object:1.15 - THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
CHAPTER 15
THE DIRECTIONS
AND CONDITIONS OF
THE FUTURE
the future, I mean the human future, cer-
tainly contains an element of the unpredictable in
itself. Because of the enormous number of physi-
cal variables on which it depends, and even more
the ever-growing predominance of the psychic (in-
dividual choice) over the purely statistical, it seems
to be decidedly the case that human evolution goes
beyond the bounds of exact calculation. So it
would be an error, deserving of vigorous denunci-
ation, to talk as though biology in its forecasts can
behave like astronomy. But it is surely no less ex-
cessive and dangerous to behave as though our
"freedom" were confronted by a future that is
completely indeterminate. No matter what the Ex-
istentialists may claim, to suppose that the Dura-
tion ahead of us resembles a virgin, "isotropic"
substance into which we may cut as we please, as
expediency dictates and in any direction, is posi-
tively and scientifically incorrect. Life, and most par-
ticularly the extreme point of Life represented by
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 225
Mankind, is not simply a state. It is on the contrary (I shall come
back to this) a vast, directed movement, bound up with the very
structure of the Cosmogenesis. It has a "thread" which cannot be
suppressed, and which must continue to show itself, in no way im-
paired, but respected, utilized and expressed, until (and at this point
more than ever) it reaches the highest, most conscious forms of its
development.
At a time when delegates from all over the world are coming to-
gether in a variety of bodies for the purpose of attempting to sketch
a first outline of future society, it seems to me essential to set forth
the main constructive axes without which it is mere self-delusion to
suppose that we can conceive or undertake any ordering or devel-
opment of the Earth: general tendencies of advance and growth, that
is to say, which in certain conditions — despite our freedom of choice,
or better still, because of it — Mankind cannot in any circumstances
ignore, and must heed more and more as time goes on.
That is the purpose of this brief note.
7. The General Tendencies
whatever THE particular modalities of the form it may
eventually take, the world of Man (this is my thesis) already shows
certain tendencies in its development, certain lines of embryogen-
esis, of which we may safely predict that they are definitive and will
only become accentuated with time. Without resorting to any sys-
tematized theory (I shall propose one later) and simply confining
ourselves to the objective study of observable facts, these axes of
growth can be reduced to three.
a First — the continuous rise of Social Unification (rise of masses and
races). Clearly no one can yet predict the exact nature of the world-
226 THE FUTURE OF MAN
group toward which events are leading us. But here and now one
thing is certain, and it appears to me that its recognition in theory,
and acceptance in practice, must be the sine qua non of any valid
discussion and effective action affecting the political, economic
and moral ordering of the present world: this is that nothing, ab-
solutely nothing — we may as well make up our minds to it — can
arrest the progress of social Man toward ever greater interde-
pendence and cohesion. The reason is this. The human mass on
the restricted surface of the earth, after a period of expansion cov-
ering all historic time, is now entering (following an abrupt but not
accidental acceleration of its rate of reproduction) a phase of com-
pression which we may seek to control but which there are no
grounds for supposing will ever be reversed. What is the automatic
reaction of human society to this process of compression? Experi-
ence supplies the answer (which theory can easily explain) — it or-
ganizes itself. To adapt themselves to, and in some sort to escape
from, the planetary grip which forces them ever closer together, in-
dividuals find themselves compelled (eventually they acquire a
taste for it) to arrange their communal lives more adroitly; first in
order to preserve, and later to increase their freedom of action.
And since the compulsion is applied on a uniform and total scale
to the whole mass of humanity the ultimate social organization
which it evokes must of necessity be unitary. I have said elsewhere
and I repeat it here 1 : it would be easier, at the stage of evolution
we have reached, to prevent the earth from revolving than to pre-
vent Mankind from becoming totalized.
b Second, and correlatively — the growth of generalized technology and
mechanization. Here again the facts are clear and the reasons obvi-
ous. In a Mankind becoming unified under pressure, its various or-
1 Cf. Chapter 7 — Human Planetization.
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 227
gans tending in consequence to achieve planetary dimensions, it is
inevitable that the mechanical equipment of society will become
all-pervading and enormous. But this change of scale alone is not
enough in itself to explain the sudden and irreversible rise of the
industrial phenomenon which we see taking place around us.
