Blewett
First of all, who is he? Who is Teilhard de Chardin for people who really are not very familiar with him?
Berry
Teilhard is one of the most fascinating persons of the twentieth century. He was a French writer, thinker, Christian mystic, theologian, with enormous impact on the twentieth century. In fact, there are few, if any, personalities of the twentieth century that have been written about so much as Teilhard. The bibliography of works written about him was into the thousands, I believe. In the French language there were 5,000 titles. Enormous amount of literature—much more literature than about some of the other personalities that were well known and were influential, but somehow have not elicited the range of response that Teilhard has elicited, because his thinking covered such a vast field of concern about the total human venture. He was scientist, he was theologian, he was a great personality, he was a Westerner in China for twenty years. It was a great deal of challenge about his thinking and so forth. And he was born in 1881, he lived up to 1955.
He was born in a period, of course, when so many changes took place in our human life and human thought and the sense of values, and when the human was just entering into this great petrochemical age: when the roads were being built, when the radio came into existence. And those of us that can remember the early radio program—of course, you reveal your age when you say 1917, when KDKA in Pittsburgh had the first commercial radio program—and can see that Teilhard’s life spanned a great period of time. Then there were the great thinkers that lived during this time: Einstein, who changed our whole view of the scientific world game; Darwin’s work was a dominant work. And probably what gave the central focus to Teilhard’s life was to discover the evolutionary theory, and the fact that Western religious thought had not been able to assimilate it, and perhaps few things have changed our intellectual perspective on things and so challenged our religious cultural traditions as the evolutionary hypothesis of Darwin.
Blewett
What do you think are the major contributions he’s made to the ecological age? To this period?
Berry
Well, that’s a great challenge, because that’s somewhat the pathos of Teilhard; is that there is an aspect of his thinking that is not easily compatible with the ecological age. But the more fundamentals of his thinking are the basic support of the ecological age.
Blewett
That’s interesting.
Berry
And so that when we think of Teilhard, we have to think of perhaps the person who altered Christian thought perhaps more than anybody since the time of Saint Paul.
Blewett
Really?
Berry
Perhaps. Certainly since the time of Saint Thomas. Why? Because the whole thought structure of human existence has changed more drastically in these last few hundred years than any time before. And if you move Christianity from the context in which it was born into this context, obviously that’s going to make the greatest change. The change that Saint Thomas brought into the picture by moving from a more Platonic to a more Aristotelian context is minor compared to what we are faced with. And the question is: can we do it or not do it?
Blewett
And Teilhard was seminal in all of that.
Berry
Well, he was a central figure. And compared to the other people—like Bart, who was a great theologian; certainly even Tillich. These were great thinkers. But none of them had the scientific knowledge that Teilhard did. So when it comes to somebody that had a great depth of scientific knowledge, his special field was paleontology.
Blewett
Oh yes.
Berry
And geology. He was deep into the geological sciences, biological sciences, and to comparative paleontological studies. And he was part of some of the great expeditions in research.
Blewett
Yeah. Didn’t he—he lived some of his life in China? He was in China?
Berry
Well, he lived there twenty years of his life. He went to China in the mid-twenties and he left in the mid-forties. Well, in 1946, I believe.
Blewett
So now, what would you say, though—like if you were to say one, two, three, four, five, or whatever—what contributions do you think he’s really made to this age?
Berry
Well, there were several.
Blewett
And I’m sure there were many.
Berry
If a person reduced them to one thing, the great thing that he did was to make a commitment to the evolutionary process. A total commitment. For a standing Christian thinker to make that total commitment that he made to the evolutionary process in the second decade of this century, when Christians were very adverse to accepting the implications of the evolutionary interpretation of things, something more than hypothesis, the evolutionary view, something that has the factual evidence that is difficult not to accept. But Christians have always found great difficulty. They thought that it challenged the whole basic structure of the faith. But he immediately saw that, no matter what happened to the faith or what happened to anything else, we had to follow the evidences that were before us. And so he accepted the evidences, committed himself definitively to that, and then he got in trouble with the church.
