immanence

Okay, so I watched Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding (not so much intentionally as to enjoy the loving company of my co-habitants) and was impressed by the tension between Bishop Michael Curry’s sermonizing on love and the dour and perplexed faces of many of the royal-loving Brits in the audience. Diana Evans’ Guardian piece gets at that tension very nicely.

I also caught the references in Curry’s speech to Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, whose work has been creeping into mainstream Catholic views about humanity and ecology, and whose views undergird — with significant critical rethinking — the views of ecotheologian Thomas Berry. (Berry should be familiar to most readers of Immanence: see, e.g., here, here, and here. In fact, his term “Ecozoic” figures in the tag line to my EcoCulture Lab — oh, and by the way, welcome, readers, to the EcoCulture Lab.)

Now, in a stunning article on Religion Dispatches, Notre Dame theology and history of science graduate John Slattery claims that Teilhard was not only forward-thinking in his embrace of evolutionary theory, but was also disappointingly retrograde in his embrace of eugenics and blatant racism. My initial thought while reading Slattery’s piece was that this might be the overenthusiasm of a youthful and disillusioned follower (the author); but reading it, and the extensive quotes from Teilhard’s writing, convinced me otherwise.

Two complementary upshots of the article are captured in the following two quotes:

But first, let’s be clear: before World War II, much of the Western World was, what most of us would now regard as openly racist. Anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-immigration, anti-disability, and misogyny dominated the populations of the United States and Europe. Leaders in science and industry coupled such racism with Darwin’s conception of evolutionary progress to produce horrific decades of enforced eugenic practices.

Yes, finding racism in the views of white folks who lived before WW2 is all too easy, and for the most part not very helpful. (Think of the arguments about whether John Muir, Karl Marx, or take-your-pick-of-any-pre-WW2-white-intellectual was a racist.) As for eugenics, that’s perhaps even easier to find among white intellectuals of the early twentieth century. (My own campus has been rocked by that debate.)

But when it comes to specifics, as Slattery shows:

Sadly, it also seems indisputable that the mature formulations of some of Teilhard’s most famous ideas—e.g., the Noosphere, the Omega Point, the divinization of the species—rest upon philosophies infused with conceptions of eugenics, racial superiority, sterilization, and limitless science. 

Teilhard’s most original contribution was to create an experimental hybrid of Christian theology and evolutionary metaphysics, captured best in the idea that the universe, led by some of its members, was evolving toward something, and that that something could be equated with God, with Divine Love, or something like that (Jesus, the “Omega Point,” et al.).

Non-Christians could easily substitute some proper nouns to make for a more palatable rendition of that same general idea (which resonates, for instance, with variations of Advaita Vedanta). Teilhard’s connections to the crucible of late nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary spiritualisms should be fairly evident — think, at one end of the spectrum, of the scientific metaphysics of Vernadsky and Le Roy, co-originators with Teilhard of the concept of the Noosphere, and at another end, of the Theosophy of Blavatsky, Leadbeater, and Besant, the Anthroposophy of Steiner, the evolutionary philosophy of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, and the other esoteric–metaphysical-evolutionist mixes that gave rise to modern yoga, the New Age, and all that.

The sticky, icky question within Teilhard’s evolutionism revolves around that phrase I’ve added to the middle of that one-sentence summary: “led by some of its members.” (It’s my phrase, but Slattery shows that it’s apt.) Led by which members? Who says? Why even led (by anything/anyone specific) at all? Isn’t that just a wishful projection of ourselves, those who would like to think of themselves as leading the cosmic way (which for white folks at a certain point in time seemed to be precisely they, and for post-racists but not post-anthropocentrists would still be humans leading the way across the universe)?

Curry’s use of Teilhard for the narrative of love fueling the universe made me think of how interesting it would have been for him to have cited Peirce or Whitehead instead. Peirce, as I’ve written, had a similar view of the universe as evolving toward something, but it wasn’t entirely clear what was leading that evolution (except for love itself), what was following in that path, how long it would take, or that it was necessarily even correlated with humanity whether in whole (anthropocentrically) or in part (ethnocentrically). His thinking on all of that was somewhat underdeveloped, but in its relationship to his metaphysical categories I find it provocative and somewhat compelling. In particular, I like the way it balances out the cataphatic, or affirmative (saying something positive about what is positive in the universe’s genesis or development), and the apophatic, or negating (humbly affirming our incapacity to know or to state anything about any of it).

Or between hope and realism. (I hope — realistically or otherwise? — that I address that balance fairly well in my forthcoming book.)