Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When The Flesh Becomes Word

The upstage part of Future Home is an extended ode to pregnancy. It extols the courage, persistence, and fears of women who harbour the next generation within themselves. The downstage part is a somewhat vague context of environmental destruction, governmental oppression, and several other political and social issues (like Native American rights and history). What holds the book together is the unlikely theme of Darwinian evolution and the Catholic religion. But perhaps that connection is not as unlikely as it might seem at first encounter.

In the early 20th century the Jesuit anthropologist and philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, developed a theological theory of evolution.* Evolutionary processes, he said, are teleological, that is to say, directional. They start with the merely material (the Geosphere), proceed to the miracle of life (the Biosphere) and are headed toward the spiritualisation of all life (the Noösphere). Put another way, it was Teilhard’s view that the reports of the New Testament would be reversed: the Word that had become Flesh would revert to the Word as the natural end, the Omega Point, of human development. We would all become united and experience one another not as flesh and blood but as non-material ‘souls,’ as parts of the one Word.

And, of course, Teilhard was absolutely correct. Humanity has now tasted its ultimate fate as pure word - symbol, image, and story - in the electronic Noösphere of the internet. Certainly the means by which we have used to create this non-fleshy state of existence would surprise Teilhard. But he would probably recognise today’s Cloud as a building block of global evolutionary progress. Humanity is clearly crawling out of its rather constraining skin and scaling new heights. We have effectively become spiritualised in the net.

But it would also be surprising if Teilhard were not profoundly disappointed with his own predictions. The Noösphere isn’t all it was cracked up to be. True, it has a sort of unifying function in that everyone on the planet is potentially connected to everyone else. But FaceBook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, while they do a wonderful job of ‘de-fleshing’ us, really do nothing to unite us. Quite the opposite. Trump, QAnon, and Russian and Chinese trolls have demonstrated the downsides of living in the immaterial world of the Word.

In Future Home, evolution has apparently gone onto reverse. Ancient creatures are appearing, viable births are declining, and genetics have turned against existing species. The conceit of evolutionary ‘progress’ has been revealed for what it is - part of the story we have told ourselves, that we are the apex of evolutionary development, top of the food chain, chosen by the divine to rule and propagate. According to Erdrich’s story, however, this ain’t necessarily so. The Noösphere is not a particularly pleasant hangout, especially if you’re pregnant.

Erdrich has her protagonist suggest a theory: “Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.” If that is the case, perhaps Teilhard had the right idea but just got his directional metaphor wrong. Evolution doesn’t progress ‘upwards,’ it cycles ‘around.’ Whenever God gets a bit weary or fed up with the details of running the cosmos, he lapses into a sort of divine unconsciousness. The Noösphere, then, is a way-stop back to the beginning of creation from where he might have another try at getting it right.

*Teilhard is mentioned by Erdrich about halfway through the book. I don’t think her reference is incidental.

View all my reviews