Re: Teilhard de Chardin - new documentary

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:23:35 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 
 
On Sat, 1 Jun 2024 16:50:40 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
 

On 6/1/24 5:40 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Fri, 31 May 2024 22:05:49 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:

 
[…]
 

I have gone directly to Teilhard's work itself and can via reason applied
to the evidence at hand come to the obvious conclusion that Teilhard was
incorporating eugenics into his evolutionary philosophy. I have no idea
what sorts of bias or predisposition are preventing you from acknowledging
the evidence and resulting conclusion. Slattery merely pointed the way. I
have my own copy of *Phenomenon of Man* and of *Activation of Energy* to go
by.

 
That paragraph is a mirror of some of the ones written by Ron Dean
about Darwin; your approach like his, is essentially 'Fuck the
experts, it's obvious to me so it must be right.'

 
Albert Einstein wrote something along the same lines, too.
 
There is nothing wrong with going to the source. 

 
Absolutely! There is nothing whatsoever wrong with going to the
source, that is what I generally do myself. It is why, regarding
Joshua Canzona's six-word quote from Amy Limpitlaw, I said "I don't
put too much faith in secondary quotes from somebody's dissertation
where the dissertation isn't available to check." For some treason,
that annoyed Hemi - maybe your advice should be directed to him.
 

There *is* something
wrong with appealing to experts to the exclusion of going to the source.

 
There is equally something wrong in deciding that people who have
professionally studied a subject for many years have simply got it
wrong and that your own interpretation of someone's writing, based on
limited study, is the correct one - especially in the case of the
obscure type of prose for which Teilhard de Chardin is well known. It
becomes hubris when you expect other people to discard the experts and
accept your opinion. That is the error that Hemi and Ron Dean both
make.
 

Well your expert Haught didn’t get into any detailed examination of
Teilhard’s use of eugenics in his writings in that Commonweal article. This
is it:

“Finally, and proceeding from the charge that Slattery levels above, we
must ask: Was Teilhard a eugenicist? He did write that “our generation
still regards with distrust all efforts proposed by science for controlling
the machinery of heredity...as if man had the right and power to interfere
with all the channels in the world except those which make him himself. And
yet it is eminently on this ground that we must try everything, to its
conclusion.” In judging this idea as morally reckless, however, Slattery
ignores the fact that for Teilhard it is always—and only—within the
constraints of a responsible moral vision rooted in Christian hope, and in
the principles listed above, that we must be ready to “try everything.”
Teilhard is looking in the age of science for a more adventurous,
world-building, and life-enhancing moral life than we can find in classical
religious patterns of piety.”

“Because humans are part of nature, and nature remains far from finished,
it is legitimate to wonder to what extent humans may morally participate in
their own and the world’s continuous creation. In doing so, may we
justifiably tamper with our genetic heritage as well as that of other
living beings? Perhaps Teilhard was at times incautious and too optimistic
about human potential in this domain. Yet the efforts of Slattery and
others to burden him with a tainted worldview need to be resisted.”

Yet Teilhard did incorporate eugenics into his evolutionary philosophy
multiple times. That cannot be swept under the rug and forgotten. I think
one would need to dissect those quotes in more detail before moving on.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/trashing-teilhard

From *Phenomenon of Man*:
“So far we have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we
have given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral
factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we
suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable
that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our
personalities, should be discovered and developed.”

“Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to society.”

From *Activation of Energy*:

“In man, by virtue of the two allied phenomena of reflection and social
totalization, the equivalent of this inner dynamism in a different context
can only be a reasoned urge towards fulfilment (both individual and
collective, each being produced through the other), followed in the
direction of the best arrangement of all the hominized substance which
makes up what I earlier called the noosphere.”

“The best arrangement with a view to a maximum hominization of the
noosphere.
From this there follows, as a first priority, a fundamental concern to
ensure (by correct nutrition, by education, and by selection) an ever more
advanced eugenics of the human zoological type on the surface of the
earth.”

And:
“We must recognize, then, the vital importance of a collective quest of
discovery and invention no longer inspired solely by a vague delight in
knowledge and power, but by the duty and the clearly-defined hope of
gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of
evolution.
And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (radical no less
than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional
problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the
biosphere.”

Slattery oddly quoted this as: “(racial no less than individual)”. See:
https://religiondispatches.org/pierre-teilhard-de-chardins-legacy-of-eugenics-and-racism-cant-be-ignored/

And:
“To lay the foundations of a technics (both biophysical and psychological)
of ultra-evolution, from the twofold point of view:
a. both of the planetary arrangements that should be conceived (in general
research, for example, and in eugenics) with a view to an ultra-arrangement
of the noosphere
b. and of the psychic energies that must be generated or concentrated in
the light of a mankind which is in a state of collective super-reflection
upon itself: the whole problem, in fact, of the maintenance and development
of the psychic energy of self-evolution.”

And when reflecting on the pressures of overpopulation he rejects eugenic
means to deal with that problem here:

“Contrary to what happens so often in nature, the propagation of our
species does not seem destined to regularize and limit itself
automatically: for the more numerous men are, the more their ingenuity
protects them and incites them to multiply even more.
In such an event, and in order to escape the asphyxiation which threatens
us, the remedies habitually proposed are: either a drastic restriction of
reproduction, or, again (an ancient dream that is now, maybe, ceasing to be
a dream?), a mass migration of human beings to some still uninhabited
star.”

“But, with whatever skill such methods of decompression may be improved,
surely their very nature is such that they are to some degree imaginary,
precarious, and desperate. The idea, in particular, of a transplanetary
swarm of migrants must undoubtedly be rejected as impossible to realize,
simply from the fact that not a single visitor from another quarter of the
heavens has ever come to find us.”

“To my mind (and providing, as I believe, that the world in which we live
can be regarded as sufficiently coherent not automatically, when all is
said and done, to suppress the life it engenders) we must look for the
relief without which our zoological phylum cannot now survive, not in a
eugenic reduction nor in an extra-terrestrial expansion of the human mass,
but rather in what one might call ‘an escape into time, through what lies
ahead’.”

That to me implies he is focusing here on the negative type of eugenics
such as sterilization and dismisses that as a way of dealing with
overpopulation. So maybe his other uses of eugenics ideas are more in line
with the positive mode?