As a paleontologist, de Chardin was of course aware of stagnations and extinctions in the evolutionary ladder, aware, in other words, that some of the transformations, the recasting, of one of the forms does not succed. In short, like Darwin, he was aware that sometimes the conservative principle was stronger than the innovative, curbing any developments. He was also aware that the selection, Darwin's greatest insight into evolution, erases the less successful genetic experiments.

Darwin's principle of selection is easily understood if one is dealing with the branching from phyla to class, class to otder, order to genus, genus to subgenus and subgenus to specie. In other words, Darwin addresses a whole array of eras, but does not account for the critical moments that might have trigger a stagnation or extinction. In order to do so Teilhard de Chardin introduced the will as a fourth principle in evolution. According to Teilhard de Chardin, if one looks at extinctions or stagnations in the early universe biologically, in other words, if one applies biological principles to cosmology, those "organisms that have become incurably fixed have chosen a road that closed prematurely upon themselves.

It is difficult to speak of a highly philosophical and theological concept as will and apply it to the sciences. In fact, this, more than other idea, has shut de Chardin off from serious scientific discourse. After all, science is concerned with statistical aggregates and not with subjective concepts. Again, we run into the immeasurable. Yet,even if the will is immeasurable, since quantum mechanics, it has become a fact of science. Unlike classical physics, which leaves no room to will and its corollary, freedom, quantum needs to grapple with the freedom inherent to a system in order to explain subatomic phenomena. As Penrose has so eloquently argued, classical physics has no room for consciousness subjectivity and if we are to map its origin, it will occur through quantum:

Very existence of solid bodies, the strengths and physical properties of materials, the nature of chemistry, the colors of substances, the phenomena of freezing and boiling, the reliability of inheritance --these, and many other familiar properties, require the quantum theory for their explanations. Perhaps, also the phenomenon of consciousness is also something that cannot be understood in entirely classical terms. Perhaps our minds are qualities rooted in some strange and wonderful feature of those physical laws which actually govern the world we inhabit, rather than being just features of some algorithm acted out by the so called "objects" of a classical physical structure. Perhaps, in some sense, this is "why" we as sentient beings, must live in a quantum world, rather than an entirely classical one, despite all the richness, and indeed mystery, that is already present in the classical universe. Might a quantum world be required so that thinking, perceiving creatures such as ourselves, can be constructed from this substance? Such a question seems appropriate more for a God , intent on building an inhabited universe, than it is for us! But the question has relevance for us also. If a classical world is not something that consciousness could be part of, then our minds must be in some way dependent upon specific deviations from classical physics...

We must indeed come to terms with quantum theory --that most exact and mysterious of physical theories-- if we are to delve deeply into some major question of philosophy: how does our world behave and what constitutes the minds that are indeed us?

Issue that Penrose is addressing here concerns the rigidity of the classical world, its inability to accommodate uncertainty, duality, non-casual correlations, and of course freedom. All of the above are concepts which, if discussed a century earlier, would have been deemed unscientific.

There is yet another consequence to complexity. Not only do systems attain greater freedom as they become more complex, but their compexity runs counter to the thermodinamic arrow. The thermodynamic arrow is of course the arrow which parallel to time's arrow marks the greater disorder within a system, marks the transition from a state of high order to a state of complete disorder. Stephen Hawking has argued quite convincingly that our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. How, if the universe tends towards disorder, can complexity run counter to entropy? The answer, simply stated, is: because complexity generates more stable structures, more successful forms. But the way it does so is not so simple. One of Hawking's failures in A Brief History of Time is the introduction of the psychological arrow of time. The concept is an attempt to popularize, and by doing so, it introduces the rather problematic question of psychology, or more simply, the observer's perception. The psychological arrow of time, or our perception of time passing, is not necessarily the fourth dimension Einstein envisioned and which Hawking's argument addresses. And while indeed, it is this four dimension where entropy increases, this is also the only dimension that allows for evolution and complexity. Teilhard de Chardin, who knew he was not an expert as in relativity understood this:

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. But as a naturalist, I am obliged to recognize [sic] that the assumption of a dimensional milieu in which space and time are organically combined is the only way we have found to explain the distribution around us of animate and inanimate substances. Indeed the further we advance our knowledge of the natural history of the world, the more clearly we relize that the distribution of objects and forms at a given moment can only be explained by a process whose duration in time varies directly with the spatial (or morphological) dispersion of objects in question. Every distance in space, every morphological deviation, presupposes and expresses duration.

