Digital Barbarism, page 22
This was not quite the case at the time of Teilhard. He was freer than that, and he wrote not, as is commonly and incorrectly stated, to reconcile science and religion, but, rather, simply to find the truth. That truth, greater than any human accomplishment, would by definition easily encompass both reason and revelation. To my mind, Teilhard’s major accomplishment was to confound the hapless nihilism based on the misapplication of the idea of entropy (if all things merely decline and energy levels drop, then what we know or dream is nothing more than a candle burning down) with an exposition of how elemental physical forces are conducive to aggregation and, thus, higher form. One cannot rely upon entropy as a philosophical precept and at the same time accept the evidence of evolution, and few who would reject the evidence of evolution would be content with entropy as a philosophical precept. That is to say that the evidence of evolution—planetary, biological, systemic in any form—points to a progression toward a higher state and suggests the presence of a motivating and organizing force even if it be only an inexplicable coincidence of natural laws. And if evolution is merely a metaphor for creation, the light ahead is still the same.
But Teilhard went much further, arguing that in the agglomeration of various elements into things more and more complex, able, and sentient, there is a pattern of convergence, that the various phenomena on their upward courses have not developed and are not developing along independent lines but are aimed at the same point: in short, that everything that rises must converge. Even in separate evolutionary careers marked by analogy rather than a common origin (such as those of winged birds and winged insects) elemental forces dictate convergence in both form and function. Teilhard’s vision of concordant physical and spiritual evolution meeting at a single point, which by any name is God, is the deeper background of the contemporary fascination with the idea of convergence.
Rather than simply surrendering to this concept, one may ask a number of questions. Are the indications of what some may take as impending convergence only an anomaly, and unsuited to the general implications attributed to them? Are they the product of careless observation and definition? And is there a fault in the notion of convergence even in its highest and most elegant formulation?
Convergence (movement toward or terminating in the same point) is neither coalescence (things growing together), concaulescence (the coalescence of separate axes), concurrence (running together), nor conglomeration (forming into a more or less rounded mass). The forces and trends of human life are always coming together or moving apart. Even as they run askew they are, in relation to each other, variably closer or more distant. That is the nature of things, but to imagine that now they are all running closer, or, more portentously, that they are on a path of convergence in which all things will be explained by the same explanation, is to invest the normal patterns of existence with inflated significance.
If we choose to work and shop around-the-clock with no customary rest or truce, if we must be accessible at all times rather than risk losing the slightest opportunity, and if our teachers scoff at dividing their subject matter into history, literature, and science, and wade instead into an amorphous “interdisciplinary” bouillabaisse that relieves them of the responsibility of knowing what they are talking about, it is not because we are at the brink of some great convergence, it is because we lack the discipline, focus, and clarity required to make refusals, maintain divisions, and uphold distinctions. It is not surprising that some would attempt to dress this grave failure in a metaphysical gloss until it appears a success.
Generation after generation, given the right circumstances, tries to square its circle, imagining itself about to answer the eternal questions it can never come even close to answering. An independent offshoot of this is the scientific arrogance that, feeding off man’s deference to the most powerful tool he has yet devised, imagines our ability to run the world according to scientific principles, a supposedly benevolent dictatorship of the boffins. But though nature is identifiable by the simplicity and elegance of its laws, to which all natural phenomena readily conform, humanity is different. It is a hive of countless and surprising variables, and it cannot be understood, much less managed, according to scientific principles. When such principles are applied to it the product is often misery and death. As the history of half the world in the previous century shows, even when so discreet and systemic a thing as an economy is directed according to “scientific principle” (which is only that thing that some fallible someone says it is), it ends in dismal failure. Humanity requires for its understanding and governance not science but art, and when this is forgotten—as in the case of Samuel Johnson’s natural philosopher who, having electrified a bottle, thinks that the problems of war and peace are inconsequential—the result is always the coercion of irrational mankind by frustrated and indignant masters.
We are at the beginning of a new millennium, and though the numerology of millenarianism has even less significance in regard to events or conditions than the positions of the stars and planets have in regard to destiny or mood, the power of coordinated belief, mass suggestion, and mass illusion is demonstrably accountable (as it was during the last millennial shift) for the feeling that we are at the verge of some final resolution. Even in Marxism, “contradiction” will cause a “fall” after a “struggle,” and the denouement, as in most religions, will be the convergence of previously disparate elements in harmony, in “a new heaven and a new earth.”
