Teilhard de Chardin BOOK FOUR: SURVIVAL Thus evolution has progressed to man, but what of the future?

What is the source of this uneasiness, this disquiet which plagues modern man? The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time . . . . Something threatens us, something is more than ever lacking, but without our being able to say exactly what . . . . In the first and most widespread degree, the malady of space-time manifests itself as a rule by a feeling of futility, of being crushed by the enormities of the cosmos . . . . Enormity of durationsometimes having the effect of an abyss on those few who are able to see it, and at other times more usually (on those whose sight is poor), the despairing effect of stability and monotony. Events that follow one another in a circle, vague pathways which intertwine, leading nowhere. Corresponding enormity of numberthe bewildering number of all that has been, is, and will be necessary to fill time and space. An ocean in which we seem to dissolve all the more irresistibly the more lucidly alive we are. The effort of trying conscientiously to find our proper place among a thousand million men. Or merely in a crowd. 53 This uneasiness can be overcome if we perceive evolution as animating these dimensions. We see that the vastness of space and time, the immensity of numbers are all the milieu in which the evolutionary process takes placethe process that is in essence the ascent to consciousness. Fine, modern man may say. That is the story up to now, but what of tomorrow? What are the requirements of the future if indeed there is a future for man? If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: Whats the good of it all? our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a haltbecause we are evolution . . . . (There is no such thing as the energy of despair in spite of what is sometimes said.) What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope . . . . Either nature is closed to our demands for futurity, in which case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort, is stifled, stillborn in a self-abortive and absurd universe. Or else an opening existsthat of the super-soul above our souls; but in that case the way out, if we are to agree to embark on it, must open out freely into limitless psychic spaces in a universe to which we can unhesitatingly entrust ourselves . . . .

We have said that life, by its very structure, having once been lifted to its stage of thought cannot go on at all without requiring to ascend ever higher. This is enough for us to be assured of two points of which our action has immediate need. The first is that there is for us, in the future, under some form or another, at least collective, not only survival but also super-life. The second is that, to imagine, discover and reach this superior form of existence, we have only to think and to walk always further in the direction in which the lines passed by evolution take on their maximum coherence. 54 In Book Four, Survival, Teilhard presents the lines along which mankind must move if survival and eventually superlife are to be reached. First of all, mankind must avoid the blind alley of isolationismthe blind alley of extreme individualism either of the individual person or of an individual group of personsthis latter form of individualism we now call racism. [Both of these alleys ignore] an essential phenomenonthe natural confluence of grains of thoughtthey disfigure or hide from our eyes the veritable contours of the noosphere and render biologically impossible the formation of a veritable spirit of the earth. 55 This confluence of thought occurs naturally primarily due to the shape of our earth. Men can only move so far without bumping into other men. As our populations increase men are forced into closer and closer proximity. There is an ever increasing melding of races and cultures. In addition to this physical fusion there is a corresponding psychic fusion that is greatly enhanced by modern media due to which, as Teilhard writes, each individual finds himself simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth. To further reinforce his argument against the naturalness of isolationism, Teilhard briefly retraces the evolutionary process from the infinitesimally small simple particles to the immensely large and complex mega molecules of today. In this retracing he presents his antiracist philosophy, written at a time when the Nazi idea of a super race was being promulgated. Really I can see no coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of facts but as a gigantic psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the super-arrangement to which all the thinking elements of the earth find themselves today individually and collectively subject. Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egotistically the extremity of everyone for himself is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.

Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch drawing off for itself alone the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage. The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.56