For emphasis sake, de Chardin's argument is purely formalistic. He addresses evolution as the distribution of forms and morphological deviation. Nevertheless, he considers time, the fourth dimension in classical physics. Unlike Hawkin, who sees time as eroding systems, or as keeping time towards a more disordered state, de Chardin sees time as the only way in which the radial energy can manifest itself through its forms. More important, forms are the only way in which systems fend off entropy. We can see this most obviously in the way we inherit things. Objects do not survive for many generations. But the forms we have inherited from our ancestors, be they the double helix of their DNA or the syntactical patterns of their language, are vessels that contain and fend information from entropy.

Many would claim that my argument here is purely historical and that cosmological history does not follow the same paths than human history. However, this conservation through forms is a law of nature as important as entropy. In our century, German mathematician Emmy Noether demonstrated that every conservation law implies the existence of a symmetry. But the correlation of natural phenomena to forms is ancient. Of course, many of our calendars and watches come from finding natural patterns. In the Renaissance, scholars, saw the efficacy of numbers as proof of God's design. And even though, in our time, after relativity and quantum, we tend to think that numbers are a bit more arbitrary, the forms they represent on paper are not, wether this form is a planet orbiting the sun, or a galaxy coiling on its own axis. The physicist Eugene Wigner has stated as much: Laws of nature could not exist without principles of invariance. Invariance is of course, the recurrence of form. Symmetries and fractals abound and they are the backbone of the stuff we see in nature. Hence, Wigner statement boils down the idea that a form runs against the thermodynamic arrow.

The quantum relativists like Hawking and Hartle would argue that even if forms, if invariance seems to conserve energy, the ultimate fate of the universe makes this attempt at conservation irrelevant. I tend to disagree. Hawking's conclusions are ultimately based on theory as it applies to the topology of the universe. And while they do consider energy --afyer all Hawkin is one of the people responsible for the concept of the singularity-- they fail to isolate it from its products. Again, they see the contents and not the forms. Furthermore, their energy is tangential energy. Hence, the fate of the universe to them is closed and written, or will be once they fill-in the number for critical mass into their books.

Radial energy, however, has not only proved that it runs against the thermodynamic arrow, creating more efficient and capable forms in a universe whose topology tends towards disorder, but has reached a critical stage in its evolution. According to de Chardin, as radial energy evolves it not only assimilates more complexity, but accumulates. Radial energy is cunulative and convergent. In de Chardin's words, radial energy, because it contains and engenders consciousness is of a convergent nature and will become involuted to a point which we might call Omega: immense the sphere of the world may be, it only exists and is finally perceptible in the directions in which its radio meet --even if these were beyond time and space altogether--.

Unlike Hawking, de Chardin, as it is obvious from this sentence, disregards cosmic topology. He does so, for many reasons. If as I have argued, his ideas are purely formalistic, the stuff of this world is merely by-product of a process and not the end itself. The end itself is the refining and elaborating of agency and the agency is radial energy itself.

If the idea that invariance, or form as I have called it throughout, is the way in which radial energy staves off entropy, is not radical or new, the idea that as it counters entropy radial energy converges upon a center definitely is. In fact, convergence or the Omega point is one of the most criticized of de Chardin's ideas. He has been labeled an anthropo-centic, an essentialist, a mystic, atheist, etc. And yet, the evidence is quite strong. We don't know yet the universe's critical mass, so it is impossible to tell wether de Chardin's convergence will be a literal one or not. In other words, we cannot tell if the universe will keep expanding or wether it will recoil and shrink back into singularity. If the latter is true, then we can see de Chardin's Omega Point as a literal event. But if it doesn't, the Omega Point is not less true. Let us remember that radial energy is not bound by the topology of the cosmos, the atomic model or human anatomy, but rather, that it binds the topology of the cosmos, the atomic model and the human anatomy. In other words, the universe, its matter and its inhabitants are merely vehicles. Many readers will find the last argument vague and somewhat sophistic. The reason why it strikes one so is because it has been decontextualized. Even though topologies, models and anatomies are not the end itself of radial energy, they are synthesis occurring in time. We have already seen how de Chardin not only incorporates Einstein's discovery of time as a fourth dimension into his theory, but argues it as a sine qua non of radial energy.

