From Science of the Noosphere Masterclass

What are your most significant insights from Week 1’s material and discussions?

I wanted to get a running start for the class so before it started I watched videos 1-9, 13, 14, and 23. I read David’s essay and struggled through Teilhard’s. In the Tuesday meeting, when the slide Three Entry Points for this Class came up I realized I’m primarily coming from #2: A whole-earth ethic. My main influence and inspiration is Thomas Berry, who was president of the American Teilhard Association from 1975 to 1987. I found an hour long interview with Berry on YouTube titled “Teilhard de Chardin in the Age of Ecology”. https://bit.ly/3JRgffq.

In the first half of the interview Berry enumerates  what he considers Teilhard’s great contributions. In the second half he turns to what he calls the pathos of Teilhard. The great contributions are:

 

1-He told the story of the Universe in an integral manner, perhaps for the first time.

2-He identified the Human as a dimension of the Universe from the beginning.

3-He moved the essential Christian issue from the Redemption to the Creation.

Berry also added two others :

4-The “zest for life” is necessary for the psychic energy needed for the challenges of the future.

5-The mystical quality of the scientific venture.

In the second half he addresses what he calls The Pathos of Teilhard. I’m quoting Berry here:

“He was overly fascinated with the human. His Anthropocentrism was excessive. He wanted human intelligence to conquer the rest of the world, to control it. He was so captivated by the concept of progress through technology that he did not have a sense of the human in communion with the natural world…There’s a critical dimension that a person has to bring to bear with Teilhard. An excessive cultic orientation to Teilhard is just not good, not sound. We need a ‘beyond Teilhard’. And so the great mission of our time for those of us who understand and appreciate the enormous contributions of Teilhard, we cannot stop where he stopped, in my estimation.” Berry then goes on to describe his eco-centric extension of Teilhard’s vision.

Berry’s view of “the pathos of Teilhard” gave me a handle on some of the difficulty I was having with Formation of the Noosphere. I bristled at the naive glorification of technology. And even deeper is the extreme focus on the human. I have come to believe that a primary cause of the unfolding global ecological catastrophe is the separation of the human from the rest of earth’s systems highlighted in Genesis, Descartes, and unfortunately in all institutions of Western culture. So far it seems to me that Teilhard only exacerbates this tragic split. This strikes me as a significant insight. At the very least it’s something for me to keep in mind and evaluate as the class goes on.