2 posts tagged “books”
Resolve starting to cave. Finding myself sneaking peaks at old favorites with increasing regularity. No longer able to avert eyes from the news ticker on CNN. Two major slips: one, with a trusty old favorite, C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves. How that book, with its old faded pages falling out, lush with interesting moral examples and anecdotes, makes for such a sloppy private pleasure for me, I'll never know. Intensely gratifying, but the guilt was worse. The other was quick and fleeting and unsatisfactory - the thick, hardbound copy of Gabriel Bertoniere's Through Faith and Fire was awkward in my hands - and I didn't finish the page.
I've found myself looking for anonymous help online. I haven't found anyone who shares my goal, and God knows, there are a lot of temptations out there, and it seems like for every one person I've found committed to not reading, there are 10,000 book fetishists who can't wait to open their favorite covers in front of just anybody, and tell the whole story...
Rrrr.
It's hard out here, but in spite of my setbacks, I'm committed. It's only until September...
I've been readng books again...
Meet Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He wrote this book. I am writing a little bit about this book.
Read on, and read about this book!!!
Teilhard de Chardin writes poetic about his concept of the noosphere, which he explains as the succeeding layer of extropic construction that humanity alone, as far as we know, can be said to contribute to - the first being 'pre-life' spheres (including diachronic and the granulative properties of the material universe as observed, and on those its material composition and physics) and then the biotic, and all the chemical, thermic, atmospheric and extrasolar properties that made life possible on Earth. Above and beyond that, Teilhard de Chardin is convinced, humanity alone generates the noosphere, or the property of consciousness, whereby the universe efficiently generated an entity that is fundamentally aware of the Universe. Evolution, he claims, is the genitive property of the universe itself come of age, and it should be no wonder to us that concepts arising from the discovery of evolution are revolutionizing the sciences and the art around us, and have been ever since. He considers life, and every strata of non-life and pre-life preceding it, to be turns on a spiral ever-climbing upwards, and even the successive generations of non-men (other hominids) who died out were merely lines of evolution that proved stagnant, whose participation in this noosphere, which he sees as the fundamental birth of the phoenix of cultural sophistication and with it history and reflection, was doomed to be inconsequential. Homo Sapiens alone was able to build culture and get this far - all other branches of life, flora and fauna, that exist or have ever existed, were incapable of creating the "soul" of the world, as he calls it.
He even goes into some social Darwinism that most people today would find uncomfortable, but I actually think deserves to be considered with an open mind. Take a breath.
He ties scientific discovery, technological implementation, and the foundation of social systems and institutions that preserve and fountain information as the stimulus of noospheric activity, and remarks to the extent that, flawed or not, it has been in the West, and through the Judeo-Christian tradition, that science and intellectual life have flourished, more than any other. de Chardin points at China and India - who today, in 2008, we STILL consider developing countries, even as they continue to radically Westernize their economies and workforce to out-produce and under-cut us - as examples of cultures whose evolutionary dead-ends.
Chinese traditions, roles and norms, Teilhard de Chardin explains, crystalized their society in the bronze age until about the 18th century, and many, many parts of China are largely the same as they were thousands of years ago. India, he further explains, coupled strict traditionalism with metaphysical speculations whose 'inwardness' stifled or redirected the constructive impulses of the individual...
This might all seem to you to be mere Anglophile, Eurocentric nonsense, except that it's kind of true: the economic, organizational, socio-ethical and philosophical complex that converged in the pre-West (from the hagia of Indo--Afro-Mesopotamian mathematicians and philosophers we know by name, to the countless personal and social projects that they inspired) is the clear progenitor of the world's most successful pan-culture. He points this out not to pat us on the back but to remind us of an important point - human systems are becoming more and more complex, and our capacity for understanding and cooperation is becoming more and more streamlined, universal, and meta-conceptual. Technology is fast becoming about mere ideas and synthesis, and all are being contributed towards a now-globalized system with a distinctly forward, Western idee fixe at heart: freedom of possibility.
Forget power-conflict, forget Marx, and for God's sake, forget post-structuralism for a moment.
Does the US have an overarching social and political ideal that it's not living up to?
Yes.
Does anybody else? What is theirs?
It's worth looking into.
Teilhard de Chardin is a raw and brilliant intelligence, and his concept is more nuanced than I've done justice in this brief sketch, and steeped in biological science. He finished this book in 1933: writing about this noosphere, evolution's youngest daughter, science and culture cross-pollenated. Today, I post this to a blog, feeling that somehow, Teilhard de Chardin saw this coming.