The Omega point, therefore is a synthesis. Unlike a Hegelian synthesis, which is merely the outcome of the dialectic between thesis and anti-thesis, de Chardin's synthesis resembles the Augustinian resolution of the tenses into eternity. If the Omega point seems problematic at this point, it is because it stands as the corollary of de Chardin's system. As such, it is all inclusive, so to understand it one must understand not only the outcome of his model, but also has to stray away from scientific findings, at least current scientific findings which are merely a stop-gap to more comprehensive disciplines. To understand the Omega point, we have to consider not only cosmic history and the concatenation of forms we have previously seen, or the evolution of organic life, but also the human history and thought. After all, what de Chardin espouses is not so dissimilar than what other current thinkers espouse when they argue for the unification of knowledge. Therefore, I will summarize the principles of radial energy and after, when I discuss their consequence, will try to elaborate on the import of the Omega point.

Energy is a force not wholly unlike the four other forces in nature. Like gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces it determines the behavior of structures. However, unlike gravity, which only sways its power across the macro-structures, or electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, which seem to rule the atomic structures, radial energy is the catalyst which orchestrates the function of each force. Energy is a constant. It does not decrease with distance and it is not bound by the speed of light. We have already touched upon the problem that the latter proposition poses. If an agent is to control the function of the other four forces, if an agent is to determine the way in which particles are to behave, then it has to attain supra-luminal velocities. Such proposition runs counter to special relativity which rules that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

I have suggested that while the limits relativity sets upon acceleration might apply to macro structures; they do not necessarily apply at the sub-atomic level. Let me elaborate a bit farther. We have already seen how, if inflation took place, it was necessary for the space to expand at a faster speed that the speed of light. This was possible not because relativity does not apply at the subatomic level. In his wonderful Scale Relativity, Nottale has argued that the limit relativity sets upon acceleration applies to both atomic and macro structures. By the same token, matter cannot contract into a singularity, at least not without an infinite amount of energy. Much greater than any accelerator can muster (1.6x10-35), it is at this threshold that radial energy functions. Here is where universes are born and where the forms that allows to be here surged. Energy manifest itself through the forms it creates. We will not build a super collider in the immediate future which will delve into the atom deep enough to reveal the radial energy within. As I have argued, its locus is within the singularity. We would need infinite energy to crack the atom open and explore its radial energy. The task would be completely unnecessary, since we can deduct the principles of radial energy through forms. The orbital nature of atom and solar system, the helical structure of galaxy, DNA and momentum state in quantum mechanics, the Mandelbrot set, which replicates itself in geology as well as biochemistry, the Fibronacci series, that approximation to the coiling of the nautilius and the pattern in sunflower or branch, which surfaces, like the other forms in our own intellectual endeavors, whether these be Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, Bartok's String Quartets, the Parthenon or Boticelli's Birth of Venus.

This latter emergence of nature forms in our intellectual life is neither accidental or mimetic, since we have to remember that the radial energy does not create only forms, but forms which are generative or as Holland labeled them emergent. The principle of this forms is, of course symmetry. They are invariant, yet flexible enough to accommodate new information and consequently grow more complex. Energy tends towards complexity. Because it manifest itself through emergent forms, through forms from which what comes out is more than what goes in and because this manifestation takes place within the fourth dimension world of relativity where time is as important as the other three dimensions, the forms are allowed transformations. In fact, they seemed ruled by the principles of evolution itself. While they conserve the form, they also undergo innovation and selection.

The forms through which radial energy manifests itself incorporate more complex systems, the freedom of the systems increases. This is a radical proposition in many ways. At firsr it reads like an anthropomorphic proposition, especially when the systems under consideration are inorganic. After all, it would be mind boggling to ask anyone what a rock or a crystal chose to do. However, through quantum physics we have began discerning that even at the atomic level there are degrees of freedom. At the organic level, this freedom, of course increases, so that with vertebrates we can speak of will, volition and sentience. The later abstractions are really shortcuts to encompass the many possibilities which we are faced with as sentient beings. There is, of course, no mathematical system that could tabulate these choices, possibilities and their outcome into statistical aggregate as there is now one for the atom.

Temporal arrow of radial energy runs counter to the thermodynamic arrow. In other words, ulike al the systmes in the universe, including our bodies and the universe itself, radial energy does not tend toward higher disorder, but towards higher order. Radial energy is able to circumvent the ultimate fate which entropy seems to have determined for the universe because its agents are forms. These forms, as we have seen, all forms really, are in variances through which energy is preserved. Energy is not only cumulative, not only does its muster more complex manifestations, it si also convergent. Teilhard de Chardin understood that radial energy function within a space-time continuum. The forms of radial energy are spatial phenomena. The way in which forms incorporate more information, becoming more complex relies of the temporal continuum. The growth of complexity, however, eventually converges. The point of convergence is referred to as Omega point and can be understood as a singularity, a mathematical point where infinite amount of energy resides.

