I?m grateful to Krista Tippett, the host of the captivating public radio program ?On Being,? for including me in an exploration of the present-day resonance of ?noosphere,? the concept of an?emerging global intelligence?shaped in the early 20th century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, philosopher and paleontologist (with others). You can read two of Teilhard?s most influential books touching on this concept ? ?The Phenomenon of Man? and ?The Future of Man? ? online.
On Dot Earth and in lectures of late, I?ve offered a contemporary spelling and framing: Knowosphere.?Tippett first speaks with?Ursula King, a Teilhard scholar and professor emerita of theology and religious studies at the University of Bristol. Then comes?David Sloan Wilson, the?SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York and author of a suite of lauded books on evolution and society.
Teilhard sometimes gets disparaged for melding science and spirituality but I encourage you to read ?The Phenomenon of Humanity,? a short piece by Wilson describing Teilhard?s prescience and importance.
Below you can read an excerpt from Wilson?s essay, followed by a snippet from the transcript of my conversation with Tippett on how my awareness of Teilhard?s ideas emerged in 1992 and again in 2002, as I dug into the ideas of his intellectual contemporary and indirect partner, the Russian earth scientist and chemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who in the 1920s (just as an example) wrote:
Mankind?s power is connected not with its matter but with its brain, its thoughts and its works, guided by its mind. In the geological history of the biosphere, a great future is opened to Man if he realizes it and does not direct his mind and work to self-destruction.
Here?s Wilson on Teilhard?s prescience, and one mistake:
Teilhard wrote that humans are both a biological species and a new evolutionary process. As a biological species, we are little different from our primate cousins, and there was no divine spark in our origin (this did not play well with the Catholic Church!). As a new evolutionary process, however, our origin was almost as momentous as the origin of life. Teilhard called the human-created world the noosphere, which slowly spread like a skin over the planet, like the biological skin (the biosphere) that preceded it. He imagined ?grains of thought? coalescing at ever-larger scales until they became a single global consciousness that he called the Omega Point?.
Only during the last decade have evolutionists begun to realize that we are an ultra-social primate species and that this accounts for virtually all of the differences that set us apart from our primate cousins. Mechanisms evolved in our ancestors that suppressed the ability of individuals to succeed at the expense of members of their own group, causing succeeding as a group to become the primary evolutionary force. We are designed to be team players in ways that penetrate so deeply into our subconscious that we are only beginning to understand the proximate mechanisms, even though we play them out every moment of our lives?.
Becoming an ultra-social species at the planetary scale?another kind of Omega Point?will be much more difficult, although theoretically possible. The first step is for everyone to realize that it will not happen spontaneously. Insofar as Teilhard portrayed the Omega Point as inevitable, that is the biggest thing that he got wrong. Dozens of contemporary theorists speculate about the global brain emerging spontaneously from the Internet, as if complexity and inter-connectivity are the only necessary ingredients. That?s wrong, and the sooner we reach a consensus on this point the better. Multi-level selection states very clearly that adaptation at level X requires a process of selection at that level and tends to be undermined by selection at lower levels. We can?t expect natural selection to operate at the scales required to solve our largest and most recalcitrant problems, so the only alternative is policy selection. Call it social engineering or stewardship, it is up to us to turn the earth into the super-organism that Teilhard had in mind. We will not succeed without a sophisticated knowledge of our species as a product of genetic evolution and a process of evolution in our own right.
I couldn?t agree more that this will only happen through conscious choices and efforts.
I encourage you to listen to the full show, which has a fluidity and tone that I think you?ll like. It?s kind of the radio equivalent of a ?long read.? For those who prefer text, here?s a ?teaser? of sorts from my chat with Tippett:
Tippett:? [I]t?s not inevitable that this technology drives towards this kind of coherence?. [Y]ou talk about language like engagement and intentionality. And you?re talking about our relationship with our technology and all these things that are becoming possible?
Revkin:?Sure. I teach a course at Pace University that I launched last year ?this is the second year ? in blogging. And it?s really not a course just in blogging; it?s a course in how to get the most out of the Internet, how to get the most out of all this connectivity. This is all about intentionality. In fact, it?s not a course ? the course is called Blogging a Better Planet, but I don?t define better planet.
I ask them to take their own passions and find some little ? in other words, there might be a student who?s interested in fashion or another in music, which is the case this year. Another one in travel. And I say find the component of the thing that excites you that also fits in this frame of smoothing our journey.
So if you don?t have intentionality, you could go out there and just sell widgets. The Internet is really good at selling widgets. And as I say, you know, the Internet helped the 9/11 organizers learn where to find their flight schools and stuff. So it can work in terrible ways as well. But I see the upside swamping the downside, especially if young people early on are trained ? not trained, but learn on their own ? how this can work for betterment.
Here?s a link to the full program transcript.
If you seek even more depth, here are links to the unedited audio recordings of the conversations:
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