THE FINITE SPACE OF THE GLOBE

HOLDS THE KEY

TO THE HUMAN STORY

Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man

Jameson's The Cultural Turn

The essay: Part One, A focus on evolutionary process. Part Two, The defining power of finite space.

 

---

PART ONE: A FOCUS ON EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

---

I read Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man at around thirty years of age, when I had not quite finished patching together a model of the world that might serve my personal needs. Teilhard appealed to me because he presumed to see everything, not just one thing. He was unafraid of an intuitive streak that allowed him to look at science and religion from the viewpoint of a complete person. He allowed himself to accept himself as a transformed person seeing the whole phenomenon of humankind in the universe--it was the viewpoint not just of a scientist, which he was, nor just of a Jesuit, which he also was. How unconventional and admirable that seemed.

Teilhard put "process" at the center of his thinking. That resonated with the work of another of my favorite writers at the time, Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy of reality was the philosophy of process. Teilhard's grand vision reconciled an evolutionary cosmos with a total belief in Christ. That might have seemed like a narrowing vision, but, to me, it was the opposite. His notion that the evolving globe would achieve itself through a critical mass of human consciousness seemed to me a daring elevation of our powers to the forefront of cosmic process itself. I frankly did not care much about the Christological part of his vision; yet it was important to me to know that, for him, it was important and reconcilable.

Process was central for Teilhard because evolution was central: he embraced the fullest implications of a world that was moving and shaping itself through vast time. It was a world that humans, equipped with the science of Darwin and Einstein, could no longer see as merely static and given. This was a scientist's insight, developed at the height of twentieth-century scientific self-assurance. Yet Teilhard was one of the very few scientists who could imagine the world as more complex and inclusive than the scientific models of that time.

That imaginative daring attracted me, but the lucidity and grace of his style of presentation made it possible to be attracted. I suppose I was like most thinking people of that time in wanting the truth of things to be elegant. Elegance, to me, meant that complexity would be expressible in something that appeared to be uncomplex. Teilhard's thought was so complex that he had to strive to present it with balanced symmetry in a calm language capable of bearing the most ambitious idea of human destiny. He was trying to say "the end" of evolution itself would have to arrive. It would arrive because a human psychosocial consciousness was itself leading the process of becoming from within.

Teilhard's studies led him to compare divergence and convergence in the evolution of the world. Divergence characterized events up to the emergence of human self-conscious thought. From that point on, convergence became the keynote. The convergence of human minds in a global "sphere" surrounding the biosphere and the lithosphere--this was his vision. And he had the scientist's urge to look forward beyond this present insight. What logically would follow? Where would the demonstrable convergence of humanity lead in the end (and, in the modern spirit based in Hegel, as well as in the Christian vision, Teilhard figured there had to be an end)? For him, convergence would be complete when two conditions developed in the "noosphere"--or in "progressive psychosocial evolution," as Julian Huxley interpreted Teilhard's unique term (p. 13). (1) Human knowledge about the universe (including humankind itself) would have to reach its maximum stage. (2) The "psychosocial" pressure of such knowledge on the finite space of the globe would have to reach its maximum stage.

Evolution would continue occurring, moving from our present state of knowledge. The human mind, increasingly convergent in a globe-encircling dynamism (the noogenesis), would become the leading instrument of evolution henceforth. Evolution would become conscious of itself through the convergent human consciousness. An increase of knowledge would lead to an increase in the pressure of the noosphere on the globe. The pressure would intensify to the point where climax occurred. This would be the Omega point, the completion of evolutionary process, presumably the end of history as humans would know it up to that point. Human science, led by the science of evolution, would converge in human consciousness with the truth of the world as embodied in Christ, and presumably then humanity would experience the promised Second Coming. Humankind and its inherited conventions of Time and Space would in some way be changed ("in the twinkling of an eye," perhaps).

