We think DKos and the blogosphere is a political experience. Right now it is, but according to the genius who predicted Cyberspace and an awakening collective mind in 1947, it will one day be recognized as far more than that.
Why Sherlock Google is who he is on the flip!
The Noosphere & the 1947 Prediction of the Internet
Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist who worshipped Evolution (for which the Pope banned his writings) called the collective mind the "Noosphere". We stand on the geosphere, the Earth itself, we live in the biosphere, the outer layer of life, but we think, said Teilhard, in a collective noosphere. It was a collective effort, for example, that invented the airplane. The Wright Brothers merely advanced a series of basic inventions made by others before them in the field of gliders, engines and model airplanes. The noosphere invented the airplane--and in the same way our entire culture.
Today, the noosphere grows close to awakening. Ever since the invention of the telegraph to the inter-connections of today's World-Wide Web, there has been a closing of the electronic circuit of communication, bringing the world closer and closer together. Today, the power of the nascent "Blogosphere" as a new political, social and cultural phenomenon is accepted as real. Teilhard basically predicted it. The evolution of the collective consciousness, which Teilhard called "noogenesis", is now about to close the special last circuit, leading to full global awakening.
"Let us take a rapid glance at the structure and functioning of what might be called the 'cerebroid' organ of the Noosphere...I am thinking, of course, in the first place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which... already link us all in a sort of 'etherized' universal consciousness. But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those astonishing electronic computers which...enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of 'speed of thought'...As in the case of all organisms preceding it, but on an immense scale, humanity is in the process of 'cerebralising' itself."
- Teilhard de Chardin, 1947, FOM 173-4, 180
What we are experiencing today is clearly an acceleration in the "Speed of Thought", in which the two largest mega-trends, the progressive paradigm shift and the Internet/Communications Revolution, are combining to take thought to qualitative new levels. In short, the closing of the final circuit in this process would allow new properties of collective thinking and collective action to develop. What is impossible in our current day would then become routine. It will all be based on a new global ability to reflect, which Teilhard spelled with an x, reflexion. If what Teilhard is predicting here actually occurs, it would easily be the most significant event in human history.
What happens if the Noosphere does awaken from its dream of history? Where would we all be headed then? Is it Utopia? No, not Utopia, the perfect place. But clearly a better place, a workable future--if enough people become active in trying to create that better future. Teilhard's future would be an "end-run" around the Modern Dilemma--and all the useable information and technology of the old worldview would then be absorbed into the much larger whole of an Awakened Global Society. It is this awakening of the Noosphere/Blogosphere that is so critical to transcending the Dilemma and finally overcoming the old corporatist Worldview.
The Compression of Humanity and Information
What does all this collectivity mean in terms of the individual? Something quite wonderful, actually. Teilhard understood that because the human population explosion was taking place on the small sphere of the Earth, humanity was in effect being compressed, especially since the entire world was now settled. He predicted this compression of the exploding population on the closed sphere of the globe would quickly lead to an unprecedented rate of change for both individual and collective humanity.
None can deny that the rate of change has accelerated dramatically in the last few decades--but Teilhard said it will continue to speed up until a tremendous shift or "awakening" occurs. The largest part of this transformation comes about because "human molecules" change "state" as they are compressed together, just as gas being forced inside a cylinder changes from gas to frozen liquid . Like the transformation of gas to liquid, the new state immediately leads to new properties, only these are primarily mental properties rather than physical characteristics. When this transformation arrives, what had been impossible suddenly becomes routine.