In the preceding pages, I betrayed much of what I had preaching before. Even though I argued that science should attempted to contextualize its findings so that they have relevance in our day to day lives, I went on and attempted to parallel de Chardin's ideas with many of the current ideas and findings of physics and other sciences. Readers who have disagreed with my parallel and who think that modern physics is not finding order but disorder would probably want me to elaborate further. Readers who agreed with the first part of the essay and waded through the exposition on de Chardin will probably take me by my word and ask me to cast some relevance in my previous parallel. I will try to please the latter and in doing so, hope to convince the former while attempting to answer the following question: If it is true and modern physics as well as other sciences are currently confirming many of the ideas which the Chardin espoused 40 or so years ago, how does that affect us as individuals, as a society, as a culture? To answer the question, I would like to drift a little bit away from science to provide myself with a scheme, an outline.

Throughout his work, Kierkegaard explored three subjects wich, through latter scholarship, have been known as the Kierkegaardian trinity. The subjects are theology, aesthetics and etics. Unlike any other psychological or philosophical system which has attempted to divide human psyche, Kierkegard seems accurate to me. As humans we are still preoccupied by aesthetics, theological and ethical questions. There is no real hierarchy to these categories. People, even when they do not frequent concerts or read poems, even when a painting is irrelevant to them still worry beauty. I am the first to argue that mass media and its favorite child, advertisement have debase our aesthetic values. These debasement does not necessarily entail that such values have disappeared. On the contrary, if mass media and advertisements have been succesful, this is due to the fact that they play and utilize people's need for an aesthetic. And even if it is a debase version of the original, the model selling some obscenely baptize perfume fulfills the same function that Boticelli's Venus did centuries ago.

A similar thing could be said about theology. Every person still asks question about his/her origin and destiny. And even though, as the question goes unanswered most people patch the hole the enigma leaves by trusting charlatans or buying into quick and easy philosophies or religions, the need for both redemption and transcendence is universal. Out of context, the picture that has emerged of the universe in the last century has been that of a cold, forbidding place where we are alienated. I would venture to speculate and say that many of this century's discontents have stemmed from such that alienation and so have all the profits which many charlatans have culled.

Like aesthetics and theology, ethics is still a central aspect of our life. Though in the public discourse, or at least in the public discourse that mass media broadcasts, ethics has been delegated to jurisprudence and religion, if people recur to either is to reaffirm a sense of right and wrong, to acquire a guide of how we treat each other. This need is so acute that most of the contemporary popular narratives take place in a courtroom and one John Grisham, one of the best selling authors of the decade has made a fortune dramatizing situations where conflicts are resolved through law, despite the corruption and sleigh of hand that goes hand in hand with his plots.

By the same token, the only any advanced in science that makes the general news it is in regard to genetic engineering. Genetic engineering does not make into the front page because people are particulary interested in chromosomes or micro-biology, it does so because it raises ethical and moral questions, which often than not are answered, not by the scientists who are doing the work, but by religious or political figures.

So let me rephrase my question: If it is true that modern physics as well as other sciences are currently confirming many of the ideas which de Chardin espouse 40 or so years ago, how should that affect our ethic, theological and aesthetic worlds? Let me start by addressing the ethical pictures. For centuries, ethics has concerned itself with the regulation of social life. Whether its precepts emerged from the ten commandments or the code of law, its premise was to provide a guide which we could use to interact with others. As many thinkers, starting with Nietzsche, pointed out, such moral or ethical codes were written by hegemonical groups who were mainly attempting to control the behavior of their subjects. As we have seen de Chardin and the new physics which seem to be confirming his ideas seem to place us at the top rung of the evolutionary ladder. The latter seems commonplace. Nevertheless, we have to place it in context in order to understand its importance.

Throughout the centuries, whether supported by religion or by science, humans have understood their "superiority." As a matter of fact, this claim to superiority has proved atrocious. It has given us license to abuse all that is around us including other humans. The West is a paradigm of this ideology. We conquered people and leveled forests as we assign ourselves the role of the chosen and the superior. The city where I live is one of the most devastating results of this ideology. I am part of the last generation which was able to appreciate Mexico City as a valley.