Because the structure of Christianity and its dogmatic teaching, its religious interpretation, is based largely on the concept of an original paradisal state where there was a fall into what we call original sin. Now, original sin was, we might almost say, was an invention of Saint Paul. In the sense you have a savior figure, you need something to be saved from, and so you have original sin. But the first Adam—it is in the Bible, the original sin, in Genesis obviously—but Adam is never mentioned in the Old Testament, except in that beginning. Adam plays no role in the Old Testament. But there was, however, that sense of need, of redemption, that divine human relations were radically disturbed, and that things could not be set right except by a savior personality. And so we get the turmoil of the prophetic age and the difficulties of dealing with existence, and then the promise of a savior personality that will bring about this transformation, restore divine human union, give humans hope that the human condition will be transformed. And it was this that developed into the backgrounds of the incarnation, the redemption as Christians presented, as it’s presented in the Gospels.
Blewett
And such a central thing.
Berry
It’s a central thing. And then Saint Paul, in explaining Christ, he goes back and has the first Adam and the second Adam. And so everything develops out of that relationship. And so we develop all the salvation doctrines of the faith. But when Teilhard came along in 1922, he wrote an essay on original sin, saying that this makes a great difficulty, except the fact that we are in an emerging universe that moves from earlier forms to later forms to more developed forms. And as it goes through more developed forms, it’s not a collapse of some perfect age and a restoration of something of that nature, but it is an emergent process that from the beginning was a simpler process, that begins even with particles of matter that we call atomic particles or galactic systems. And the shape of things unfolds through time, and so forth.
Blewett
And all of that is sacred.
Berry
Yeah. Sacred. Oh, certainly, yes. All of that has, from the beginning, a spiritual dimension. There’s no such thing as Christ matter, and it has that sense. But that’s a central fact of Teilhard’s intellectual life and the tension between the religious authorities in Teilhard, which a person has to keep in mind. Because much of what happened in much of his writing is to balance out a very sensitive Christian theological context with the modern scientific context. But his genius was that he was able to keep his relationship with both, although he was in a certain sense alienated from both. Because your Orthodox scientist—that is, your more mechanistically oriented scientist—found it difficult to deal with Teilhard’s interpretation of the universe as having a psychic consciousness aspect from the beginning. And that was on the one hand. So that type of scientist could not deal adequately with Teilhard, nor can the theological, on the other hand, the theological or religious side. They had difficulty with Teilhard because he was so deep into the scientific world.
Blewett
Say something more then, Tom, about that psychic death.
Berry
But let me just say something more, though, about this article that he wrote in 1922. That wasn’t a big problem until 1924. And then he was invited, had a chance to go to China. The Jesuits had a research center in China, in Tianjin. And because his studies were of this nature and so forth, he had become a distinguished personality already. Also at this time, at Zhoukoudian in North China, the excavations were being made for the result of the discovery of the Peking skull, which at that time was the foremost bit of paleontological research concerning the origins of the human. But at that time that article was discovered, was making trouble. And there was a certain sense of wanting to get Teilhard out of an influential position in Europe and get him out to the mission. So he gets into China.
In China, once he’s there, he comes back, and the real tendency of it from then on, he was an exile, a person might say. He did his work in China. He was part of that expedition of working with those excavations at Zhoukoudian. And periodically he would go back to Europe, and he was offered positions teaching in Europe. And he had a great deal of recognition there. But his superiors insisted that he—
Blewett
Keep out of the limelight that way.
Berry
Keep out of the theological scene. They didn’t mind his doing his scientific work, but Teilhard saw that the scientific work had fantastic implications for the total cultural development of the human, and it had fantastic implications for the Christian vision of life and the whole interpretation of Christianity. And so that he was a writer, too. And he had lyric capacity with words and expressions. And he had a vision. He was one of the great personalities in interpreting and in changing the whole cultural scene. So that he is one of those vast historical personalities.
And then a person could say, “Well, who would you even compare him to?” and so forth. Well, to my mind, there are several personalities of the twentieth century that are very important. There’s Carl Jung, and there’s—also, maybe we could explore that later, and see how Teilhard relates to these. But going back to the earlier stage and the scene in which his thinking developed. Let me just read a passage here. It’s just a short passage from one of his essays that he wrote 1929, The Sense of Man, where he ends this: “what must mark the Christian in the future is an unparalleled zeal for creation.”
So if I were to mark the great contributions of Teilhard, I would say three things that he did. The first thing is that he told the story of the universe in an integral manner, and perhaps for the first time. For a long time, the scientists had been searching out a way to tell the total story of the universe. Sir James Jeans had written his explanation, Eddington had written his, but neither one of them quite—they understood the universe, too, somewhat, that it had a psychic component, and that that was central to the process. But they were not able to tell the story with the fullness and the richness that Teilhard told it. So that The Phenomenon of Man—it’s really not “The Phenomenon of Man,” but “The Human Phenomenon,” as in the French title. That story was written where he told the story of the universe in its four basic phases: the galactic story, the Earth story, life story, human story.