 

---

PART TWO: THE DEFINING POWER OF FINITE SPACE

---

I find it worthwhile to emphasize that Teilhard's whole vision depends on the finite space of the globe.

The noosphere could increase in pressure only because it has to implode on itself as it circles the physical earth. Otherwise, the energy of human thought would disperse into a vast space and effect no climactic change at all. Teilhard thus envisions the (limitless) phenomenon of humankind in a (limited) phenomenon of space, the space of the globe we inherit, the scene of all our miracles and potentialities. This spatial imperative, I think, provides the special link between Teilhard's high modernist text of the 1950s and one of the dominant characteristics of what we now call postmodernism.

The spatial dominant may help to explain why Teilhard's idea of the noosphere has gained a certain vogue in the postmodern dialogue. Many have observed that his venerable notion of the noosphere resembles nothing so much as the novelty of contemporary life that we know as the World Wide Web. Somewhat prophetically, Julian Huxley in his introduction in 1959 uses the very word:

"...when it [human thought] is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy." (p. 17; my emphasis)

As cyberporn escalates and catastrophically destructive viruses sweep the WWW, causing corporations and governments to stall, we might hesitate before insisting upon its resemblance to the vehicle for the Second Coming. Still, the physical fact of the worldwide reach of the WWW, which still bears the visionary stamp of its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, makes the comparison attractive.

The necessary function of limited global space in Teilhard's vision resonates with a second interesting theme in the postmodern dialogue. For this insight I turn to Fredric Jameson's essay in The Cultural Turn, "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?"

In one of his acrobatic loops of insight, Jameson says that the "end of history" declared by Fukuyama and his kind is really a declaration of the end of space. The conventional view of the "end of history" theme is that global capitalism now encompasses all significant development. This singular sway of Western capitalist culture effectively ends the many social and political stories, including the unlimited exploitation of colonies, of past decades and centuries. Jameson suggests that the reason for the "end" is that humankind has now reached the end of the space available on the finite globe. The capitalist system now reaches everywhere on earth and begins to cycle back on itself.

For comparison and contrast, Jameson recalls Frederick Jackson Turner's famous declaration. The American frontier, Turner declared, came to a close in 1893. This marked the end of the American "Promethianism" (Jameson's notion) that set no restraint on the exploitation of earth. The American empire of course had the rest of the world beyond the two oceans to continue exploiting. But Jameson suggests that Fukuyama's analogous declaration a hundred years later applies to the entire globe, leaving no nation any further room for exploitative development. The global scene is set for the unrelieved operation of late capitalism, which does not depend on exploitation of resources for its success.

The intriguing prospect here is that Teilhard and Jameson ring a common note in their respective references to the effects on human evolution of limited global space. Their common insight reflects meaningfully, I think, on the emerging understanding of the full import of "globalization."

Globalization, one might argue, started with the writers of the Hebrew Bible, who were able to imagine one world over which a single God could have dominion. Or perhaps it suffices to say that it started with Marco Polo's adventures in the Far East or with Columbus's voyage to the New World in 1492. Wherever one dates its beginning, we now understand that globalization is not just a trendy new way to talk about the old colonialism of the past couple of centuries. Those origins and that geo-political system certainly were steps along the way, but we have arrived at a new state of affairs that stands apart from earlier historical movements. In a new sense, the human community has finally encircled its finite habitat. It finally is conducting its affairs with a consciousness of its spatial limit and of the intensification that flows from this limit. That first picture of Spaceship Earth from a space vehicle, floating blue as heaven in a sea of ink, comes to mind; there are those who say it was the stimulus for a completely new global imaginary.

Teilhard de Chardin was beyond modernism even as he wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, when the modernist viewpoint dominated. It should not seem odd, then, to count him as one of the more insightful commentators on what would become, after his time, postmodernism. Above all, he wanted to see where humankind was going in the evolutionary story. The evidence half a century later is that he had his eye on something significant, even though centuries will have to pass before humankind knows more certainly how accurately he was seeing.