The Future of Mankind
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., was professor of
geology at the Catholic Institute in Paris, director of the National
Geologic Survey
of China, and director of the National Research Center of France.
He died in New York City in 1955. Published by Harper & Row,
New York and Evanston, 1959. This material was prepared for Religion
Online
by Ted and Winnie Brock.
Chapter 8: Some Reflections on the Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom
Bomb
One early dawn in the ‘bad lands’ of
Arizona, something over a year ago, a dazzling flash of light, strangely
brilliant in
quality, illumined the most distant peaks, eclipsing the first
rays of the rising sun. There followed a prodigious burst of sound.
. .
. The thing had happened. For the first time on earth an atomic
fire had burned for the space of a second, industriously kindled
by the
science of Man.
But having thus realized his dream of creating a new thunderclap,
Man, stunned by his success, looked inward and sought by the glare
of the lightning his own hand had loosed to understand its effect upon
himself. His body was safe; but what had happened to his soul?
I shall not seek to discuss or defend the essential
morality of this act of releasing atomic energy. There were those,
on the morrow of
the Arizona experiment, who had the temerity to assert that the physicists,
having brought their researches to a successful conclusion, should
have suppressed and destroyed the dangerous fruits of their invention.
As though it were not every man’s duty to pursue the creative
forces of knowledge and action to their uttermost end! As though, in
any event, there exists any force on earth capable of restraining human
thought from following any course upon which it has embarked!
Neither shall I here attempt to examine the economic
and political problems created by the intrusion of nuclear energy
upon human affairs.
How is the use of this terrifying power to be organized and controlled?
This is for the worldly technicians to answer. It is sufficient for
me to recall the general condition which is necessary for the solution
of the problem: it must be posed on an international scale. As the
American journal, The New Yorker, observed with remarkable penetration
on August 18th, 1945: ‘Political plans for the new world, as
shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. The only conceivable
way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed
to a universal structure.’
The aim of these reflections—more narrowly concerned
with our separate souls, but for that reason perhaps going deeper—is
simply to examine, in the case of the atomic bomb, the effects of
the invention upon
the inventor, arising out of the fact of the invention. Each of our
actions,
and the more so the more novel the action, has its deep-seated
repercussions upon our subsequent inner orientation. To fly, to beget,
to kill for
the first time—these, as we know, suffice to transform a life.
By the liberation of atomic energy on a massive scale, and for the
first
time, man has not only changed the face of the earth; he has by
the very act set in motion at the heart of his being a long chain
of reactions
which, in the brief flash of an explosion of matter, has made of
him, virtually at least, a new being hitherto unknown to himself.
Let me try, in a first approximation, to distinguish the main links
in this chain.
a At that crucial instant when the explosion was about
to happen (or not happen) the first artificers of the atom bomb were
crouched on
the soil of the desert. When they got to their feet after it was over,
it was Mankind who stood up with them, instilled with a new sense of
power. Certainly the power was of a kind which Man had many times felt
emanating from himself, in great pulsations, during the course of his
history. He had felt it, for example, in the darkness of the paleolithic
age when for the first time he ventured to put fire to his own use,
or accidentally discovered how to produce it; in neolithic times when
he found that by cultivating thin ears of grass he could turn them
into rice and millet and corn; and much later, at the dawn of our industrial
era, when he found that he could tame and harness not only animals
but the tireless energies of steam and electricity. Each of these new
conquests signified extensively and intensively, for Man and for the
earth, a total rearrangement of life, a change of epoch; but when all
is said they did not bring about any essential change of plane in the
depths of human consciousness.
For in all these cases (even the most
beneficial, that of electricity), what did the discovery lead
to except the control and utilization of forces already at liberty
in the surrounding
world? They called for ingenuity and adaptiveness rather than
any act of creation; they were no more, in each case, than a new
sail hoisted
to catch a new wind. But the discovery and liberation of atomic
power bears quite another aspect and in consequence has had a very
different
effect upon Man’s soul. Here it is no longer a question
of laying hands upon existing forces freely available for his
use. This time
a door has been decidedly forced open, giving access to a new
and supposedly inviolable compartment of the universe.
Hitherto
Man was using matter
to serve his needs. Now he has succeeded in seizing and manipulating
the sources commanding the very origins of matter—springs so
deep that he can release for his own purposes what seemed to
be the exclusive
property of the sidereal powers, and so powerful that he must
think twice before committing some act which might destroy
the earth. In
the glow of this triumph how can he feel otherwise than exalted
as he has never been since his birth; the more so since the
prodigious event is not the mere accidental product of a futureless
chance
but
the long-prepared outcome of intelligently concerted action?