Blewett
Those four.
Berry
Those are the four segments of the “great story.”
Blewett
Say that again? The galactic?
Berry
The galactic story, the Earth story, life story, and human story. And each of these is integral with the others so that there’s one story. But we might say for the sake of articulating certain distinctive phases—there are many ways to do it, but that’s one way to do it. Teilhard was able to see that, from the beginning, matter has a psychic as well as a physical component. It has a tendency either to accept one or the other of these, and to eliminate the other.
Blewett
Okay. Psychic and physical.
Berry
Yes, that matter itself has intelligibility. If it has intelligibility, then it’s not what might be called crass matter. Otherwise it would not have what I call radiant intelligibility. And Teilhard understood that. And so that he kept this sensitivity to that, and he was able to tell the story of the universe as a progressive emergence of ascending forms of consciousness throughout the earlier developments of the universe, from the beginnings of the fireball on through the galactic system, shaping the Earth, origins of life and so forth. Later somebody like Ilya Prigogine would tell the story in terms of the self-organizing power of the universe. So the summary of his work by Erich Jantsch is entitled The Self-Organizing Universe.
Blewett
But Teilhard was the first to really put the physical and the psychic as integral in…?
Berry
As integral, and to follow the sequence of its emergence with the richness that he was able to give to it. So the great work of Prigogine is to identify the fact that, even at the chemical level, there’s a self-organizing power. Now, for religious people, when a person talks about a self-organizing universe, they get the impression: well, you’re doing away with the divine controls of it or the extrinsic things. Well, first of all, there’s no “out there,” there’s only, so to speak, an “in here.” So that the best way to think of the divine is as intrinsic to creation. Because obviously there would be no creation without, except as manifestation. The divine won’t manifest himself. He can’t do it out there. Of course there isn’t any out there, there’s only the in here. Otherwise the divine would not be omnipresent and so forth.
Blewett
That certainly is a central insight, and so fundamental, then, to all that has followed in kind of this development of ecological age or the sense of the sacredness.
Berry
Yeah, and the development toward that, right. Let’s go to the second point. The second point that he did was to identify the human as the dimension of the universe from the beginning. In other words, the universe is always integral with itself at all times and everywhere. That is: everything requires everything else, and it’s not itself without everything else. The world we have now couldn’t be what it is unless what was before this was what it was, and so forth. This couldn’t be what it is unless what came first had the power to produce this.
Blewett
I see what you’re saying.
Berry
Unless the fireball could produce a galactic system, the fireball—neither could exist. Unless galactic systems could produce an Earth, the Earth couldn’t exist. Unless the whole universe produced a human, the human couldn’t exist. So that the human is, in a manner, integral with the universe from the beginning. If you want to tell my story, you have to tell the story of the universe. And that’s what this television program, not long ago, called Creation—that was the last statement in it. It was a magnificent story of creation, and it ended with that statement: that the story of the universe is the human story. And so that—
Blewett
And that was a key insight of Teilhard.
Berry
Oh, certainly. That was one of the main things of Teilhard, and that has been further elucidated. When he was saying this as early as 1930, he has one called The Spirit of the Earth—an essay that he wrote in 1930—and that was after he had gone. It was on his way back to China. He had just traveled across North America, and he wrote it on a ship when he was in the Pacific going back to China. It’s a very wonderful essay called The Spirit of the Earth. That was the first form, I think, of The Human Phenomenon that he wrote ten years later. That’s the second.
The third thing that is so important with Teilhard is that he moved the essential Christian issue from the redemption to the creation. In modern times, because of the struggles of interpreting the Gospels and the epistles of St. Paul that came out in the sixteenth century—and all our struggles to explain redemption, and our attachment to redemption, and our feeling of being caught amid the turmoil of time, and wanting to get out of the universe rather than to stay in the universe—there was a kind of a Christian attachment to something, to anything but the universe. And so that it was salvation processes that Christians were looking for and Teilhard said: it doesn’t make sense. That you have—like the thing I just read—that the primary work of the Christian is this universe. And if anything is going to be saved, nothing can be saved without everything else being saved. So that, to move the issue to creation—and this would be in accord with [???]’s position, rather than Thomas’ position—that the essential thing is the creation process, and a person has to see redemption as some work occurring in that process as kind of a phase of divine presence in the universe, and functioning with the universe. But it must be seen within the creation perspective.