When I grew up, there were still lakes and rivers and the surrounding mountains were still visible. In fact, I have been in many valleys around the world and I would venture the assertion that the valley where I grew up was the most beautiful, if not the most successful as an ecosystem. However, around the 1950's, when Mexico jumped in the band-wagon of progress, city planners decided to tube the rivers and dry the lakes. My sons and daughters now drive in congested highways which were once rivers. The lake basin became low income housing and its inhabitants suffer, with the entire city, unbearable dust storms which no one has been able to remedy. The growth and progress which politicians sold us in the fifties is paying high interests indeed. The city, as any reader would know, makes more environmental headlines than any other city in the world.

The irreparable damage done to this city stems from an ideology of progress not too different from that which razed the hardwood forests of American Midwest. Its protagonists saw themselves as men who had missions because they were in some way superior. Since we are living the atrocious consequences of such ideology, many remarkable thinkers in our days have attempted to question our hierarchical position in the evolutionary ladder. People like Stephen Jay Gould have argued not only that there is no discernible plan in evolution but that our intelligence, that quality which has allowed us to assume our superiority is merely an adaptation that does not warrant primacy. Gould has been instrumental in undoing the scaffold that throughout the years supported an evolutionary hierarchy. As I have pointed out, his reasons are ideological, and though his ideology is well-meaning; his anti-hierarchical argument might be just as detrimental as the hierarchical one he is trying to deflate. Like all such attempts, it not only steal us of our humanity, it also steals our wonder and awe at nature. It plunges us in a nihilistic machine where there is no consequence because there is neither plan nor purpose, just chance and accident. I repeat. If we see the progree from inorganic molecule to organic molecule to complex organisms like us, it is impossible to do away with hierarchies completely.

We are part of a chain. However, through science we have not only gained a fairly accurate understanding of how this chain progressed but more importantly, how being at the end of it, does not mean our link does not depend on the previous links. Science has shown that we function within ecosystems, that we depend on the rivers we tube, the lakes we dry, the forest we raze. And despite such knowledge our ethical codes are still regimenting the well-being of a social order so that few benefit from the tilling and building. We do not only need an ethical code that will attempt to equalize class difference, we need an ecological ethics, an ethics that will extend not just to a courtroom where judges decide what is appropriate behaviors and what is not. Ethics is truly about consequence. The ten commandments or the laws, whichever code one adopts, forbids certain kends of behavior or acts because they carry consequences.

Just as the old ethics defined the responsabilities we have towards other people, the new ethics should place us in a larger context, a context which regulates, not only our social behavior, but our behavior towards our resources. This is becoming eminently clear as the sway of the mass media has kept us informed, albeit badly, about the casuality in our decisions. Let me use a simple explanation. I am writing this at the end of a disastrous week at the world markets. Today, every editorial mention recessions and depression. The crisis started several months ago, as the Asian markets collapsed. Though economists knew that this collapse would affect western economies, when the Russian economy started doing the same thing last week, they were strangely cool, claiming that the Russian market had no effect as far as the domestic marked is concerned. This assertion proved to be largely inaccurate. In our days, it does not matter how small a market a country represents, its rises and falls affect the global economy.

For decades now, economists have adopted chaos mathematics to predict the market's behaviors, chaos predicts the behaviors of systems by studying them as long term phenomena. In other words, instead of isolating a system, whether this system is the market or a meteorological phenomena it is largely irrelevant, in time, chaos sees a larger chain of casuality. In this way it is useful to gauge ecosystems, whether patterns and markets. We have grown largely costumed to this far reaching effects when we read about the behavior of the stock exchange; however, we have failed completely to understand it at an ethical level. The mantra of chaos mathematics, the way it has been mocked and understood, is by the phrase "When a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, a lady sneezes in Michigan." Though rather humorous, the phrase rings true to the chaos' premises.

Our acts carry long term consequences. We believe so as far as our jurisprudence is concerned. We have not applied the same principles to our ecological behavior. Ultimately, we should come to understand that the linked pyramid which de Chardin argued for, though it places us at the pinnacle, is an interdependent pyramid. Its hierarchy, unlike the hierarchy espoused by the great chain of being, might grant us greater freedom and higher conscience, but not that unfettered imperialistic ideology to subdue nature and others, that greed for which the older model was but a rationalization. No, de Chardin's pyramid, if rightly understood, grants us freedom in the same proportion that it gives us responsibility, higher consciousness in the same proportion than it grants our deeds more consequence. That is why we have reached a critical level. Our actions have greater consequence as consciousness has increased. So if we do not channel this consciousness within an ethical system that considers, not just our behavior towards others, but also toward the planet the consquences will be fatal.

