we take a deep breath and make a New Year’s resolution to look at the data and recognize that

   “For all the challenges we face, there is no better time to be alive.”

   Happy New Year!