Blewett
That really is a very new kind of religious stream that’s been emerging today.
Berry
It’s a new—we’re always saying don’t love the world, love not the world, other things in the world.
Blewett
And transcendent.
Berry
Yeah. And to seek the things that are above. Well, you can’t seek the things that are above unless you behold them in the things below. And to make that radical distinction between the things above and the things below puts the whole creation in a state of chaos. And if the Divine St. Paul says in Epistle to the Romans in his first chapter that we come through the things that are made, we come to the knowledge of the higher things. So then, unless the Earth were so gorgeous and so beautiful, we wouldn’t have a grand idea of the divine. Always say that if we lived on the moon, our idea of the divine would reflect the lunar landscape. It would be desolate. Our idea of God would be desolate.
Blewett
Because we learn from this….
Berry
Well, we learn from what’s around us. There’s no way to come to a perspective on the divine except through our experience that we have. We have sense beings. St. Thomas even says that there’s nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. Well, anyway, there are these three central things.
Blewett
Okay, so those are just deep, deep contributions.
Berry
Well, perhaps there are a couple of other things that might be mentioned that I think are somewhat important as regards to Teilhard. In understanding Teilhard, before going extensively into the idea of how he relates to the ecological age, is his sense of human, of psychic energy. He lived during the period of the vibrant period of the existentialists, when Camus and also Sartre and some of the other writers were very depressed about the world and the chaos and the idea that you had to accept the fact that the universe is absurd, the sense of an absurd universe, the universe that’s presented, say, by Samuel Beckett.
And tell you ourselves then very clearly the crisis of human energy, of psychic energy, and the thing he was most afraid of in humans meeting the future with the dying down of what he called The Zest for Life. Zest for life. Zest for life.
He wrote a thing using that as the English title. So he didn’t use the principle, but the zest for life. The zest for life. So that there is enormous need to be fascinated with life.
If we’re not fascinated with life, then we’re just not going out of the psychic energy needed to carry through the human endeavor in any fascinating or any fulfilling manner. So there is that aspect of his work. And then there’s one other thing that needs to be emphasized also is the mystical quality of the scientific venture. That is then a science he once called research as the highest form of worship.
Oh my goodness. It was an extraordinary statement. But he has an essay and it’s in the English edition under the title of human energy, the last essay. And that has to do with science and the high mission of the scientific world. I sometimes say science is the yoga of the West.
That’s our spiritual discipline. Now a person says, how can you say that when science has been so mechanistic over a very long time? Well, that is a very important phase of science. Science had to move into a setting aside of the spiritual for a while in order to penetrate matter. And one of the great contributions of science is to, in its investigation of what we call matter, to end up with the realization that matter, crass matter, they end up in the spiritual because they see the psychic component that matter is considered merely as crass, what might be called, of just opaque matter, it’s not opaque. It’s luminous reality, it’s luminous, all organizing energetic process that has in it the capacity to produce such a stupendous universe.
And so that it has, it’s something more than what the person might call simply matter, as this was looked upon for a while. Once it’s done that, then it turns toward a more greater sensitivity of what we call the spiritual or the luminous qualitative manner. Then we’re back to a new way of experiencing the divine. We’re back to a new way of seeing what the primitive human self have always seen, that the universe is pervaded by a luminous sacred aspect.
And because he was scientist and deeply religious, Teilhard was, He was the first person really, and that’s why I say, may in a sense be, I’ve changed and be a Christian thinking more than any thinker since then. Yeah, the mystical quality of the scientific. The scientific. That it has a trans-scientific mission. Well, the person has to keep in mind that the dynamics of technology are non-technological, they’re efficient, they’re very, I’d say, and it’s hopeful, it’s almost a spiritual quality or drive because we think technology is going to bring us to some mystical mode of existence. Advertising is based on mysticism. And the idea that it’s taking us to this heavenly realm, they have this automobile drive that take you up in the paradise.
And you can take, advertise a bar of soap, which will eliminate all the tension to the human indigestion and take you off the wonderland paradise. Well, all of that is involved in this process. So in some way, Teilhard’s contribution has become distorted though in the technological... Well, the pathos of Teilhard, yeah. This is where the person has to still be this critical dimension that a person has to bring to bear on Teilhard.