We have ample evidence of this consequences already. Some have entered main-stream culture. Everybody is aware that the ozone layer and the rain forests have revaged out weather systems. This week the Chinese government admitted that the disastrous floods of the season were due to ecological misdoings. Yet, some of these consequences are still microscopic. They are showing in the skin tissue of whales, which means, the chemical by-products of our culture have made it the bottom of the ocean where the largest mammal feeds.

It is possible to revise our ethical code? Pesimists will, of course, say no. If they are right, it is not because we do not know how to reform this ethical code, but because there are too many interests groups impeding this reform. The poison showing up in the skin cells of whales, the hole we have burrowed in the ozone layer, the acres we have tilled off hardwood forests are all symptomatic of a culture of consumption. Nothing in this culture is sacred. Heads of state and religious figures take the same blows than any other public figure from both the media and society. The only two things which everybody respects is greed and profit. The largest industry in the world is not an industry that manufactures anything. It is the advertisement industry.

William Leach, in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture, one of the best history books of the last decade, has argued that the consumer culture as we know it is a rather recent phenomena, and dates it to the post-civil-war. During those years, the founders of retail conglomerates did all in their power to change the more austere values which the society held since its puritan inception. It is not shocking to see how John Wannamaker, the largest retailer of all at the time, presciently dressed up his store every Easter Sunday to look like a church. For that is what stores have become.

Whereas in the past we went to church or temple for solace, today we drive to the mall and find a quick fix to our depression by buying a new gadget. So merchants did not only manage to influence fundamentally the shape of urban space wich makes them responsible for the kind of urban ecological disaster I have related above, but also co-opted the strategies of religion in order to erase its principal values, to such extent that in our days new religions emerge espousing the principles of commercial culture and not those of older religion.

Instead of the tragic sense of life which the old religions espoused and which geared so many great minds towards a life of the intellect and spirit, a life of justice, mercy and peace, we get religions which are wish oriented, optimistic, sunny. Religions which like consumerism have erased the word consequence off their lexicons. I have slipped from ethics into theology. The slip is quite natural. Our ethical codes, as they are embodied by legal codes, hark back to religious principles. I will not however attempt a theological treatise here. My attempt is much more humble. I want to argue if we take science`s progress throughout this century and see it in a formalistic scheme as de Chardin saw it, it is not too difficult to see that we are at the top of a hierarchy to wich we do not only owe our existence, but on wich we still depend. If I am right, we need a new ethical code that regulates our behavior towards every being that mortars that pyramid. This will not happen however, as long as the only sacred thing in our culture is profit and consumtion.

Many thinkers have argued on behalf of the consumer culture, claiming it grants freedom, it fosters democracy, calling it anarchical or epicurean. I believe they are wrong. Philosophers like Marcuse and Adorno have showed how the market is totalitarian and undemocratic. If consumerism has done anything it is certainly not anarchical or epicurean. On the contrary, it has turned us solipsists. Every product severs our links to others and to nature. Music is a case in point. A century ago, the family was centered around the parlor room and the parlor room around a musical instrument, commonly a piano. Families made music together and their social life revolved around music making. With the invention of the grammofhone the ubiquitous piano lost its position and was replaced by a machine that made the music. Music making, a skill wich in recent years has been proven to hone other intellectual skills got lost. Within less than a century the grammophone lost its place and listening to music has become a solitary activity, an activity whose epitome is the walkman. We lost, in other words, one of the highest forms of communal intelectual activity, the public and private concert.

The walkman is, of course, the least pernicious of our products. It shield us from the world, but it does not shield us as much as the TV and the computer. I do not mean to be a luddite. I love my CD`s as much as anyone. I write, plan and calculate in a computer. What I am criticizing is the way in which the gadget not only shuts us from the world around us, but impedes thought. As pianist Rusell Sherman in his wonderful book Piano Pieces has argued: Imaginative life has been expropriated by two different but complementary forces: The Grand Guignol of contemporary culture and the laboratory of market research.

Fact, if there is a common denominator to consumer culture it, is its anti- intelectualism. Its products foster an anti-imaginative anti-intellectual life; its propaganda does too. So that the higher form of consciousness which puts us at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy is being atrophied. By swapping the principles of the mind and the spirit which ruled many in other ages for principles of immediate satisfaction inherent to consumer culture, we are might not just be striding from our natural role, but also wasting the primary model which our intellect has developed from nature itself.

