The Long Arc of Evolution Bends Toward Consciousness….

A Teilhardian view of our present turmoil

With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) we come to the long view—the really long view—of our present social and political turmoil. While best remembered nowadays as a Christian cosmological mystic, Teilhard was trained by his Jesuit order as a paleontologist, and during his lifetime he was more widely known for his scientific achievements, including his participation in the discovery of “Peking Man” (sinanthropos pekinensis), the earliest hominid fossil known at the time, dating back at least 350,000 years. He thought in geological eras, not cultural ones; his specialty was the Upper Quaternary period (roughly the last 130,000 years.) He thought not so much in terms of cultural upheavals, but the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the shifting of tectonic plates, the emergence and disappearance of species. Gebser’s entire roadmap would fit in a tiny corner of the domain in which Teilhard’s expansive overview unfolded.

Teilhard’s theological masterpiece was The Human Phenomenon, published posthumously in 1957 after his death finally removed the censorship the Vatican had clamped down on his expansive cosmological reflections. It is a wondrously panoramic universe story from a theocentric perspective, beginning with the birth of our planet some 4.5 billion years ago and culminating in a theoretical “Omega point” at which all that had originally been flung out as divine possibility is returned as the consummate fruit of divine love. Along this long evolutionary journey, the way seems to be guided, ultimately by the Omega Point’s own inexorable gravitational pull, but the countless twists and turns in the road are subject to the massive play of what Teilhard called tatonnement, trial and error. Basically, almost anything that can happen eventually will. The long arc of evolution ultimately bends toward consciousness, Teilhard claims, but the journey unfolds across an epic geological time scale against a backdrop of mountain chains rising and falling, entire continents swallowed into the earth, dramatic climate upheavals, and periodic cataclysmic events (such as an asteroid strike), which wipe out all apparent forward motion, sometimes for ten thousand years. But then the seed buried in that beleaguered earth wakes up and begins to grow again, picking up right where it left off with even more evolutionary strength. Beneath the fractured surface God apparently writes straight, but with crooked lines —and on a timescale so vast that human causality simply no longer obtains.

Viewed through the Teilhardian lens, what I see with dark clarity is that the human species appears to be well on its way to self-extinction, partly through its own direct actions and partly as a result of the collateral destabilization of its primary habitat through the unmoderated exercise of its own most cutting-edge evolutionary features. In short, after a very long period (12,000 years) of climate stability in which we have been able to set down our roots and tend our human vineyard, we are now embarking upon a period of climate cavitation whose end result, if the direction continues, will be the destruction of the narrow bandwidth of conditions in which human life is possible. The shift is already well underway, and while we humans may not be fully to blame, we are at least heavily implicated. Who am I to say if the rate of change has passed a tipping point, or is now irreversible? But the change is definitely happening before our eyes: visible not only in species loss, but in the destabilization of fundamental patterns in the geosphere—wind, current, heat, tides, atmospheric composition. I live on a small island in the ocean. I see it every day. And as a species now rapidly headed toward the “endangered” list, we seem obstinately incapable of facing up to the situation. We simply refuse to think —or have not yet learned to think— at a planetary scale.

According to Teilhard, the primary cause of extinction is when a species becomes overspecialized: when it develops evolutionary adaptations that ultimately make it viable only within a tiny niche habitat. Think of those enormous racks of antlers on elks, tusks on mastodons, trunks on elephants or long necks on giraffes, brilliantly adapted to a specific environment, but a huge, eventually lethal over-specialization once that environment is yanked out from under them. For me the comparable evolutionary weak spot for us humans would be our increasingly overspecialized brains. Along that long arc of evolution the human brain has developed extraordinary but seemingly unmoderated abilities to tear into the inner fastnesses of things, develop technological fixes for every self-created problem, and now even to reproduce and replace itself with an entirely new octave of machine-generated AI simulacrum, essentially evolving itself right out of the biosphere, drawing our entire élan vital from what Teilhard called the noosphere, the “virtual” habitat of human culture and cleverness. Unfortunately, Teilhard may have failed to emphasize sufficiently that the noosphere depends on the biosphere for its continued existence.

I was shaken to the core many years ago when I learned from one of those popular science writers (Brian Swimme? Brian Greene? Ilya Prigogine?) that human life is viable only within a very narrow temperature gradient: no more than 10 degrees. “Patently untrue,” I scoffed, immediately countering with all those strange and variable habitats where human beings have learned to survive, from the arctic to the equator. But then I realized that this author was not talking about the external temperature, but about the internal temperature, the inner core temperature the body must maintain to survive. If that inner core dips consistently much below 93, we develop hypothermia and die. If it soars above 103, as in fevers or heat waves, we die of heat prostration. And this is what we are already seeing as each summer heat-related deaths continue to mount as increasingly severe heat waves grip our planet for increasingly longer periods.

Who cares, we think. We sit in our comfortably cool houses in cities already now rendered uninhabitable outdoors during those summer months and push up the air conditioners.

I will go no further in this rant; there is no need to drive up the emotional thermostat as well. But I watch, and my heart shudders and breaks. Remember the Darwin Awards? For me, the planet’s hands down winner this year is the US Congress, in its decision to repeal landmark environmental protections hard won over the past thirty years through a noble bipartisan effort to at least try to slow down the rate of positive acceleration. But of course, we need those fossil fuels, don’t we, to generate more power to power those air conditioners to escape the oppressive heat that the fossil fuels are substantially responsible for. This is what is meant by “overspecializing oneself out of existence.”

As I watch from this vast Teilhardian timescale, my initial sense of hopelessness rises like the waters around my neck. There is nothing I can do, nothing, to stand at any scale against the dark powers of human greed, shortsightedness, and stupidity now actively massing on the near-horizon to bring this 350,000-year-old experiment in “three brained beings” to its screeching mastodon halt.

And yet, for all its apparent futility, there is indeed hope in daring to apply the Teilhardian scale. I have looked at the dark side of things in this post; in the next I will try to follow the golden thread as it winds its way through what otherwise might look to be an impenetrable maze. And I will say right now that hope has something to do with a word that both Gebser and Teilhard consistently brought to the forefront: a mutation…a biological, evolutionary change in the way we human beings live within our own skins. Even in my own darkest moments I do believe that it is already underway, and that its effects are already beginning to break on our planetary shores if we can only keep riding the wave.