Part II. On the Possible Bases of a Universal Human Creed
Chapter 7: A Great Event
4. Deeper than Our Present Discords: Mankind in the Re-shaping Although in terms of its biological, economic and mental determinisms
the human earth, emerging from war, may be seen to be more tightly fastened upon itself than ever before, in its other and freer aspects it may give a first impression of growing disorder. As I said at the beginning, a thick fog of confusion and dissension is at present drifting over the world. Indeed one might say that men have never more vehemently rebuffed and detested one another than they do now, when everything drives them closer together. Is this state of moral chaos really to be
reconciled with the idea and the hope that we are advancing towards unanimity through the closer contact of our bodies and minds?
Let us look at things more closely to see whether, even in those troubled regions of the heart, there may not be gleams of light heralding the planetization of Mankind.
Traced in broad outline the ‘psychic’ map of the world would show on its surface a mosaic of vertically separated compartments (ethnical, political, religious) whereas in depth a loosening surface, symbolizing class-antagonism, would separate the human mass into two thicknesses over its entire planetary extent. Such is the tangled skein which the war has inevitably thrown into relief. Within these ancient or recent lines of division, the tightening-np of the world could not fail to cause upheaval and explosion in the Noosphere. But what effect has it had in younger and more elastic zones?
A new substance has recently appeared in the heart of the thinking
‘magma’ -- a new element, not yet catalogued but of supreme
importance: We might call it Homo progressivus, that is to say, the man to whom the terrestrial future matters more than the present. A new type of man indeed, when we consider that, less than two hundred years ago, the notion of an organic evolution of the World in Time had acquired neither form nor substance in the human mind. When we come to look for them, men of this sort are easily recognizable. They are scientists, thinkers, airmen and so on -- all those possessed by the demon (or the angel) of Research. Let us try to plot their statistical distribution on our imaginary map. The diagram turns out to have some remarkable
features.
In the first place, points denoting this new human type will be found to be scattered more or less all over the thinking face of the globe.
Although more numerous among the white peoples, and tending towards the lower social class, they will appear, at least occasionally, in every compartment into which the human race is divided. Their emergence is clearly related to some phenomenon of a noospheric kind.
Secondly, some apparent attraction draws these scattered elements together and causes them to unite among themselves. You have only to take two men, in any gathering, endowed with this mysterious sense of the future. They will gravitate instinctively towards one another in the crowd; they will know one another.
But the third characteristic, the most noteworthy of all, is that this meeting and grouping together is not confined to individuals belonging to the same category or having the same origins, that is to say,
belonging to the same compartment within the Noosphere. No racial, social or religious barrier seems to be effective against this force of attraction. I myself have experienced this a hundred times, and anyone who chooses can do the same. Regardless of the country, creed or social status of the person I approach, provided the same flame of expectation burns in us both, there is a profound, definitive and total contact
instantly established between us. It matters nothing that differences of education or training cause us to express our hopes in different ways.
We feel that we are of the same kind, and we find that our very
differences are a common armor, as though there were a dimension of life in which all striving makes for nearness, not only within a corporate body but heart to heart.
I believe that these various characteristics can be accounted for in only one way. We have to accept that, accelerated by the successive
intellectual and social upheavals that have shaken the world during the past century and a half, a radical process of differentiation and
segregation is taking place within the human mass. And it is following precisely the course we would expect: the spontaneous individualization and separation of that which moves and rises from that which remains immobile; the irresistible multiplication and aggregation, over the whole extent of the globe, of elements activated by a (hominized) reawakening of the phyletic sense; the gradual formation and emergence, at variance with most former categories, of a new noospheric zone m which human collectivization, hitherto enforced, is at last entering its sympathetic phase under the influence of the newly manifest Sense of Evolution.
It would seem, then, that the grand phenomenon which we are now witnessing represents a new and possibly final division of Mankind, based no longer on wealth but on belief in progress.
The old Marxist conflict between producers and exploiters becomes out- dated -- at the best a misplaced approximation. What finally divides the men of today into two camps is not class but an attitude of mind -- the spirit of movement. On the one hand there are those who simply wish to make the world a comfortable dwelling-place; on the other hand, those who can only conceive of it as a machine for progress -- or better, an organism that is progressing. On the one hand the ‘bourgeois spirit’ in
its essence, and on the other the true ‘toilers of the Earth’, those of whom we may safely predict that, without violence or hatred, simply by biological predominance, they will tomorrow constitute the human race.
On one hand the cast-offs; on the other, the agents and elements of planetization.
Peking, 25 December 1945. Cahiers du Monde Nouveau, August- September 1946.
15
return to religion-online
The Future of Mankind by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., was professor of geology at the Catholic Institute in Paris, director of the National Geologic Survey of China, and director of the
National Research Center of France. He died in New York City in 1955. Published by Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1959. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.