Therefore, a new sense of power: but even more, the
sense of a power capable of development to an indefinite extent.
What gripped the throats
of those bold experimenters in Arizona, in that minute before the
explosion, must surely have been far less the thought of the destruction
it might
lead to than of the critical test which the pyramid of calculation
and hypothesis culminating in this solemn moment was about to undergo.
The quicker ending of the war, the vast sums of money spent—what
did such things matter when the very worth of science itself was
on
trial? That vast and subtle edifice of equations. experiments,
inter-woven calculations put together little by little in the laboratories,
would
it survive the test of this culminating experiment which would
make of it, in everyday terms, something tangible, efficacious, unanswerable?
Was it a dream or reality? This was the moment of truth. In a few
instants
they would know.
And the flame truly sprang upwards at the place and
time prescribed, energy did indeed burst forth from what, to ordinary
perception, was
inert, non-inflammable matter. Man at that moment found himself endowed
not merely with his existing strength but with a method which would
enable him to master all the forces surrounding him. For one thing
he had acquired absolute and final confidence in the instrument of
mathematical analysis which for the past century he had been forging.
Not only could matter be expressed in terms of mathematics, it could
be subjugated by mathematics. Perhaps even more important, he had discovered,
in the unconsidered unanimity of the act which circumstances had forced
upon him, another secret pointing the way to his omnipotence.
For the
first time in history, through the non-fortuitous conjunction
of a world crisis and an unprecedented advance in means of communication,
a planned
scientific experiment employing units of a hundred or a thousand
men had been successfully completed. And very swiftly. In three years
a
technical achievement had been realized which might not have
been accomplished in a century of isolated efforts. Thus greatest
of Man’s scientific
triumphs happens also to be the one in which the largest number
of brains were enabled to join together in a single organism, the
most
complex and the most centrated, for the purpose of research.
Was this simply coincidence? Did it not rather show that in this
as in other
fields nothing in the universe can resist the converging energies
of a sufficient number of minds sufficiently grouped and organized?
Thus considered, the fact of the release of nuclear energy, overwhelming
and intoxicating though it was, began to seem less tremendous. Was
it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in a series of fantastic
events which, having afforded us access to the heart of the atom, would
lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the many other strongholds which
science is already besieging? The vitalization of matter by the creation
of super-molecules. The re-modeling of the human organism by means
of hormones. Control of heredity and sex by the manipulation of genes
and chromosomes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls
by direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psycho-analysis.
The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable intellectual and effective
powers still latent in the human mass. . . . Is not every kind of effect
produced by a suitable arrangement of matter? And have we not reason
to hope that in the end we shall be able to arrange every kind of matter,
following the results we have obtained in the nuclear field?
It is thus, step by step, that Man, pursuing the
flight of his growing aspirations, taught by a first success
to be conscious of his power,
finds himself impelled to look beyond any purely mechanical improvement
of the earth’s surface and increase of his external riches, and
to dwell upon the growth and biological perfection of himself. A vast
accumulation of historical research and imaginative reconstruction
already existed to teach him this. For millions of years a tide of
knowledge has risen ceaselessly about him through the stuff of the
cosmos; and that in him which he calls his ‘I’ is nothing
other than this tide atomically turning inward upon itself. This he
knew already; but without knowing to what extent he could render effective
aid to the flood of life pouring through him.
But now, after that famous
sunrise in Arizona, he can no longer doubt. He not only can but,
of organic necessity, he must for the future assist in his own becoming.
The first phase was the creation of mind through the obscure,
instinctive
play of vital forces. The second phase is the rebounding and
acceleration of the upward movement through the reflexive play of
mind itself, the
only principle in the world capable of combining and using for
the purposes of Life, and on the planetary scale, the still-dispersed
or
slumbering energies of matter and of thought. It is broadly in
these terms that we are obliged henceforth to envisage the grand
scheme of
things of which, by the fact of our existence, we find ourselves
a part.
So that today there exists in each of us a man whose mind has been
opened to the meaning, the responsibility and the aspirations of his
cosmic function in the universe; a man, that is to say, who whether
he likes it or not has been transformed into another man, in his very
depths.
