Arquivo para March 31st, 2021
The civilizing future
31
Mar
For many authors, World War I was already the end of a 
civilization, although the most popular literature at the time was courage and patriotism, the most lucid minds saw the absurdity of the war and among them was Teilhard Chardin who lost two brothers and one close friend Jean Boussac who would be a great name for French geology.
However, Chardin believed in the future, for him there is a “law of complexity and conscience”, which can be thought of in these terms: “Spiritual perfection (or conscious ´centrality´) and material synthesis (or complexity) are nothing more than the two aspects and the two related parts of the same phenomenon ”, so it does not separate our historical and spiritual evolution.
His belief in the future was clearly expressed in an unprecedented interview given to Marcel Brion in January 1952 and published in the French magazine “Les Nouvelles Littéraires”, in which he clarifies the vision that transcends evil and suffering, an accusation that was made to him as a apostasy.
In this interview, stating that it was after he worked as a makeup artist in the trenches of war, that he definitely coined the word Noosphere: “I used that term for the first time in one of my first essays on the Human Phenomenon, more or less in 1927, but, indeed, the idea of a human spiritual community adjacent to the organic had been born in me in the trenches: the idea, I mean, of a kind of special biological “mega unit” that constitutes the thinking envelope of the earth. This is, for me, the noosphere ”.
Far from a belief in technization, says Chardin: “Neither mechanization, therefore, nor identification by fusion and loss of consciousness, but unification through laborious ultra-determination and love” and this can build a sustainable future for humanity.
At the end of the interview, he asks: “Isn’t the birth, around us, of such ´neo-humanism´ (linked, in my religious thought, to the progress of“ charity ”) not precisely one of the distinguishing characteristics of the times that we are going through? ”
Brion, Marcel. Rencontre avec le Père Teilhard de Chardin, “Les Nouvelles Littéraires”, january of 1951,