Not only do we who live now want this as much as ever it has been wanted, the generation born after the war has long been convinced that it deserves it. Our fathers returned from a struggle of mythical proportions, and their victory was absolute. In the War of Independence we achieved self-determination but did not destroy England. After the Civil War we emerged as a single nation that nonetheless was half-vanquished. And in the First World War we came to terms with an opponent that we failed to crush and did not reconfigure. But in the Second World War our armies destroyed and occupied enemy countries more powerful and threatening than any we had ever faced. We leveled them, conquering every inch. In a famous photograph, Churchill struggles gamely through the ruins of the Chancellery in Berlin. It was done, complete, more than Wagnerian. It made the Iliad look like very small potatoes. And yet, these were our fathers, one generation removed. They told us that we were smarter than they were, that we would stand on their shoulders, that they had fought for us (it was true), and that we would outshine them.
Having been deprived of this glorious vision by history and circumstance, many of us then went on to hallucinate it. Drugs probably helped, as did a surfeit of material things, and the degradation of the educational system. This generation and those descended from it have abused and discredited the past and convinced themselves of their capacity to repair and remake the world—not according to the principles that preceding generations have proved with blood, patience, and genius, but in contradiction of them, by their own set of newly made laws, hardly a single one of which is not precisely what will lead to the suffering and destruction that they do not know, having been lifted beyond such things by the sense and sacrifice of their elders. This and the following generations, by and large, that have done more than any others to cut the ancient sinews that have kept us whole and alive; these generations, characterless, spendthrift, and vain, that have lost the capacity of embarrassment; these generations that have desecrated history, buried the word, murdered tranquility, and done about as much as can be done to turn the world into a cartoon, are sure that they are on to something big: convergence, consilience, theories of everything, immortality, perfection.
Are they really. There is no question mark at the end of the previous sentence, because it is not a question but a dismissal. Take for example the hopeful meows about immortality. Like good Hermeticists, some who speculate on such things really have latched on to the notion that immortality is just around the corner. No matter that the world of life is like a river that disappears mysteriously over a fall, and that of all the billions who have come before, and of all the billions alive today moving inexorably toward the edge, not a single one has failed and not a single one will fail to go over it. Now it has actually become fashionable here and there to comfort oneself with the hope that this death will be defeated by a machine very like the one in which resides the miracle of the spreadsheet.
But between expectant lips and this particular cup are distances so vast that you had better take a good look around while you can, for even if in a far-distant time everything in one’s memory can be preserved or transferred to some medium of storage, it is not the sum of these things that makes the soul, but how they are integrated and with what speed, depth, bravery, and unpredictable wit. It wasn’t what Raphael knew, but that things of beauty flew off his hand. All the great worlds of information packed into the Library of Congress do not, in their totality, begin to make a life. Nor would merely linking them create consciousness, the essence of which remains an utter and absolute mystery. No mechanism for cradling the soul will ever be found better than the one we have been given, and if something eventually comes close, that which will be left out will be that which looms largest.
The illusion of the perfectibility of man is based on ignorance of his splendidly complex nature, which is weighted and counterweighted already so delicately and brilliantly that amending it would be far more profitless a thing than, say, rewriting Shakespeare for the better, or adding a backbeat to a Verdi aria. And even the BlackBerry-less and benighted medievals (who had real berries) knew that immortality was one of the elements not only of heaven but of hell. Thus Paolo and Francesca and their eternal kiss. For every tick there is a tock, for every triumph a defeat. This is the balance of human nature, and it cannot be countermanded.
Yet we persist in thinking it can. Often, as with Daedalus and Icarus, the effort to countermand is a matter of degree, of pace, adjustment, lack of patience, and lack of humility, because our designs too quickly run out of control. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and their hundreds of millions of followers were convinced of a dream of perfection that they would bring first to their countries and then to the world. But one need not be a psychotic in control of a nation to suffer the same delusion. A friend of mine in college, a protégé of Marcuse, told me that he wanted to burn down, quite literally, the world’s greatest library and replace everything therein (which is to say nearly all recorded human knowledge) with the contents of his battered spiral notebook. According to him, this would become the basis of a new and just order. Needless to say, he wouldn’t let me see what he had written, perhaps because I existed on too low a plane. He wouldn’t have burned down anything, for he was in fact a kindly intellectual, but many terrible notions were circulating among kindly intellectuals at the time.