What has really let loose the Machine in the world, and for good,
is that it both facilitates and indefinitely multiplies our activities.
Not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of
physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our
senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact
measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our
perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying
our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a mini-
mum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how
can Mankind fail to pursue it?
c Thirdly and finally — the heightening of vision. One may say of
the deeper vision that I have in mind that it is conveyed to our
senses by the increased power of our instruments. But in a larger
and more significant sense, I mean the growth of our reflective
concept of the Universe, it arises irresistibly out of the mastery
we have acquired of the physical springs of the world. Because of
this technical control an increasing current of free energy is flow-
ing through the human mass: energy already promoted but hith-
erto absorbed by the work of the hands, and also latent energy,
released and in effect created by the better ordering of matter.
But it becomes decidedly apparent 2 that this added energy, when
it is made available to the human social organism, can only be
usefully and effectively employed in one way: it must be trans-
2 Provided we except the regressive cases of indolence (search for well-being as
opposed to more-being) which momentarily crop up here and there through the
excess of ease and comfort.
228 THE FUTURE OF MAN
formed into research and creative work. The more free Man's
mind is, the more does he reflect; and the more he reflects the
further do his thoughts penetrate and the more intensively do
they become arranged in closely related systems. That is why
the great wave of modern technical progress is automatically ac-
companied by an ever-spreading ripple of theoretical thought
and speculation. Everybody knows, without troubling to weigh
the reason or importance of a fact seemingly so commonplace,
that nothing is more impossible than to inhibit the growth of an
idea. Applying this in its widest sense, the surest affirmation we
can make about the human future is that nothing will ever
restrain Man from seeking to think and essay everything to the
very end.
Unification, technification, growing rationalization of the hu-
man Earth: we need to shut our eyes to the spectacle of the world
we live in, it seems to me, if we are to suppose that we can ever
escape from these three basic trends. But let me add at once that
we must be insensitive to what, for want of a better word, I will
call the "excellence" of the Universe if we are alarmed or rebel-
lious at a prospect that it would be radically wrong to regard as
a humiliating threat to our liberty. For how can we fail to discern
in the simultaneous rise of Society, the Machine and Thought,
this threefold tide that is bearing us upward, the essential and
primordial process of Life itself — I mean, the organic in-folding
of Cosmic matter upon itself, whereby ever-increasing unity, sub-
tended by ever-heightened consciousness, is achieved by ever
more complicated structural arrangements? We must not sup-
pose, even at this early and half-passive stage of our hominiza-
tion, that the pardy enforced flowering of thought imposed on
us by planetary pressure represents a force of enslavement of
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 229
which we are the victims: we must recognize it as a force of lib-
eration. 3
What matters is that in the interacting development of these
two basic trends upon which Mankind is continuing to build itself,
technical organization and the growth of reflective consciousness,
the second should acquire an ever greater predominance and de-
gree of autonomy, conformably with the fundamental law of "vi-
tal in-folding."
And it is here, the General Tendencies being established, that
the question of the Conditions of the Future arises.
2. The Conditions
IF IT IS true that, bound by the collective interaction of its liber-
ties, the human social group cannot escape from certain irre-
versible laws of evolution, does this mean that, observed along its
axis of "greatest complexity" (i.e., increasing liberty) the World is
coiling upon itself with as much sureness as it is in other respects
radiating outward and explosively expanding? In other words, be-
cause certain unalterable factors compel us to advance, with no
possibility of return, in the direction of increasing hominization,
must we conclude that biological evolution on Earth will easily
achieve its purpose — that Thought will necessarily succeed in so
shaping itself that in the end it will comprehend everything?
By no means; and for a series of reasons (or conditions to be
fulfilled) which I must now set forth, from the most superficial to
3 Which does not mean, alas, that the liberating process will not be accompa-
nied by a certain amount of suffering, setbacks and even apparent wastage: the
whole problem of Evil is restated (more comprehensibly, it seems to me, than
in the case of a static world) in this vision of a Universe in evolution.
