object:1.09 - FAITH IN PEACE
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
CHAPTER 9
FAITH IN PEACE
I am NO politician and still less a prophet. Like
the rest of us I am anxiously following the pro-
ceedings at the Peace Conference, this poignant
spectacle of the two halves of Mankind wrangling
incessantly over points of detail but making no
fundamental contact because they approach every-
thing from different angles. How will it all turn
out? I do not know.
But I am, if I may be allowed the term, a "geo-
biologist," and I have looked hard and long at the
face of Mother Earth. For this reason I feel and I
am convinced of one thing: that nothing is more
dangerous for the future of the world, nothing
moreover less warranted in Nature, than the af-
fected resignation and false realism with which in
these days a great number of people, hunching
their shoulders and drawing in their heads, predict
(and in so doing tend to provoke) a further catas-
trophe in the near future. More than all the rem-
nants of hatred lingering between nations, this
terror of inevitable war, which sees no cure for
warfare except in even greater terror, is responsible
144 THE FUTURE OF MAN
for poisoning the air we breathe. That is why, humbly and devoutly
echoing a divine utterance, I feel the need to cry to those around
me, "What do ye fear, O men of little faith?" Do you not see that
the peace which you no longer dare to hope for (when you do not
actually scorn it as a myth) is possible and indeed certain, provided
you will grasp what the word "peace" means and what it requires of
you? Let me beg you to rise for a moment above the dust and smoke
obscuring the horizon and gaze with me at the course of the world.
IN THE FIRST place I maintain that peace — I mean, some form of
universal and stable peace — is possible in human terms. Why should
it not be? Of course we can easily pile up arguments and evidence
to refute this hopeful view. Historically, there have always been wars,
and they have grown more harsh: therefore there will continue to be
war till the end of time. Morally, man is evil, and becoming more so
as he grows more civilized: what grounds have we for hoping that he
will improve? And scientifically, since what characterizes the devel-
opment of the animal species from its beginning is the struggle for
life, how can we expect, mere humans that we are, to escape from
this essential biological condition without which there can be nei-
ther growth nor progress? I am well aware of the many reasons for
skepticism, which as a geobiologist I have pondered as much as any-
one. But I must say frankly that none of them impresses me, because
to my mind all are neutralized and finally annulled by a fact of
higher importance to which, I do not know why, sociologists seem to
pay no attention. I mean the particular and unique structure of the
zoological group to which we belong. Until the coming of Man the
branches or shoots composing the different living species tended in-
exorably to diverge and spread ever more widely apart as they de-
FAITH IN PEACE 145
veloped. With Man, on the other hand, owing to the grand psycho-
logical phenomenon of Reflection, the branches of his species fol-
low an entirely different course. Instead of separating and detaching
themselves from one another they turn inward and presently inter-
twine, so that by degrees, races, peoples, nations merging together,
they come to form a sort of uniconscious superorganism. To eyes
that can see, this is what is now happening. And having noted this
profound change in the evolutionary process at the human level,
how can we fail to see that it changes the whole nature of the prob-
lem, so that, in seeking to forecast the development of human soci-
ety in this matter of war and peace, we cannot simply project the
history of the animal world into the future, or even that of the first
hundred or two hundred millennia of our own species? Biologically
speaking, what has hitherto driven living creatures to mutual de-
struction has clearly been the necessity which impelled them to sup-
plant one another in order to survive. But why should their survival
depend upon their supplanting one another, except for the reason
that they existed independendy of one another? Ultimately and fun-
damentally it is the divergence of the living branches, operating
from the highest level down to the family and the individuals com-
posing the family, which has always been the cause of human
conflict. But suppose, on the contrary (this is the entirely new devel-
opment in the case of the human race) that the outspreading and
unfolding of forms gradually gives way to a process of in-folding.
Then the previous economy of Nature undergoes a radical change:
for converging branches do not survive by eliminating each other;
they have to unite. Everything that formerly made for war now
makes for peace, and the zoological laws of conservation and sur-
vival must wear an opposite sign if they are to be applied to Man.