The great enemy of the modern world, ‘Public
Enemy No. I’,
is boredom. So long as Life did not think, and above all did not
have time to think—that is to say, while it was still developing
and
absorbed with the immediate struggle to maintain itself and advance
-- it was untroubled by questions as to the value and interest
of action. Only when a margin of leisure for reflection came to intervene
between
the task and its execution did the workman experience the first
pangs of taedium vitae. But in these days the margin is immeasurably
greater,
so that it fills our horizon.
Thanks to the mechanical devices
which we increasingly charge with the burden not only of production
but also
of calculation, the quantity of unused human energy is growing
at a disturbing rate both within us and around us; and this phenomenon
will
reach its climax in the near future, when nuclear forces have
been harnessed to useful work. I repeat: despite all appearances,
Mankind
is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our troubles.
We no longer know what to do with ourselves. Hence in social
terms the disorderly turmoil of individuals pursuing conflicting
and
egotistical aims; and, on the national scale, the chaos of armed
conflict in which,
for want of a better object, the excess of accumulated energy
is destructively released . . . ‘Idleness, mother of all vices.’
But these lowering storm clouds are what the Sense
of Evolution, arising in human consciousness, is destined to disperse.
Whatever may be the
future economic repercussions of the atom bomb, whether over- or under-estimated,
the fact remains that in laying hands on the very core of matter we
have disclosed to human existence a supreme purpose: the purpose of
pursuing ever further, to the very end, the forces of Life. In exploding
the atom we took our first bite at the fruit of the great discovery,
and this was enough for a taste to enter our mouths that can never
be washed away: the taste for super-creativeness. It was also enough
to ensure that the nightmare of bloody combat must vanish in the light
of some form of growing unanimity. We are told that, drunk with its
own power, mankind is rushing to self-destruction, that it will be
consumed in the fire it has so rashly lit.
To me it seems that thanks
to the atom bomb it is war, not mankind, that is destined to
be eliminated, and for two reasons. The first, which we all know
and long for, is
that the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands
must render all armed conflict impossible. But what is even more
important,
although we have thought less about it, is that war will be eliminated
at its source in our hearts because, compared with the vast field
for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its triumphs will
soon
appear trivial and outmoded. Now that a true objective is offered
us, one that we can only attain by striving with all our power in
a concerted
effort, our future action can only be convergent, drawing us
together in an atmosphere of sympathy.
I repeat, sympathy, because
to be ardently
intent upon a common object is inevitably the beginning of
love. In affording us a biological, ‘phyletic’ outlet directed upwards,
the shock which threatened to destroy us will have the effect of re-orienting
us, of instilling a new dynamic and finally (within certain limits)
of making us one whole. The atomic age is not the age of destruction
but of union in research. For all their military trappings, the recent
explosions at Bikini herald the birth into the world of a Mankind both
inwardly and outwardly pacified. They proclaim the coming of the Spirit
of the Earth.
We are at the point where, if we are to restore complete
equilibrium to the state of psychic disarray which the atomic shock
has induced
in us, we must sooner or later (sooner?) decide upon our attitude
to a fundamental choice; the point where our conflicts may begin
again,
and fiercely, but by other means and on a different plane.
I spoke of the Spirit of the Earth. What are we to understand by that
ambiguous phrase?
Is it the Promethean or Faustian spirit: the spirit of autonomy and
solitude; Man with his own strength and for his own sake opposing a
blind and hostile Universe; the rise of consciousness concluding in
an act of possession?
Is it the Christian spirit, on the contrary: the spirit of service
and of giving; Man struggling like Jacob to conquer and attain a supreme
center of consciousness which calls to him; the evolution of the earth
ending in an act of union?
Spirit of force or spirit of love? Where shall we place true heroism,
where look for true greatness, where recognize objective truth?
It would take too long, and it is outside the scope of this paper,
to discuss the comparative worth of two opposed forms of adoration,
the first of which may well have attracted poets, but only the second
of which, I think, presents itself to the reflective mind as capable
of conferring upon a universe in motion its full spiritual coherence,
its total substance beyond death, and finally its whole message for
our hearts.(Witnesses of that experiment in Arizona found, in the anguish
of the last instants, that in the depths of their hearts they were
praying. [Official Report: appendices.])
What does matter here is to note that Mankind cannot go much further
along the road upon which it has embarked through its latest conquests
without having to settle (or be divided intellectually on) the question
of which summit it must seek to attain.
In short, the final effect of the light cast by the
atomic fire into the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine
within them the over-riding
question of the ultimate end of Evolution—that is to say, the
problem of God.
Ètudes, September 1946.