Individuals would seek and find more of what makes them human--and they would be able to develop their full creative potential in a greatly expanded nurturing environment. In the new state of humanity, Teilhard predicted there would be a way for each like-minded person on Earth to connect with each other in a mutual support network. Something like the Internet and the many search engines, discussion groups and Web sites now connecting the whole world, Teilhard explained how the new collectivity actually develops the individual:
"..the medium will be established in which a basic affinity may be born and grow, springing from one seed of thought to the next, canalizing in a single direction the swarm of individual trajectories. In the old Time and Space a universal attraction of souls was inconceivable. The existence of such a power becomes possible, even inevitable, in the curvature of a world capable of noogenesis" [95, FOM]
It is thus compression of both the population and information that drives the powerful coming together of many individuals into an unprecedented collective purpose, a collective mind ready to act. This will not submerge the individual, believed Teilhard, but rather will bring out the true personality of each person. Compression will "super-personalize" each one of us through a "new kind of love". Teilhard is here getting a sense of the human potential movement to come, a jump to a new level of personal development. This new state of nurturing will allow us to explore more deeply the potential of what it means to be human and create--and it leads to a totally different future.
"True union, the union of heart and spirit, does not enslave, nor does it neutralize the individuals which it brings together. It super-personalizes them. Let us try to picture the phenomenon on a terrestrial scale. Imagine men awakening at last, under the influence of the ever-tightening planetary embrace, to a sense of universal solidarity based on their profound community, evolutionary in its nature and purpose. The nightmares of brutalization and mechanization which are conjured up to terrify us and prevent our advance are at once dispelled. It is not harshness or hatred but a new kind of love, not yet experienced by man, which we must learn to look for as it is borne to us on the rising tide of planetization." [124, FOM]
The power of the exploding human population on the finite geography of the globe, and the resulting effect of compression on society, is essential to understanding Teilhard's predictions about the future. It is what energizes the whole transformation of the future, rapidly bringing forth new inventions, new thoughts and new solutions, making the impossible of today a reality tomorrow. It means that the usual view of the future presented in movies, the techno/totalitarian-nightmare, will actually never come about on a global scale. Compression forces the final battle between good and evil, between hate and love, and between war and peace. What the Hollywood script writers don't realize--and what they leave out--is that a coming transformation of consciousness, caused by the compression of humanity, will transcend the war, greed and stupidity of the 20th Century.
"From the first beginnings of History... this principle of the compressive generation of consciousness has been ceaselessly at work in the human mass..." [289, FOM] "What is the automatic reaction of human society to this process of compression? Experience supplies the answer--it organizes itself."[238, FOM]
"It is a profoundly instructive and mysterious phenomenon. The human mass is spiritually warmed and illuminated by the iron grip of planetary compression; and the warming, whereby the rays of individual interaction expand, induces a further increase, in a kind of recoil, of the compression which was its cause... and so on, in a chain-reaction of increasing rapidity. [296-7, FOM]
Each increase in pressure leads to further opening up between people and nations, each increase makes the development of new social structures and new technologies a reality. This process accelerates until it reaches a critical mass, Teilhard said. Then we will be subject to "forces of attraction between men which are as powerful in their own way as nuclear energy".
When the dual process of the compression of information and the completion of the neural net is complete, explained Teilhard, something new under the Sun will emerge: an awakened collective consciousness--an unprecedented transformation of individual minds into a collective will. This global mind will find a united purpose and be able to take collective action, transcending the old war reflex by uniting to restore our ravaged Earth. As Einstein says, with the advent of the Bomb, we need a new mode of thinking.
And if Teilhard is right, the waking-point leading to this great transformation lies in our near-future. In the 21st Century, Teilhard predicted we will reach the Third Threshold of Consciousness, the point at which the Noosphere actually becomes conscious of itself and reflects on its own being, achieving the state of reflexion. There will then be a new global purpose, a new ability to act in a collective manner--somewhat like Gandhi's convergence of the unities.