Okay. Because although he did so much and understood so profoundly some of the issues that we’re dealing with, he was over-fascinated with the human and is what might be considered... What might be called anthropocentrism was excessive. He wanted the human intelligence to conquer the... the rest of the world and to control it. Control it and I dropped my paper here, but I have my paper where I have a... Just a couple of passages that... It would be helpful. I might read you here.
That would be helpful, Teilhard. That mentioned something of this control over matter, which was so in a certain sense frightening that as humans, we are to conquer nature. He says in the phenomenon of... The human phenomenon of man, he wrote, when mankind is once realized, his first function is to penetrate, intellectually unify and harness the energies which surround it in order still further to understand and master them.
There will no longer be any danger of running into an upper limit of its fluorescence. In other words, it was so captivated with the idea of progress through technology. I say it did not have the sense of communion with the natural world. That the human was somehow in communion. It was to control it.
He had the idea we were... He did not commune with it the way the ecologists want to commune with it. He was not ecocentric in that thing. So that is interesting because of his own work in paleontology, now that you would think that the kind of a resonance with the Earth would be very central.
Well, that’s what... When a person talks about Teilhardd in the ecological age, this is what needs to be done. Teilhardd is enormously important in setting in the foundations of this communion. In a certain sense, there is an ambivalence about Teilhardd in this.
And that is the point of it. That is why an excessive cultic orientation to Teilhardd is just not good and not sound. We need a beyond Teilhardd even. And so the great mission of our times and those who understand and appreciate the enormous contributions of Teilhardd, I cannot stop where he stopped in my estimation.
I see. And so when I propose the idea of Teilhardd in the ecological age, is not to say that he has provided a perfect interpretation of it, but that he has provided the principles. Now those three principles, or even those five principles are very important, but the first three can be the basis of a deep entry into this type of ecological community that we’re thinking. But the pathos is that Teilhardd in his text is not that much into the ecological age.
Now why not? Well, in a certain sense, the real tragedy of human oppression of the natural world has not quite begun. Rachel Carson had not written our book until 1962. So that’s when I would say the ecological age begins with that very stark presentation, although earlier in the world, in the whole of American history, this issue has been a dominant item of our literature, Moby Dick of Melville. Conquering and mastering. Moby Dick is possibly the most significant novel ever written to identify this human earth issue.
And in the religious tradition, it’s Ahab, his psychic or pathological determination to kill the whale, to dominate the whale, has to do with, to a large extent, with the human emphasis and intention to control the natural. And also Mark Twain with that, with the raft, that simple raft of Huck and the slave, when the steamboat comes down and smashes that, Mark Twain is talking about the way in which the more early type of experience tends to be smashed by the technological world. And you get in Cooper, Pennymore Cooper wrote about in the pioneers, one of his early leather-sucking tales, he writes about the woodcutter. When you cut down all the trees, and even then he said, somebody, another character said, if you keep cutting down these trees, you’re gonna double stage everything.
And so Cooper was well aware of this issue, so it’s not exactly a new issue. But in the twentieth century, when we got this enormous power over the natural world, it’s become just dangerous. And not only dangerous, catastrophic, because we’re into nuclear power and so forth. And that’s where when Teilhard came into contact with nuclear power, he was totally an ecstasy. Isn’t that interesting, yeah. He went to visit the cyclotron in, I guess in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or somewhere in California.
And he had a certain elation over these experiences. And so that what is needed in terms of the ecological issue is to be able to translate those early sensitivities of Teilhard into a more acceptable context. Because in the ecological age, we need to see the universe as a community, and particularly the planet Earth, particularly in the biosphere. We need to encompass the Earth, for instance, with the America, what’s the matter with the American constitution? We’re in this the year of the constitution, and everybody’s saying that such a great document, well, it is a great document for humans.
For humans, yeah. But what happens to the rest of the continent? It’s devastating for humans to be told they have all these rights, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness at the expense of the natural world. So what we need is a constitution for the North American continent, where all the creatures would understand each other in a single community, a community of life.
And this needs, of course, to be extended to the rest of the world. In this sense, there is a, there is a great difficulty with Teilhard. There is something in Teilhard, and what I make of an extension of the philosophes of the 18th century, almost, of a certain type of French clarity and prudence and insight, but lacking in a certain emotional rapport with the natural world. Rousseau mentioned some of that, but it’s not the area of enlightenment carried some of this, and then it was driven by the idea of progress. And Teilhard translated progress into spiritual progress, into human progress, to a certain extent at the expense of the natural world.