The whole phenomenon has been reversed. This may well account
for the terrible upheavals we have undergone; not an irresistible in-
crease in the tide of war, but simply a clash of currents: the old dis-
146 THE FUTURE OF MAN
ruptive surface forces driving against a merging in the depths which
is already taking place. Why not, after all?
it is hard to escape the conclusion, looking at things in this way,
that despite all appearances to the contrary Mankind is not only ca-
pable of living in peace but by its very structure cannot fail eventually to
achieve peace. Here, of course, we encounter the formidable element of
human freedom of action, of which it is endlessly repeated that its
unpredictable interference with the established proceedings of Na-
ture threatens constantly to disrupt and frustrate them. But we need
to be clear about this. No doubt it is true that up to a point we are free
as individuals to resist the trends and demands of Life. But does this
mean (it is a very different matter) that we can escape collectively
from the fundamental set of the tide? I do not think so. When I con-
sider the inexorable nature of the universal impulse which for more
than six hundred million years has ceaselessly promoted the global
rise of consciousness on the earth's surface, driving on through an
endlessly multiplying network of opposing hazards; when I reflect
upon the irresistible forces (geographical, ethnic, economic and psy-
chic) whose combined effect is to thrust the human mass ever more
tightly in upon itself; when finally, on the occasion of some great act
of human collaboration or devotion, I perceive as though in a light-
ning flash the prodigious, still-slumbering affinity which draws the
"thinking molecules" of the world together — wherever I look I am
forced to the same conclusion: that the earth is more likely to stop
turning than is Mankind, as a whole, likely to stop organizing and
unifying itself. For if this interior movement were to stop, it is the
Universe itself, embodied in Man, that would fail to curve inward
and achieve totalization. And nothing, as it seems, can prevent the
FAITH IN PEACE 147
universe from succeeding — nothing, not even our human liberties,
whose essential tendency to union may fail in detail but cannot (with-
out "cosmic" contradiction) err "statistically" According to whether
one looks at it from the point of view of the isolated unit or in terms
of all units taken together, the human synthesis, that is to say, Peace,
shows us two complementary faces (like so many other things in this
world): first a steep slope, only to be climbed by constant effort in the
face of many setbacks; and ultimately the point of balance to which
the whole system must inevitably come.
PEACE therefore IS certain: it is only a matter of time. In-
evitably, with an inevitability which is nothing but the supreme ex-
pression of liberty, we are moving laboriously and self-critically
toward it. But what exactly do we mean by this — what kind of peace?
Only a peace, it is perfectly clear, which will allow, express and cor-
respond to what I have called the vital in-folding of Mankind upon
itself. A sustained state of growing convergence and concentration,
a great organized endeavor: if it is not that kind of peace, then
what I have been saying is worthless and we are back with our un-
certainties. This means that all hope of bourgeois tranquillity, all
dreams of "millenary" felicity in which we may be tempted to in-
dulge, must be washed out, eliminated from our horizon. A per-
fectly ordered society with everyone living in effortless ease within
a fixed framework, a world in a state of tranquil repose, all this has
nothing to do with our advancing Universe, apart from the fact
that it would rapidly induce a state of deadly tedium. Although, as
I believe, concord must of necessity eventually prevail on earth, it
can by our premises only take the form of some sort of tense co-
hesion pervaded and inspired with the same energies, now become
148 THE FUTURE OF MAN
harmonious, which were previously wasted in bloodshed: unanim-
ity in search and conquest, sustained among us by the universal re-
solve to raise ourselves upward, all straining shoulder to shoulder,
toward even greater heights of consciousness and freedom. In
short, true peace, the only kind that is biologically possible, beto-
kens neither the ending nor the reverse of warfare, but war in a
naturally sublimated form. It reflects and corresponds to the nor-
mal state of Mankind become at last alive to the possibilities and
demands of its evolution.
And here a last question arises, bringing us to the heart of the
problem. Why is it, finally, that men at this very moment are still
so painfully incapable of agreeing among themselves; why does the
threat of war still appear so menacing? Is it not because they have
still not purged themselves sufficiently of the demon of immobil-
ism? Is not the underlying antagonism which separates them at the
conference tables quite simply the eternal conflict between motion
and inertia, the cleavage between one part of the world that moves
and another that does not seek to advance? Let us not forget that
faith in peace is not possible, not justifiable, except in a world dom-
inated by faith in the future, faith in Man and the progress of Man.
By this token, so long as we are not all of one mind, and with a suf-
ficient degree of ardor, it will be useless for us to seek to draw to-
gether and unite. We shall only fail.
That is why, when I look for reassurance as to our future, I do
not turn to official utterances, or "pacifist" manifestations, or con-
scientious objectors. I turn instinctively toward the ever more nu-
merous institutions and associations of men where in the search for
knowledge a new spirit is silently taking shape around us — the soul
of Mankind resolved at all costs to achieve, in its total integrity, the
uttermost fulfillment of its powers and its destiny.
CAHIERS DU MONDE NOUVEAU, JANUARY 1 947.
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