Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

institutions, has now—partly by its very nature and partly by refusal of opportunity, the pressures of modern social organization, and lack of courage—been collectivized. The spark of individual genius is no longer as free as the rough waters of the sea, having been confined to channels, canals, sluices, pipes, and corked bottles. There are brilliant ants, and wise ants, chief ants, and even Feynman-type ants, but the light of the blazing, burning, magnificent ants like Newton, Galileo, and Einstein is now muted beneath layers of communal gauze and collaborative discipline, like the light of a firefly so deep in the grass that it will never find a mate.

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