Creative Transformation is really two books. The first is a summary of common knowledge and my unconventional, speculative interpretation of this knowledge. I call this "The Evolutionary Perspective." This summary of physical, biological, and psychosocial evolution represents my thinking and my interactions with my students, from whom I learned much, from 1970 through 1983. It is required to understand the more radical, second part of Creative Transformation.
Creative Transformation is really two books. The first is a summary of common knowledge and my unconventional, speculative interpretation of this knowledge. I call this "The Evolutionary Perspective." This summary of physical, biological, and psychosocial evolution represents my thinking and my interactions with my students, from whom I learned much, from 1970 through 1983. It is required to understand the more radical, second part of Creative Transformation.
Creative Transformation is really two books. The first is a summary of common knowledge and my unconventional, speculative interpretation of this knowledge. I call this "The Evolutionary Perspective." This summary of physical, biological, and psychosocial evolution represents my thinking and my interactions with my students, from whom I learned much, from 1970 through 1983. It is required to understand the more radical, second part of Creative Transformation.
CHAPTER 5
The New Synthesis
In Part I of this book I developed a rational, evolutionary perspective of
the universe and our place in it, basing my exposition on generally
accepted, well-understood facts with logical, speculative extrapolations
from these facts. The extrapolations, although possibly radical to some,
were in the spirit of scientific tradition, with few or no mystical compo-
nents. I am now going to deviate from that tradition and bring in mystical
components which are in harmony with scientific facts. This is something
which is generally not acceptable within scientific discourse.
I have learned through personal experience that the creative process is
not purely logical or linear. It involves irrational, nonlinear, and diffused
thinking which makes apparently irrational jumps between many appar-
ently unrelated topics. Eventually, this type of thinking and perceiving
must become focused and subject to objective, rational analysis, or it is
very likely to lead to self-deception. If we are to be maximally creative we
must learn to combine rigorous scientific thinking with diffused mystical
thinking.
‘We create through diffused, intuitive, mystical thinking. That type of
thinking can also lead to gross self-deception. We separate truth from illu-
sion through science. In this chapter—and to a lesser extent in the chapters
that follow—I shall try to bring about a synthesis between these two types
of often antagonistic mental processes by deriving the Creative Transfor-
mation process not linearly and logically, as I derived the evolutionary per-
spective, but rather subjectively and personally, as the process actually
became understood by me. This involves sharing my subjective experiences
with the reader as well as sharing the objective facts that led to these experi-
ences. To the best of my knowledge this has never been done successfully.
However, it would be misleading to give a linear, logical derivation of Crea-
tive Transformation when the linear logic of the process occurred to me
only after I derived it. I hope that by my taking this risk, you will benefit.
If I fail now, you and I can both try to derive the Creative Transformation
process rigorously, linearly, and logically in future books about this new
synthesis.210 THE NEW SYNTHESIS
The new synthesis is a twentieth-century phenomenon by which all
fields of knowledge are converging to show that physical, biological, and
psychosocial evolution are different facets of a single cosmological process.
The new synthesis begins in this century with Einstein, who through his
understanding of the ethical teachings of Spinoza was able to get new
insights into how the universe is structured. Since Einstein, many persons
have contributed to the new synthesis. We will discuss some of them later.
The thinker who most exemplifies the new synthesis is Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard was born in France in 1881 to an aristocratic family. He was
ordained a Jesuit priest in 1912, but volunteered to be a stretcher-bearer in
‘World War I. He was decorated for valor and received the Legion of Honor.
He became a world-famous paleontologist. In the 1930s he was one of the
discoverers of Peking Man, the first known complete set of fossils of
advanced Homo erectus. In addition to his more conventional scientific
activities he was a philosopher of evolution who made the first complete,
modern synthesis of science, evolution, ethics, art, and mysticism. Spinoza
had made a more rigorous but less complete synthesis 300 years earlier.
Teilhard wrote many beautiful books on these subjects [759-768]. Almost
all of them were banned by the Catholic bureaucracy. However, they were
published after his death in 1955 while in “‘exile”’ in New York City. I had the
privilege to encounter Teilhard once in Berkeley, California, around 1953, a
few years before he died. Crossing paths on a campus walk, we smiled at one
another and said “hello” but did not otherwise speak. I did not know who he
was at that time, but that incident stayed with me and profoundly affected
me for the rest of my life. I felt I had encountered a remarkable man and
always regretted that I did not attempt a conversation.
Teilhard’s best-known book is The Phenomenon of Man (Le Phéno-
mene Humain, a much better title in the original French) [767]. In it he
speculates that evolution is a process leading us toward convergence with
God at a point he called Omega. Many persons, including me, have been
deeply moved by Teilhard, and I was an anticlerical agnostic when I first
read him, not knowing he was that impressive person I had encountered
sixteen years earlier. Yet Teilhard is decreasing in popularity. Part of the
problem is that as a total generalist, i.e., a full scientific and artistic mystic,
he was misunderstood by both the scientific and the humanistic communi-
ties. He violated some of the prejudices of each. The scientific bureaucracy
takes any apparent error in an argument as reason for discarding the entire
argument, even if it leads to obviously correct conclusions. Scientists are
also highly prejudiced against the introduction of any form of mysticism to
any scientific discussion. Specialists in any field always try to discredit gen-The Moral Society 2u
eralists by latching onto any error they make in the former’s specialized
fields. They always miss the forest for the trees. That is why specialists are
minimally creative, We cannot create when we fear error. Science can
always eliminate our errors.
The major value of Teilhard, as with Spinoza and other scientific
mystics, is not that he is correct in all his details but that the beauty and
completeness of his synthesis can stimulate the imagination of others to
perfect his vision in an unending process. The tragedy of Teilhard is that
his vision was not practical—indeed, less so than that of Spinoza. He
showed us from where we came, how we got here, and where we are going;
but he did not tell us how to take the next step. He left thousands of per-
sons ready, willing, but unable to take the next step. What happened was
that eventually a cult, dominated primarily by self-deluded, mystical spe-
cialists, took over the Teilhardian movement and further alienated the sci-
entific community. One of the effects of Teilhard was to stimulate many
other persons to explain and amplify his vision. This led me to write my
first book on these subjects, The Moral Society, in 1970 [280].
The Moral Society
In this book it was my twofold objective (a) to perfect the vision of Teilhard
by amplifying it through my presumably more extensive and deeper knowl-
edge of mathematics, physical science, and technology, and (b) then to
make it practical both through my knowledge of the real world and by
purging it of all mysticism, ideology, and sentimentality. My intent was no
less than to write a book that would replace the Bible, the Koran, and Das
Kapital as motivating factors in human history, I was much less successful
at it than Teilhard.
My youthful arrogance might be forgiven in light of the facts that at
the time I was a very successful, 34-year-old high-technology entrepreneur
and scientific generalist who had many inventions to his name and had for
two years been the founder, chairman of the board, and president of a fast-
growing, highly creative engineering company that was destined to earn
hundreds of millions of dollars. As with many Americans, I thought that
having achieved financial and technical success I now qualified as an
“enlightened master.” However, as soon as I saw myself becoming wealthy
and powerful I realized that this would not fulfill my life or give meaning
to my existence. Indeed, it was a trap. What moved me and gave meaning
to my life was the vision of Teilhard and Spinoza and its restatement by me
in The Moral Society.
The first thing I did after I finished The Moral Society was to give
copies of the manuscript to my closest associates, many of whom I had
greatly enriched and all of whom I respected. I was astonished by the
results. All of my senior coworkers claimed I had personally betrayed