230 THE FUTURE OF MAN
the most profound. First conditions of survival, then conditions of
health, and finally, above all, conditions of synthesis.
a First — Conditions of Survival. I am not thinking particularly of
the possibility of a cosmic catastrophe which might render the earth
prematurely uninhabitable. The presumed duration of the whole
human development (a few million years) is so trifling compared
with the extent of astronomic time, even at the lowest estimate, that
the chance of a variation of the solar equilibrium while anthropo-
genesis is in process may be ignored. Nor do I propose to dwell upon
the truly negligible possibility of some rash or criminal experiment
blowing up the world (there is, after all, an instinct of planetary
preservation) or even of some infectious disease causing the total
elimination of an animal group as far-sighted, progressive and ubiq-
uitous as Mankind in the adult state. But on the other hand I think
we must pay serious attention to warnings such as that recendy ut-
tered by Mr. Fairfield Osborn, in his book Our Plundered Planet?
In our hurry to advance are we not squandering our reserves
to such an extent that our progress may soon be brought to a halt
for lack of supplies? Where physical energy and even inorganic
substances are concerned, science can foresee and indeed already
possesses inexhaustible substitutes for coal, petroleum and certain
metals. But foodstuffs are another matter. How long (if it ever hap-
pens at all) will it take chemical science to find ways of feeding us
by the direct conversion of carbon, nitrogen and other simple ele-
ments? The population graph is rising almost vertically, while
arable land in every continent is being ruined for lack of proper
husbandry. We must take care: we still have feet of clay.
4 Brown & Co., Boston, 1948. See also in Harper's (February 1948) the well-
documented article by C. Lester Walker: "Too Many People."
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 231
b Secondly — Conditions of Health. I am thinking far less of hy-
giene and physical culture, to which sufficient thought is devoted
already than of the vital problems posed by genetics, which are
willfully ignored. As I mentioned above after rising slowly until the
seventeenth century, when it reached about 400 millions, the
earth's population began to shoot up in an alarming fashion. It was
800 millions by the end of the eighteenth century, 1,600 millions by
1900 and over 2000 millions by 1940. At the present rate of in-
crease, regardless of war and famine, we must expect a further 500
millions in the next twenty-five years. This demographic explosion,
so closely connected with the development of a relatively unified
and industrialized Earth, clearly gives rise to entirely new necessi-
ties and problems, both quantitative and qualitative. From the
palaeolithic age onward, and still more after the neolithic age,
Man has always lived in a state of expansion: to him to grow and
to multiply have been one and the same thing. But now we sud-
denly see the saturation point ahead of us, and approaching at a
dizzy speed. How are we to prevent this compression of Mankind
on the closed surface of the planet (a thing that is good in itself, as
we have seen, since it promotes social unification) from passing that
critical point beyond which any increase in numbers will mean
famine and suffocation? Above all, how are we to ensure that the
maximum population, when it is reached, shall be composed only
of elements harmonious in themselves and blended as harmo-
niously as possible together? Individual eugenics (breeding and
education designed to produce only the best individual types) and
racial eugenics (the grouping or intermixing of different ethnic
types being not left to chance but effected as a controlled process
5 The word is used here in its general and etymological sense of "perfection in
the continuance and fulfillment of the species."
232 THE FUTURE OF MAN
in the proportions most beneficial to humanity as a whole), both,
as I well know, come up against apparently insuperable difficulties,
from the point of view of technical organization and from that of
psychological resistance. But this does not alter the fact that the
problem of building a healthy Mankind already stares us in the
face and is growing more acute every day With the help of science,
and sustained by a renewed sense of our species, shall we be able
to round this dangerous corner?
c Finally — Conditions of Synthesis, the most important of all. What
does the term mean? Cosmically speaking, as I have said, Man is
collectively immersed in a "vortex" of organization which, operat-
ing above the level of the individual, gathers and lifts individuals as
a whole toward the heightening of their power of reflection by
means of a surplus of technical complexity. But, given the nature of
the reflexive phenomenon, what rule must this evolutionary process
observe if it is to fulfill its purpose? Essentially the following: that
within the compressive arrangement which gathers them into a sin-
gle complex center of vision, the human elements must group and
tighten not merely without becoming distorted in the process, but
with an enhancement of their "centric" qualities, i.e., their person-
ality: a delicate operation and one which, biologically, it would
seem to be impossible to carry out except in an atmosphere (or tem-
perature) of unanimity or mutual attraction. Recent totalitarian ex-
periments seem to furnish material for a positive judgment on this
last point: the individual, outwardly bound to his fellows by coer-
cion and solely in terms of function, deteriorates and retrogresses:
6 It must truly be said that this is not merely a condition of success but a posi-
tive requirement of growth. Although compelled to totalize himself (collec-
tively) Man, at all costs, must not cease at the same time to personalize himself.
