In the age of information and technology, the age in which what is termed "reason" has apparently triumphed over mystery, Forbes A.S.A.P. magazine published a collector's issue in October 1999 on the theme of convergence, a term now popular in the public imagination to denote the coming together of all branches of knowledge and perceptions of the world, into one worldview.
The magazine has called together scientists, journalists, and thinkers from a variety of disciplines in order to evaluate this term. Wendy Shalit, who is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, and who is among the more wary interpreters of convergence, calls the Internet-one harbinger of convergence-outright idolatry and calls it an "allegory for what can go wrong with convergence." Shalit states that students are being duped into thinking that, because they have access to a wider mass of information, they have achieved a higher level of thought. Earlier in her article, she lambastes Dartmouth College's English Department, whose Chairman, William W. Cook, told her that studying great writers such as Shakespeare was no longer necessary "in an age with an 'explosion of materials.'"
One of the issue's general editorials, entitled "Tools," remarks that "the alternative to becoming digital may well be enslavement. After all, on the day when our tools become better at being us than we are, then who will be the tool?" (Those of us still resistant to Windows 2000 had better watch out.)
Perhaps Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson brandishes the most aggressive form of this thinking, when he claims that "the naturalistic hypothesis arising from scientific knowledge holds that the powerful emotions of religious experience are entirely neurobiological;" and that "scientific knowledge is that which humanity knows with a reasonable degree of certainty on the basis of consistent, verifiable evidence." In Wilson's worldview, religion and religiosity fit into the mold of what science-a product of the human mind-deems they are.
Keith Ward, Regis Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, claims that all religions are melding more and more into one, aided by progress in science and technology, and that the historical understanding that grew in the 19th century no longer makes it possible for anyone to claim that faith is a statement of "final, complete revelation."
Probably the most truthful assessment of the whole business is that of Mark Helprin, a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal and a novelist, who sees the fallacy in all of it. He cites Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Everything that Rises Must Converge," which blows up the fallacy of the perfectability of man. "Humanity," Helprin writes, "cannot be understood, much less managed, according to scientific principles…. If salvation depends on development and advancement, what does this imply about the lame, the weak, the befuddled, and the oppressed?" He goes on to compare O'Connor to Joan of Arc, who confounded the powerful intelligentsia of her time by a wisdom that came from somewhere outside of the human mind.
It is this last thing, perhaps, that is at the core of what happened in history 2000 years ago. Father Giussani, in In Search of the Human Face, raises that point, that it is not our efforts at righteousness that redeem us in front of the Infinite, but our adherence to a Presence, since the very effort to correct our own sin would be defined by the original wound in us. It was for this precise reason that God entered history-not as a moral arbiter, not as an illuminator of our predicament, but as a Presence to adhere to from within our predicament, a Presence that has remained in history up to our very time. This-something outside of us, completely new, untainted by our predicament but willing to suffer it-is the only salvation our experience claims.
But mankind's stance in front of the Christian claim has always been black or white. And it is this that seems so evident in the convergence theories Forbes has offered us as a collection for posterity. For whether we believe that science has absorbed religion or that we are converging into a God-point, or that tradition is the way to go, it seems that all of the theorists of convergence, at least in this magazine, have one thing in common: that they too were converged by the editors of Forbes, and that Rich Karlgaard, Forbes' publisher, in continuing to make the distinction between faith and reason, allows that faith-without the reasons-is making a comeback: allows it, admits it as something permissible, a mere idea among other ideas-one propelled and sustained, permissible according to the one overarching idea that Forbes magazine would not challenge or even raise for discussion: the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.