The famous Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin argued that a process of cultural convergence would lead the human species into a single interthinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought or “noosphere”. As Julian Huxley explained it in 1959: “Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called ‘point Omega‘, as opposed to the Alpha of elementary particles and their energies.” Chardin’s theological take on this was that humanity would ultimately merge with the Divine, an idea that generated much controversy.

The early twentieth century, even before the horrors of World War 1, experienced a crisis of identity and of culture generally. For Paul’s essay on this age of anxiety see attached file from my website dpcrook.wordpress. com.

Cultural Crisis in the West