With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) we arrive at a long-term perspective. Really We look at current social and political turmoil from a long-term perspective. Though best remembered today as a Christian cosmological mystic, Teilhard was trained as a paleontologist by the Jesuit order, and during his lifetime was more widely known for his scientific achievements, including his participation in the discovery of Peking Man (Sinanthropos pekinensis), the oldest hominid fossil known at the time, dating back at least 350,000 years. He thought in geological rather than cultural epochs. His specialty was the Late Quaternary (approximately the past 130,000 years). He was thinking not in terms of cultural upheavals, but in the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the movement of tectonic plates, and the appearance and disappearance of species. Gebser’s entire roadmap would fit into a small corner of the realm in which Teilhard’s vast outline unfolds.

Teilhard’s theological masterpiece is human phenomenonIt was published posthumously in 1957, after the censorship the Vatican had imposed on his extensive cosmological reflections was finally lifted. It is a stunningly panoramic cosmic story from a theocentric perspective, starting with the birth of our planet some 4.5 billion years ago and culminating in the theoretical “Omega Point” where all that was originally released as divine potential is returned as the perfect fruit of divine love. Along this long evolutionary journey, the path ultimately appears to be guided by the inexorable pull of the Omega Point itself, but the countless twists and turns of the path are subject to what Teilhard called large-scale effects. Tatnement, trial and error. Basically, almost everything can It will happen eventually. The long arc of evolution eventually bends toward consciousness, Teilhard argues, but that journey unfolds over grand geological time scales, against the backdrop of the uplift and collapse of mountain ranges, the swallowing of entire continents into the Earth, dramatic climate changes, and periodic cataclysms (such as asteroid impacts) that erase all apparent forward motion, sometimes over 10,000 years. But then the seeds buried in that beleaguered planet wake up and begin to grow again, regaining the power to further evolve from where they left off. Beneath the cracked surface, God writes in seemingly straight but crooked lines, and on time scales so vast that human causality is no longer simply available.

Viewed through a Teilhardian lens, I see with dark clarity that the human species appears to be heading toward self-destruction, partly through its own direct actions and partly as a result of the concomitant destabilization of its primary habitat through the uncontrolled exercise of its most cutting-edge evolutionary features. In short, after a very long period of climate stability (12,000 years) during which we were able to put down roots and tend human vineyards, we are now entering an era of climate cavitation, and if this direction continues, the end result will be the destruction of the narrow bandwidth of conditions in which human life is possible. This change is already well underway, and while we humans may not be entirely responsible, we are at least heavily involved. Who can say whether the rate of change has crossed a tipping point or reached a point of no return? But it is certainly happening before our eyes, not only in the loss of species but also in the destabilization of fundamental patterns in the geosphere, such as winds, ocean currents, heat, tides, and the composition of the atmosphere. I live on a small island in the ocean. I watch it every day. And with species now rapidly moving onto the “endangered” list, we seem stubbornly unable to confront the situation. We simply refuse to think globally, or we have not yet learned to think.

According to Teilhard, the main cause of extinction is when a species becomes overspecialized, that is, develops evolutionary adaptations that eventually allow it to survive only within a small habitat niche. Think of the antlers of a moose, the tusks of a mastodon, the trunk of an elephant, or the long neck of a giraffe, a vast shelf that is brilliantly adapted to a particular environment, but which, once pulled out from under it, becomes a huge and ultimately fatal overspecialization. To me, the comparable evolutionary weakness of humans would be our increasingly overspecialized brains. Along its long evolutionary arc, the human brain has developed an extraordinary but seemingly unrelenting ability to cut through the inner solidity of things, develop technological solutions to every problem it creates, and now recreate itself and replace it with a whole new octave of machine-generated AI simulacra, essentially evolving itself directly from the biosphere and drawing the entire vitality of our élan from what Teilhard called it. noospherethe “virtual” habitat of human culture and cleverness. Unfortunately, Teilhard may not have been able to emphasize enough the noosphere’s dependence on the biosphere for its survival.

Years ago, when I heard from one of the popular science writers (Brian Swimmy? Brian Greene? Ilya Prigogine?) that human life can only survive within a very narrow temperature gradient of 10 degrees Celsius or less, I was shaken to the core. “Obviously a lie,” I scoffed, quickly retorting about all the strange and varied habitats humans have learned to survive in, from the North Pole to the equator. But then what this author meant was not the external temperature; internal Temperature, the core temperature that the body must maintain in order to survive. If that inner core consistently drops well below 93 degrees, we develop hypothermia and die. When our body temperature rises above 103 degrees, like during a fever or heat wave, we die of heatstroke. And this is what we are already seeing as heat-related deaths continue to rise each summer as increasingly severe heat waves batter the planet for longer and longer periods.

Who cares, we think. During the summer months, we sit in comfortably cool homes in cities that are already uninhabitable outdoors, turning up the air conditioning.

I will not go into this rant any further. There’s no need to turn up your emotional thermostat either. But when I look at it, my heart trembles and I feel like it’s about to burst. Remember the Darwin Prize? For me, the clear winner for the planet this year is the US Congress, which has decided to repeal the hard-won landmark environmental protections of the past 30 years through noble bipartisan efforts to at least slow the rate of positive acceleration. But of course, we need those fossil fuels to generate more electricity to power our air conditioners to escape the intense heat that fossil fuels are primarily responsible for. This is what it means to “specialize yourself too much and lose your existence.”

Viewed from this vast Teilhardian timescale, an initial sense of despair rises like water on your neck. There is nothing I can do, on any scale, to confront the dark forces of human greed, short-sightedness, and stupidity that are now swarming actively on the horizon to bring this 350,000-year-old experiment by “three-brained beings” to a screeching mastodon halt.

Yet, despite its obvious futility, there is certainly hope in daring to apply the Tejardian scale. In this article we have looked at the dark side of things. Next time, I’ll try to follow the golden thread, which looks like an impenetrable maze. And what I am saying now is that hope has something to do with the words that Gebser and Teilhard have consistently brought to the fore. mutation…biological and evolutionary changes in the way we humans live within our own skin. Even in my own darkest moments, I believe that it is already underway and that its effects are already beginning to appear on the shores of our planet, if only we can continue to ride the wave.