260728: A Neo-Teilhardian Reader

28 Jul, 2026

Dan Simmons's lovely Hyperion Cantos series, in addition to its abundant Keats lore, features a neo-Teilhardian evolution of the Catholic Church.

This idea lodged in my brain, especially since neo-Teilhardian thinking has become especially popular among elites the past half-century. Most recently, Robert Hazen's Time's Second Arrow has been doing the rounds. But before that, Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny was a belated bestseller after Bill Clinton championed it as an optimistic manifesto for the new millennium. These are not niche ideas—but they are surprisingly under-circulated.

I'm considering putting together a Neo-Teilhardian Reader to collate the many poets, philosophers, scientists, and theologians who have advanced similar ideas of cosmic evolution.

Most simply, I think of neo-Teilhardianism as the claim that the history of the Universe is a history of complexification (simultaneous speciation and integration; that is, diversification and coordination of parts). Some thinkers have additionally posited that at the end of this process lies the creation of God, that is, a sentient Universe.

Some texts I would include in such a reader (in chronological order, by field):

• Poets
  • Emerson, excerpts from Nature (1836) on the "endless circulations of charity" (h/t Amanuel Sahilu)
  • Walt Whitman, "A Passage to India" (1869): on railroads, telegraphs, and "all the world networked and spanned" by technological inter-connection
  • Hart Crane, excerpts from The Bridge (1930): bridge as metaphor of connectivity, spanning riven rivals
  • Nikos Kazantzakis, excerpts from The Saviours of God (1923) on evolution as theogony, and God as the outcome of our struggling
• Journalists & Critics
  • Randolph Bourne, "Transnational America" (1916) on hyphenation and the American experiment
  • Robert Wright, excerpts from NonZero (1999) on the transition from Big Man chiefdoms to city-states
  • Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010) on technological evolution
• Philosophers & Theorists
  • Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, & Deity (1920) Gifford lectures on deistic emergence
  • Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925): the world as becoming, rather than being
  • John Stewart, Evolution's Arrow (2000) on evolutionary directionality and cooperation
  • Brett P. Anderson's "Intimations of a New Worldview" (2024) on opponent processing, dialectic, and emergence
• Russian cosmists (Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Vernadsky)
• Scientists
  • Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos (1978) on the way entropic drift from randomness to patternicity
  • Lynn Margulis, excerpts on endosymbiosis and coordination as the primary driver of evolution (1970s-1990s)
  • Robert Hazen, Time's Second Arrow (2026) on mineral evolution and geologic complexification