I’ll read you another passage. Just, it’s a very important issue as regards Teilhard, and I think that we need to deal with this in a certain amount of concern, and particularly, as we understand Teilhard, it’s important to appreciate what he hoped for. He hoped for progress and for a type of overcoming the human condition. You see, what I call the human condition is the acceptance of the, that we have a limited existence. There’s no sense in hoping for it to get to a certain, that peace and perfect peace, perfect justice, perfect ease with life, to, through mechanistic processes, Teilhard’s over fascinated with mechanism. And that isn’t the story of the earth, there’s always chaos and struggle and violence for the creator. There’s the struggle and violence, but there’s the creativity, and he wanted creativity. The artificial for the human is perfect, it’s a part of the natural order.
But that when the two, that in case where the two are compared to each other, the artificial is always better. Oh my goodness, yeah. Yeah, in other words, like flying a plane and a flying a bird, Berkson was into this. Berkson is back of Teilhard. Berkson is the greatest single influence on Teilhard, and he did his creative evolution, where he brought together the evolutionary ideas of Darwin together with the, with a certain spirituality that comes from the Neoplatonist movement, and also from the romanticism of the German world. And this creative evolution is one of the, again, one of the great works of the twentieth century.
But you were gonna say something about progress, like, Teilhard? Yeah, this is very relevant to the present, but it shows how difficult a thinker can be. And, but we have to be very careful about getting caught in things. And Teilhard in a certain sense did get caught.
Get caught. Well, that’s a pathos of Teilhard. And people generally don’t understand either people reject him or they idealize him to such an extent that they don’t understand the great values of Teilhard, just enormous values that I mentioned as enables us to rethink the world and for Christians to think of a Christ dimension of the universe in this total process and gives us this splendid vision of things, but then a person has to be sensitive to this aspect of Teilhard, where he mentions that the vitalization of matter by the creation of super molecules and so forth. But he says, was it not simply the first act? This is atomic power. Was it not, this is after he had seen the cyclotron and so forth. Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude and a series of fantastic events which having afforded us access to the heart of the atom? Which lead us on to overthrow one by one the many other strongholds which science is already besieging.
So he has this awesome conquest. The vitalization of matter by the creation of super molecules, then these are listing the conquest. Over the vitalization of matter by the creation of super, the remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones.
They just rediscovered hormones. Now once we have this power, we can remodel the human organism. So it was already into engineering the human. Biogenetics, huh? Yeah, already into biogenetics.
Oh my goodness. He said, what we need, one of our greatest needs is an acceptable eugenics. So anyway, control of heredity and sex by the manipulation of genes and chromosomes. This is the 1940s.
Here we are in the 1980s. When we really faced with it, the readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by direct action upon springs gradually brought to life by psychoanalysis. The rousing and harnessing of the unfathomable, intellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass. It’s not every kind of effect produced by a suitable arrangement of matter.
And have we not reasoned to hope that in the end, we should be able to arrange every kind of matter following the results we have obtained in the nuclear field? This is in the book, The Future of Man, page 149. Now, that’s kind of a terrifying thing.
Yes, yes. Now that’s why along with these grand things that we need to see that there is an emotional change in how we view this question of the conquest of matter, rather than a sensitivity to our community with the universe and our evocation, not conquest, but evocation, people that are related to each other do these things. There is the evocatory relationship. The natural world will respond to us, but our mechanization of things, our controlling of things, and we’ve tried this with all kinds of our technologies, and you see, he foresaw the technologies, and but he was willing to go into them with a kind of a total commitment to it. Now we’ve experienced what’s happened, and we see the devastation, the closing down of the life systems of the planet. The person would say that in all of this, there is still this about the issue, and it is that we are, that these will hopefully be turned to more constructive instruments, instrumentalities, but the dangers of it so far are such, it’s like our control over our agricultural processes of the growing of grains and so forth. We tend to overdo it, to have improper judgment.
We don’t accept the judgment of the natural world. That’s a good point, Tom, that’s very important. But see, the world itself, and that’s why it’s necessary to go to this because the planet Earth as we have it as a result of a vast range of experimentation over billions of years, over billions of years.