Let me explain. Peter Stevens, in his book Patterns of Nature contends that meandering is one of the elemental patterns replicated in the natural world. By meandering, Stevens means that nature, in its progress toward more efficient systems, convolutes its initial models, makes them, to use the terminology I have been used here, more complex. As products of nature, our minds follow the same convolutions in order to achieve their goal. Our highest intellectual achievements themselves, mimic nature's and the intellect's convolutions. We can hear them in Bach's fugues, read them in Dante's terza rima and Shakespeare's blank verse, observe them in a Turner landscape, enter them as we step into the vault of Chartres. And it is no accident that this short-list of intellectual achievements represents the one thing merchands and publicist have not been able to package and co-opt. They might severe the first bars of Beethoven's fifht, and turn it into a piece of cultural junk in order to sell products, but they still have to build an audience which will pack the house during a concert season. In fact concert halls are deserted; book sales are down; museums are constantly running out of funds and there is a projected shortage of thousands of scientists in America by the year 2000. Why? Because the works of the intellect, those crystallizations of our higher consciousness work, in principle, against the values which consumerism espouses, partly because of their content, partly also because unlike the consumer culture and like the products of nature, they take place, not in the virtual world that mass media inhabits, but in the time and space. So if we are to revise our ethics, we have to regain the values of mind and spirit and discard our hunger for immediate satisfaction which is the anti-thesis of such values.

This is not a theology perhaps. But it will be an antidote so that future generations do not live through the constrictions of a deformed and alinated reality where processed information, garish imagery, received ideas, jellied maxims, and fugitive trash are the main impediment in establishing and understanding of our role in society and nature. I have attempted to pin-point this role, attemted to place humans in a continuum whose main thrust is the attainment of a higher consciousness. I believe the end of this evolutionary thrust is a purified radial energy, or to use a more common term, a higher form of spirit. It is still impossible to prove the future of this evolution. But very important evidence is there and I hope I have touched upon it. A complete shift of values will not take place until we try to remedy the alienation from nature which as Alexis Carrel has argued, stems from the fact that the environment in which our mind and spirit bloomed has been substituted. This substitution can be most easily understood by the last aspect of the Kierkegaardian trinity, aesthetics.

During a lecture, the Victorian critic John Ruskin took a reproduction of a Constable painting and began smearing it with charcoal. This --he said-- is what the industrial revolution has done to our landscapes. His demonstration fulfilled two purposes. First, he was able to show the aesthetic dilemma with which the industrial arts would have to live with. If nature, our main source of aesthetic nourishment is ravaged, where do we go for inspiration? Second and most important, he was able to show how the ethical misdoings of industrialism were undoing what might be the greatest accomplishment we have attained as humans in attemting to unify the intellect with the spirit, art.

In fact, if there is a source of alienation from nature in our days, its most blatant manifestation might be aesthetic. As R. Murray Schaffer has demonstrated in his book, The Tunning of the World, our senses, the means by which we connect with the world, have been atrophied by new soundscape which is the by-product of emerging commercial and industrial landscapes. The reason why Schaffer's book is so instructive, is that by isolating the particularities of a soundscape, he not only shows how removed we have become from our natural surroundings, from the natural chain we belong to, but also pin-points the psychological and intellectual aftermath of this alienation. According to Schaffer, the pre-urban, pre-industrial landscape was dominated by sounds which were important because of their individuality. The soundscape of the ancients was the soundscape of nature. In the preindustrial era one heard the caress of waters, the vocal variations of the wind:

Natural soundscapes has its own unique tones and often these are so original as to constitute sound marks. The most striking geogrphical sound mark I have ever heard is in New Zeland. At Tikitere, Rotorua, great fields of boiling sulfur, spread over acres of ground, are accompanied by strange undergtround rumblings and gurblings. The place is pustular sore on the skin of the earth with infernal sound effects boiling up through vents.

Of Schaffer's chief arguments is that with urbanization, we have not only lost soundscapes like the one he describes, but also a great deal of out mythos --a great deal of imaginative world that such soundscapes foster--. In the urban, industrialized soundscape, instead of sounds that are distinguished by their numerousness and domination, where individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds.

