Originally published 30 July 2002
My tattered copy of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, which I read enthusiastically when it was published as an English paperback in 1961, now and then tumbles off the bookshelf, demanding a re-read.
Teilhard was a paleontologist, a Jesuit priest, and a mystic. In his book, he traced the evolution of the universe from the original matter and energy, up through the emergence of life, to consciousness. He purported to see a trend that will lead ultimately to the consolidation and redemption of all things in the Godhead, which he called Omega.
His vision of the creation as the Creator’s primary revelation attracted many readers in the 1950s and ’60s, especially among those who hoped to find some reconciliation between science and traditional faith.
Teilhard wrote The Phenomenon of Man as a scientist, he tells us, and there is a lot of science in it. But it was his tendency to drift off into fuzzy theological abstractions that bothered many of his scientific colleagues, and that ultimately caused the book to fall out of favor even with some of his ardent fans. His Eurocentricism and elevation of Christianity above all other religions also were troubling.
Yet there was much in Teilhard’s account of an inevitable direction to evolution that has found a fuller and more rigorous scientific treatment in recent years, as for example in physicist Eric Chaisson’s book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature.
And in some ways Teilhard now seems positively prescient, most notably in his idea of the noosphere.
The Earth is layered like an onion, he said — a rocky lithosphere, a hydrosphere, an atmosphere, and a biosphere. To these he added a further layer of pure thought that he called the noosphere, from the Greek word for “mind,” brought into being by the evolution of consciousness.
On a spherical Earth, people couldn’t spread out forever. As population grew, so did contact between minds, stimulating the growth of consciousness. And now, he wrote, “thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth [actively and passively] simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the Earth.”
We live in a sea of electromagnetic radiation, vibrant with information — ideas, images, text, music — surrounding us on every side, as pervasive as the air we breathe. Each one of us has the potential to become an active node in this shimmering web of immaterial vibrations — what Teilhard called the planet’s “phosphorescence of thought.”
Sometime this year, the number of wireless phones will overtake fixed phones. Within a few years, wireless handheld communication sets will combine features of mobile phones, broadband Internet, international multichannel radio and television, personal computers, personal organizers, digital cameras and the global positioning system, or GPS.
Fiber-optic networks and central wireless transmission stations will be superseded by some form of “mesh networking,” with every individual’s personal node device, let’s call it, supporting transmission of information between other active nodes of the system. The system will increasingly be organized from the ground up, rather than from the top down; that is, big network operators will give way to fluid, ever-changing networks stitched together by communities of individuals.
Eventually, personal node devices, or PNDs, will be integrated directly with the human nervous system in ways we can’t as yet imagine.
All of this evolution will take place at an ever more rapid rate, as the pressure of interacting thought grows ever greater, precisely as Teilhard imagined.
What all this means, and how it will affect human society, is anybody’s guess. Certainly, a new kind of globalization will emerge, for good or ill, in which, as Teilhard said, “the whole Earth…is required to nourish each one of us.” The recent World Cup competitions in Japan and Korea, watched as they occurred with consuming interest by billions of people throughout the world — without reference to religion, politics, or even economic development — were a powerful illustration of the noosphere’s thrust towards homogenization.
Teilhard was optimistic about globalization, partly because he was a man of the Enlightenment and therefore a champion of progress, partly because he was a Christian who believed that humankind’s story has a hopeful destiny. The problem, he asserted, will be finding a way to give every individual a unique value within the unity of a massively interconnected whole.
In this he was surely right. The great challenge of electronic globalization is to ensure that personal freedom is enhanced, not diminished, by connectivity. The noosphere is, or will become, as Teilhard suggested, a kind of supraorganism with a life of its own. The tension we must negotiate is between our collective fate and our individual uniqueness — between the respective importance of the network and the node.