The electric flow of hubris is such that in all eras it touches all classes and types. Now it is endemic, if only because the belief that man can be a god runs parallel, though illogically, with the decision that there is no God. In the absence of God, all nature is merely accident. Amidst all the accident there is only one purposefulness other than instinct, that of man. Standing thus above the randomness of the rest of the universe, he is no longer a piece of work (no will having worked upon him) but the ultimate and decisive power, alone above all else, the sole possessor of volition. It is hardly a new theme, though rationalism and the triumph of science have pushed it farther than in other ages. Previously, the conflict was between monotheism and idolatry. Now it is between any kind of theism and worship of the self. It is not a coincidence that in this era narcissism has inflated to the point of flattening many aspects of character. Hardly unique or surprising is the horribly cute pretension exemplified, for example, in a cookbook entitled How To Be A Domestic Goddess, dedicated to “John, Goddess-Maker.”114 This found sufficient resonance to be echoed. Seven years later you could read magazine articles such as, “The Easy Way To Be A Domestic Goddess,” with a picture of a woman aglow like Diana (courtesy of a bodice of electric lightbulbs), with the secret of how to become divine simply to “Wrap an odd-shaped gift.”115 Such things are not serious, but, like Freudian slips, they betray what is underneath. And in the bankrupt and bankrupting quest to escape history, mortality, and human nature, the necessary illusions are furthered with unprecedented power by the electronic culture and its informal system of belief. There, the world is made into a kind of shrunken head, a tame thing with neither wind nor storm; a playhouse where it is possible for those who share in the illusion to imagine that they are in charge; a closed system in which the word virtual is applied to that which is not virtual, and the masters are masters of nothing, not even a puff of real smoke.
Someone who is understandably if not forgivably centered in such a way upon himself can easily misinterpret any course of events as part of a planned or evolving harmony favorable to his destiny or opinions. Lack of humility comes from insufficient attention to how the world really works. The illustration of this has been one of the cornerstones of literature from its earliest beginnings, and in regard to it there is a lesson of history at every turn. Consider the dialectical placement of statements by three of what Churchill called “English worthies”—in this case Conservative politicians in the National Government of the late thirties. Mussolini said of them, “These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.” (He was right, of course, but it didn’t do him terribly much good.)
First, the thesis, from Sir Samuel Hoare, then home secretary, in March of 1939. He saw a “golden age” about to dawn, when “five men in Europe, the three dictators and the prime ministers of England and France,” would converge (not his word), and “in an incredibly short time transform the whole history of the world.”116 The antithesis came on the very same day, when (according to his memorandum) Lord Halifax told Ribbentrop that “Experience of all history went to show that the pressure of facts was sometimes more powerful than the will of men: and if once war should start in Central Europe, it was quite impossible to say where it might not end, or who might not become involved.”117 And, finally, the synthesis, in Neville Chamberlain’s speech to the Commons, of September 3, 1939: “Everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”118 So much for the golden age.
The optimism and confidence of the fin de siècle a hundred years ago became the First World War; the Second World War; the Holocaust; the Cold War and its attendant, costly, proxy wars; and a century as much, or more, of alienation, misery, and death, as of progress and the alleviation of suffering. Churchill was able to make an exception to the rule of blindness in the age of appeasement only because he had been an optimist prior to the Great War, and had bitterly learned the lesson he went on to teach—not that one policy or another is always right, but that throughout history grandiose expectations are almost always confounded and overturned in tragedy.
Thomas Hardy knew not only that fate deals severely with what he called “the Pride of Life,” but how. In “The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic),” he wrote:
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.119
Teilhard de Chardin’s recognizably Hermetic concept that salvation comes through the development and convergence of human capabilities with the divine is a doctrine with a dark side that he chose optimistically and faithfully to ignore, a side that Yeats (he of balancing this life with this death) expresses with customary and disconcerting beauty:
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.120
That something is very wrong with the notion of convergence in even its most elevated formulation is supported by its most eloquent critique. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a simple and profound short story by Flannery O’Connor, a mother and son travel on a city bus in the newly integrated South. The mother clings to the old ways and is clearly wrong in doing so, but, in practice, she is kind and good. The son is the apostle of progress and justice, but in practice he is smug and cruel. He represents pride in achievement, faith in emerging perfection, reason, justice, the linear concept of history. She—humility, tradition, conservation, circularity, continuity, mercy, and forgiveness.
It is no coincidence that in the interplay between the two in the context of their individual struggles he finds that his actions have assured “his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.” And it isn’t a coincidence that the title of the story, which Flannery O’Connor wrote to address the great French philosopher, is from Teilhard, for it is a velvet demolition of his belief that mankind can evolve to perfection.
If salvation is a function of perfectibility, what does this imply about the lame, the weak, the befuddled, and the oppressed? Are they by implication less beloved of God? In one spare short story, mortally ill Flannery O’Connor, with the Southern and the Celtic knowledge of hubris and defeat running naturally in her blood, checkmated Teilhard’s great erudition, multiple volumes, and splendid dreams. This she did with the same kind of totally unexpected, breathtaking power of the Maid of Orleans, or Anne Frank. She, who would never know temporal glory, or be rewarded in this world, who died without husband or children, who suffered and had no sway, she knew the simple truth that salvation is ultimately a matter of grace. That is, when all is said and done, man is simply unable to construct the higher parts of his destiny, and must know this to survive even the simpler challenges that he is expected to meet.