Lo-fi soundscape was introduced by the industrial revolution and was extended by the electric revolution that followed it. The lo-fi soundscape originates with sound congestion. The industrial revolution introduced a multitude of new sounds with unhappy consequences for many of the natural and human sounds which they tended to obscure; and this development was extended into a second phase, when the electric revolution added new effects of its own and introduced devises for packing sounds and transmitting them schizofhonically across time and space to live amplified or multiplied existences. Today the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds; there is so much acoustic information that little can emerge with clarity. In the ultimate lo-fi soundscape, the signal-to noise ratio is one-to-one and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to.

Will be some that think this revolution in our soundscape is an isolated incident which has not scared our psyches. There will be others that will argue that a change in the soundscape is merely a cosmetic change. If our nerves are not shattered after drive down any of our cities highways, then, at least, in our houses, where the low frequencies of air conditioner and refrigerator, and the high frequencies of air conditioner and refrigerator, and the high frequencies of other appliances are constantly going, thought becomes, if not impossible, at least non-continuous.

Ultimately, what we have trained ourselves to do, is to shut the aureal world off. And the greatest consequence of this automatic response is that our sense of hearing, one of our main connections to the world, has lost its ability as one of the sources of thought. The destruction of the soundscape is, of course, only one of the ways in which the distortion of one of our aesthetic sources becomes evident. I would contend that every sense, and by every sense we should understand every way in which we connect to the world around us, sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste, has been atrophied. The consequences of this atrophy are not merely cosmetic, they are stunting our development.

After all, evolution is the adaptation of an organism to outside stimuli and it is through the senses that we respond to the outside stimuli and adapt. In humans, part of this adaptation has emerged through culture, through the processing and documenting of the perception we have of our world. A great deal of this documenting has occurred thanks to an aesthetic impulse. After all, we know ancient humans through they pottery and they Lascaux, We know Greek culture from The Iliad and The Odyssey. The senses have been vital to this documentation. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has argued in the essay The Impact of the Concept of Culture and the Concept of Man, collected in his book The Interpretation of Cultures:

Culture was not added on to our species. It is not a cosmetic element to our being, than being added on, so to speak, to a finished or vitually finished animal…(culture) was ingredient, and central ingredient, in the production of that animal itself. The slow, steady, almost glacial growth of culture through the Ice Age altered the balance of selection pressures for the evolving Homo in such a way as to play a major directive role in his evolution. The perfection of tools, the adoption of organized hunting and gathering practices, the beginning of true family organization, the discovery of fire, and, most critically, though is yet extremely difficult to trace it our in detail, the increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language, art, myth, ritual) for orientation, communication and self-control, all created for man a new environment to he was then obliged to adapt. As culture, step by infinitesimal step, accumulated and developed, a selective advantage was given to those individuals in the population most ables to take advantage of it --the effective hunter, the persistent gatherer, the adept toolmaker, the resourceful leader-- until what had been a small brain protohuman Australopithecus became the large brained, fully human, Homo sapiens.

Between cultural patterns, the body and the brain, a positive feedback system was created in which each shaped the progress of the other, a system in which the interaction among increasing tool use, the changing of anatomy of the hand, and the expanding representation of the thumb on the cortex, is only one of the more graphic examples. By submitting himself to governance of simbolically mediated programs for producing artifacts, organizing social life, or expressing emotions, man determined, if unwittingly, the culminating stages of his own biological destiny. Quite literally, though quite inadvertently, he created himself.

Quote Geetrz at large because, in this paragraph, he is able to show how aesthetics, or any branch of knowledge which is codified through language, numbers, facial expressions or any symbolic and intellectual systems for that matter, have been crucial to our evolution. These symbolic systems have determined our biological paths and are the greatest proof that as a complex system we have greater freedom.

We are at this moment in our history, because the sciences are so reified from the rest of the culture, and because our culture has been reduced to the ephemeral babble of mass media, at a critical point. Can we continue our evolution or will we stagnate as a species?

Teilhard de Chardin and other thinkers like Christian de Duve have understood that evolution is not just a fact in our lives, but the main purpose of the cosmos.

Whether we evolve or not, life will continue on. To use an image which the American poet Rodney Jones used in one of his poems:

And think now
How the planet would turn as well without us,
As when a finger is lifted from the glass
And the water regains its shape

Evolution will not stop with the death or extinction of Homo Sapiens. However, it will definitely take a set-back, an irreparable set-back for both, nature and us. And if we want to prevent this set-back, our only tool is a development of culture, not in the specialized way in which culture has developed since the Renaissance, but in an integrated way, so that consciousness becomes not only unified, but attains the higher complexity it is meant to attain.