And things have been fitted together so intimately that once we enter into it and start tearing apart things that have been adjusted over through a long period of development, then we have to be enormously sensitive while we deal with these things. So what is important and what I’m proposing is not the setting Teilhard aside, but of being aware of that aspect of Teilhard and being able, when we talk about Teilhard in the ecological age, he has enormous values for the ecological age, but that contribution lies precisely in the fact that it could move the Christian world over into a religious concern for the natural world, first of all, and that is perhaps now, perhaps the single greatest thing that needs to be done is that. Tom, what would you say to people today then who are trying to draw the richness of Teilhard and let it form and be motivating in their own lives towards action in this ecological age? Well, his principles as regards the zest for life is one of the great principles that tastes for life that a person needs has to be translated now into a source of psychic energy because the life, the changes that we have to bring about are going to require an awesome amount of human energy. We have to be intensely devoted to the natural world in order to save the life systems that are now threatened.
There is everything is to be done. All the professions have to be readjusted and we have to begin by what I’m saying, but I would identify as thinking of the human as species and we have to find our role as species among species and to ask not kind of what kind of world we want, but what kind of a world does the natural world want to be? What does the earth want to be? And how do we help fulfill that role? Because we fit into that rather than the world fitting into our plans.
But right now we have to alter all our professions and so forth. Well, let me give what I call the three sentences where I identify what needs to be done. First of all, it’s the summary of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the earth. Second sentence, the desolation of the earth is becoming the destiny of the human. Third sentence, all human institutions, programs, and activities, all human professions must be joined primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.
Now, we need a medical practice that’s based on that relationship. Human-earth relationship. Human-earth relationship. Not human-human or human-human, but primarily, it’s the relationship to the air and the water. If we’re gonna poison the air, poison the water, poison the soil, then it’s not a mutually enhancing relationship. And in fact, if we talk about progress, it must be progress in the life-giving qualities of the water and the life-giving qualities of the air as well as progress in the human.
Because if these things do not progress, the human is not progressing. The trees are not happy, we can’t be happy. And the birds are not happy, we can’t be happy. And we are not progressing. So it must either be total progress or no progress. The plundering of progress brought about by humans, plundering the planet is no good.
So the first thing is this mutually enhancing relationship that must guide all our activities. And it goes like this, that ecology is not a part of economics, economics is a part of ecology. Our religion, our ecology is not a part of religion. Religion is a part of ecology. Because the ecosystem is the primary reality. And it’s the ecosystem that supports all the manifestations of life. And so that our adjustment, whether it be in education or what, education is a part of ecology primarily. Ecology is not primarily a part of education. So when you say the ecological age, it really is a total new. It’s a totally new.
Pure. We have to de-center our anthropocentric orientation. We have to become de-centered from that to a bio-centric or a cosmocentric orientation. Why I call myself a geologian. We need geologians, sociologians and so forth in this sense that geology, that just that is the physical structure of things is not honest. Geology, because geology is integral with everything else.
And geologists are moving in that direction. So nothing can be understood without understanding everything else. And nor can we have a human functioning in any human order like the constitution. I suggest the constitution of the North American continent.
Yes. As the only reasonable thing to do rather than a constitution for humans. And I suggest a biocracy instead of a democracy.
Because you just have a democracy. You have something for humans, but to have a arrangements where just humans are thinking about their situation, then a person is losing out as regards a larger part of the real community and the trees have to pull. The trees have to vote. Yes, and the birds have to vote. The birds have to vote. And we are coming to that.
In other words, that’s happening. How? Through the environmental protection problem. Every time any project takes place, any significant project now, you have to have an environmental assessment made. And so in that sense, that is kind of asking permission of the land for us to be there.
That’s what environmental assessment is. Now this has legal status and we have also on the arts and we have a river keeper now. The river keeper on the Hudson.
And Long Island Sound now has a keeper. A human that speaks on the part of this is something like, before the law, a corporation is a person, so to speak, or an infant can be represented. It requires somebody to represent them. But there’s no reason why this cannot be arranged for. And where a court should have representation and judgments of things. And it is happening.
We don’t see it, but it is something like this sense of this barge with the garbage on it that is adrift and cannot find anywhere to go. Because it’s not acceptable anywhere. Yeah, yeah. So in some way we’re. So that humans, but it represents the humans, if that is not acceptable, then we are not acceptable in our present mode of action. So if we really think about it, we have to say that we have made ourselves unfit for the community of life. And if we make ourselves unfit for the community of life, then the community of life is going to reject us. Yeah. Yeah.