From John Mabry in 1994:
We have reached the end of the expanding, or "diversity" stage, and are now entering the contracting, or "unifying" stage. At this point, Chardin's theory runs completely counter to Darwin's, in that the success of humanity's evolution in the second stage will not be determined by "survival of the fittest," but by our own capacity to converge and unify. The most important initial evolutionary leap of the convergence stage is the formation of what Chardin termed "the Noosphere." It's formation, as Michael Murray explains, begins with "a global network of trade, communications, accumulation, and exchange of knowledge, cooperative research ...all go into the weaving of the material support for a sphere of collective thought. In the field of science alone, no individual knows more than a tiny fraction of the sum of scientific knowledge, and each scientist is dependent not only for his education but for all his subsequent work on the traditions and resources which are the collective possession of an entire international society composed of the living and the dead. Just as Earth once covered itself with a film of interdependent living organisms which we call the biosphere, so mankind's combined achievements are forming a global network of collective mind."
"The idea," writes Chardin, "is that of the Earth not only covered by myriads of grains of thought, but enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." One hesitates to invoke the terms "group-mind" or "hive mentality," but they are, perhaps, leaps made by far less developed creatures than we that presage our own ascent. We know that such a thing can and does exist in a variety of species, especially ants, migratory birds, and others... If C.G. Jung has given us the notion of the "collective unconscious," Chardin, then, speaks of the "collective conscious."
The Noosphere is a fascinating and intriguing idea, one that many of us desperately want, on some level, to be true. But as we have been describing it thus far, it seems little more than science fiction. How is it that such an awesome phenomenon could possibly come to be? Amazingly, Teilhard predicts the evolution of a machine that hardly even existed in his time beyond being a glorified abacus: the computer. "Here I am thinking," he writes in Man's Place in Nature, "of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by a process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision." Teilhard's vision of what computers would do for us is twofold. First, computers will achieve the completion of our brains, in that there would be the instantaneous retrieval of information around the globe. Second, computers will improve our brains by facilitating processes more quickly than our own resources can achieve them.
It is also interesting that Chardin predicts the use of the prefix "cyber" in regards to the computer/human matrix, since "cyber" is all the rage in computering circles. In fact, what can be seen as the progenitor of Teilhard's Noosphere is now being termed "Cyberspace" by the computer press, in reference to that mystical field of inter-connecting computer pathways wherein all of the exchanges are made. As Michael Benedikt describes it in his Collected Abstracts from the First Conference on Cyberspace, "Cyberspace is a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multi-dimensional, artificial, or Virtual' reality. In this world, onto which every computer screen is a window, actual, geographical distance is irrelevant. Objects seen or heard are neither physical nor, necessarily, presentations of physical objects, but are rather;in form, character, and action;made up of data, of pure information. This information is derived in part from the operation of the natural, physical world, but is derived primarily from the immense traffic of symbolic information, images, sounds, and people, that constitute human enterprise in science, art, business, and culture."
The form most of these exchanges take is the computer "bulletin board." On this, any person with the simplest of computers and a modem can call a central, master computer with which literally any number of other users may be linked. Once connected, a person may receive or distribute messages on any given topic to one or a million people. As John Barlow describes it, "In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and discussions range on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules." ("Trouble in Cyberspace," The Humanist Sept/Oct 1991)
In light of developments such as computer bulletin boards and "super- information highways" like the Internet, Teilhard's fantastic notions don't seem so fantastic. He is, it turns out, the unsung prophet of our collective future. It is time that we begin to look forward to what these developments are going to mean to us personally, developmentally. Chardin says that "Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization." We need to consider how the inevitable changes in our nature are going to affect us as individuals, spiritually, psychologically, and pathologically. One advantage, though, to facing what is happening to us is that we can stop "groping about" in the dark, and take conscious control of our evolution to speed it on its way.
We are, therefore, in the latter twentieth century, at the threshold of another great leap in evolution, the contraction and unification of the human species, the construction of the Noosphere, the focusing of our psychic energies. "The powers that we have released," Chardin states in Human Energy, "could not possibly be absorbed by the narrow system of individual or national units which the architects of the human Earth have hitherto used. The age of nations has passed. Now unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth."
Cyberspace and the Dream of Teilhard de Chardin