Laurel Martin
Prof. Geroulanos, Matthew MacLean Texts & Ideas: The Birth of the Human 3 May 2018
Prompt #3: Teilhard de Chardin, Leroi-Gourhan, and Lévi-Strauss
Just as we humans have been searching for our origins for generations, we have always conceived theories regarding our future. Encouraged by the prospects of modern science and technology in the 1930s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed humanity would ultimately achieve what the universe had in its past that it has since lost: a single, unified consciousness. After the Second World War, however, thinkers were deeply troubled by the implications of Western civilization’s seemingly unlimited technological potential. Claude Lévi-Strauss attacked the traditional Western notion of continual evolution, which he saw as fostering the destruction of cultural diversity through eternal homogenization. André Leroi-Gourhan likewise feared the possibilities of humanity as a collective, thoroughly technicized organism would lead to mass devastation, as our fundamental biology remains that of highly aggressive predators. Though all three thinkers saw modern science and technology as engendering a new age of the human, Lévi- Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan believed humanity’s collectivity would result in our destruction, rather than the peak of our potential.
In the era of the Scopes Trial when religious thinkers saw Darwinian evolution as contradictory to the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin fully committed himself to a theory of religion centered around the findings of modern science. Despite witnessing the worst horror of human tragedy in World War I, Teilhard emerged from his experiences with the optimistic conviction that God, through evolution, was preparing
humanity for a new purpose: total spiritualization. Convinced the universe is “necessarily homogeneous in its nature and dimensions,” Teilhard asserted there was once a primordial unity that has since been broken, and to which we will ultimately return.i He regarded all of history to be directed toward the Omega Point: a transcendence of the human toward supreme unity with God. For Teilhard, the key to realizing this fundamental unity is the awakening of thought and increased consciousness, which “affects life itself in its organic totality … mark[ing] a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet.”ii
Believing mankind to "flourish on the leading shoot of zoological evolution,” Teilhard saw the modern era as the beginning of a new age in which humanity will seize control of the universe’s construction through science and technology.iii As Teilhard himself put it, the goal of human research is that of “mastering … the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world.”iv Teilhard’s highly optimistic view of technology led him to regard modern man as capable of unlimited potential, only lacking “a new domain of psychical expansion” that will ultimately result in the psychic unity of mankind.v Just as evolution leads to greater complexity and intelligence, Teilhard saw science and technology as expanding the human sphere of influence, allowing a person’s ideas to become accessible all over the world. Taken a little less literally, Teilhard's idea of the noosphere, or the sphere that encompasses all human thought, could be interpreted as a forerunner to the internet. According to Teilhard, the interaction among ideas the noosphere engenders will ultimately culminate in a single, universal consciousness: the point at which all human potential is realized.
The devastating consequences of the Second World War produced a moment of doubt and guilt for humanism in contemporary anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss emerged as the
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leading figure in the discipline for his profound antihumanism, his sense that the world was being overtaken by the creeping monoculture of Western civilization. Denying Teilhard’s assertion that “the principal axis of anthropogenesis has passed through the West,” Lévi-Strauss strove to prove the development of human life takes form in a variety of cultures, none of which is inherently superior to any other.vi His theory of structuralism dictated that culture is formulated by underlying schemas common to all people, regardless of the different ways in which it manifests itself. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss sought to dispel the tendency to regard only recent scientific and technological advances as “brought about by human effort, intelligence and imagination."vii Progress, for Lévi-Strauss, "is neither continuous nor inevitable.”viii Seeing as all advancements are accounted for by circumstance in time and place rather than special aptitudes, history is the sum of all cultures' contributions. According to Lévi-Strauss, there is no universal standard that can be applied to all of humanity, as we are all equally, though differently, human.
Lévi-Strauss feared a complete westernization of the planet, either through an imposition of Western customs, or by causing the collapse of existing ways of life without leaving anything else in their place. After witnessing the devastation caused by World War II, he stressed the need to preserve the diversity of cultures in a world threatened by monotony and uniformity. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss claimed the adoption of Western customs as “less the result of free choice than of the absence of any alternative.”ix In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss illustrates humanity at the end of its history, with homogenization rendering impossible any major difference or change. He famously asked, “… what else can the so-called escapism of traveling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?”x Although ostensibly a travelogue, Tristes Tropiques provides a scathing critique of the West’s cannibalization of humanity rather than a typical, romanticized quest for the ‘exotic.’ Lévi-Strauss described Polynesian islands
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“smothered in concrete,” the “dingy suburb” of Asia, and “shanty towns … spreading across Africa.”xi The very achievements of Western civilization that Teilhard de Chardin and others had praised, for Lévi-Strauss, were only accomplished through colonialism and subjugation of ‘the other.’ Homogenization does not represent the peak of human potential, but the destruction of humanity itself. As Lévi-Strauss put it, “the first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.”xii
In the wake of the Second World War, the leading figures in the discipline of prehistory were skeptical about the fate of the human in a thoroughly technicized world. André Leroi- Gourhan, also participated in a sort of ‘antihumanism’ through which he questioned the traditionally conceived boundaries of the human in relation to the animal. Since the Enlightenment, a notion prevailed that regarded human culture as fundamentally based on our complex brain. Thus, humanist thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin emphasized the historical emergence of the mind and not necessarily of the body. Leroi-Gourhan, however, sought out to prove the evolutionary event of upright posture, which 'liberates' the hand for greater complexity of interactions with the world, in fact preceded our advanced cognition. Furthermore, he denied the existence of superior or inferior technology, as all humans have evolved through both biological evolution and technical behavior corresponding to their own specific environment. Therefore, what makes us human are the unique ways in which we interact with the world and with each other, though Leroi-Gourhan insisted we remain highly predatory mammals in our biological makeup. He asserted there is no reason whatsoever to “to suppose that the primitive human was any less aggressive than humans are today,” as “aggressive behavior has been a fact of human life at least since the Australanthropians [early genus of hominins].”xiii Like countless others in the postwar world, Leroi-Gourhan was skeptical of our capacity to master our own
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aggression in the face of the colossal potential for destruction our advanced technical knowledge gives us.
Moreover, Leroi-Gourhan noted that the denser our populations become over time, and the more our innovative technical activity increases, the more we become part of something larger than our physical selves. Like Teilhard de Chardin, he believed over the course of evolution, “zoological balance was gradually replaced by a new balance,” in which the human, “whose body is still that of a normal mammal, merged into a collective organism with a practically unlimited potential for achievement.”xiv However, Leroi-Gourhan feared the consequences of cybernetic convergence of the human with the machine, as war takes a remarkably more dangerous form with the vast destructiveness of weapons our industries can now produce. Industry will continue to act as the “sinister driving force of material development in the service of a society composed of an ever-increasing number of human beings still governed by the laws of their zoological nature.”xv Leroi-Gourhan described this society as “the chief consumer of humans, through violence or through work,” which can only result in humanity’s complete dominance over the natural world.xvi For Leroi-Gourhan, the process will inevitably end up “with the last small oil deposit being emptied for the purpose of cooking the last handful of grass to accompany the last rat.”xvii Due to the imbalance between our fundamentally predatory nature and our vast technological potential for destruction, Leroi- Gourhan believed the human to be destined for extinction.