This is the whole problem and drama of anthropogenesis.
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 233
he becomes mechanized. To repeat a comparison I have already
used above, under these purely enforced conditions the center of
consciousness cannot achieve its natural growth rising out of the
technical center of social organization. Only union through love and
in love (using the word "love" in its widest and most real sense of
"mutual internal affinity"), because it brings individuals together,
not superficially and tangentially but center to center, can physi-
cally possess the property of not merely differentiating but also per-
sonalizing the elements which comprise it. This amounts to saying
that even under the irresistible compulsion of the pressures causing
it to unite, Mankind will only find and shape itself if men can learn
to love one another in the very act of drawing closer.
But how is this warming of hearts to be realized? In my paper
on the formation of the Noosphere 7 I suggested that the very ex-
cess of external compression to which we are subjected by the rel-
ative contraction of our planet may one day cause us to breach
that mysterious wall of growing repulsion which, more often than
not, sets the human molecules in opposition to one another, and
enter the powerful, still-unknown field of our basic affinities. In
other words, attraction will one day be born of enforced nearness.
I am very much less disposed to believe today that the tightening
of the human mass will of itself 'suffice to warm the human heart.
But I continue to believe, if anything more strongly, in the hidden
existence and eventual release of forces of attraction between men
which are as powerful in their own way as nuclear energy appears
to be, at the other end of the spectrum of complexity. And surely
it is this kind of attraction, the necessary condition of our unity,
which must be linked at its root with the radiations of some ulti-
mate Center (at once transcendent and immanent) of psychic con-
7 See above, p. 149.
234 THE FUTURE OF MAN
gregation: the same Center as that whose existence, opening for
human endeavor a door to the Irreversible, seems indispensable
(the supreme condition of the future!), for the preservation of the
will to advance, in defiance of the shadow of death, upon an evo-
lutionary path become reflective, conscious of the future . . . 8
If this is true, is it not apparent that the success of Anthropo-
genesis, ultimately dependent upon achieving contact with the
supracosmic, must, despite the rigors of its external conditioning,
essentially contain an irreducible element of indeterminacy and
uncertainty?
Conclusion
all things taken into account, where does the balance lie
between these diverse influences, "for and against"? Faced by the
biological dilemma confronting our zoological group (unite or per-
ish) which are we to accept, which way rather than another, as the
direction in which the indeterminacy essential to the human ad-
venture is most likely to be resolved?
As I have said elsewhere, the more we study the past, noting
the steady rise of Life over millions of years, and observing the
ever-growing multitude of reflective elements engaged in the con-
struction of the Noosphere; the more must we be convinced that
by a sort of "infallibility of large numbers" Mankind, the present
crest of the evolutionary wave, cannot fail in the course of its
guided probings to find the right road and an outlet for its higher
ascent. Far from being stultified by overcrowding, the cells of indi-
vidual freedom, in a concerted action growing more powerful as
8 See above, Chapter 13 — The Human Rebound of Evolution, p. 192.
THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE 235
they increase in numbers, will rectify and redress themselves when
they begin to move in the direction toward which they are inwardly
polarized. It is reasoned calculation, not speculation, which makes
me ready to lay odds on the ultimate triumph of hominization over
all the vicissitudes threatening its progress.
For a Christian, provided his Christology accepts the fact that
the collective consummation of earthly Mankind is not a mean-
ingless and still less a hostile event but a precondition 9 of the final,
"parousiac" establishment of the Kingdom of God — for such a
Christian the eventual biological success of Man on Earth is not
merely a probability but a certainty: since Christ (and in Him vir-
tually the World) is already risen. But this certainty, born as it is of
a "supernatural" act of faith, is of its nature supraphenomenal:
which means, in one sense, that it leaves all the anxieties attendant
upon the human condition, on their own level, still in the heart of
the believer.
PARIS, JUNE 30, 1948, PSYCHE, OCTOBER 1948.
3 Necessary, but not sufficient in itself.
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