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Teilhard de Chardin the Catholic
priest, palaeontologist and philosopher-theologian, maintained that the
universe and humankind were evolving toward a perfect state called the Omega
Point. According to him our planet which started off as a geosphere-- that
is, composed only of inanimate matter-- was fundamentally transformed with
the advent of life which converted it to a biosphere and which then itself
was transformed by the development of human cognition into a noosphere, or
the realm of thought. The aim of this evolutionary process was to ultimately
converge towards a final unity, or a level of maximum complexity identical
with God.
John David Garcia, a self-described
ethical protagonist and scientific generalist who died five years ago,
agreed with Teilhard but felt that the vision was too intelligence oriented
and lacked a moral dimension. He stressed that even more that an increase by
humanity to reach Omega Point was a constant increase in ethical behaviour
and the way to go about achieving that was through "total creativity". He
defined total creativity as the product of intelligence and ethics.
However, by total creativity
Garcia didn't mean the kind of standalone original thinking that's
manifested by people in any one particular area of work or line of thinking
such as music, physics or business. Instead Garcia considered it to be that
total quality of human being "which allows and motivates him or her
not only to discover new scientific laws, invent new machines or create
great art but also to help others to do those things by way of commerce,
politics, administration, industrial production, education, philanthropy,
therapy or the provision of social services."
We can see therefore that Teilhard's Omega
Point, though easier to attain may be, is ultimately sterile. It's as if
after having been set an objective and given an impetus towards that purpose
the whole process simply winds up transforming itself into a cosmically
barren supercomputer without any consistent integrity or governing
principles. By contrast, Garcia's final pinnacle of evolutionary development
is not just a perfect state of maximum complexity, it also has a definite
ethical aspect to it. In today's terminology we should perhaps call it
"value-added evolution." Or to be even more cool, "evolving with attitude". |
