by Tom Wolfe
For Teilhard also had glamour to burn, three kinds of it. At the age of thirty-two he had been the French star of the most sensational archaeological find of all time, the Piltdown man, the so-called missing link in the evolution of ape to man, in a dig near Lewes, England, led by the Englishman Charles Dawson. One year later, when World War I broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-allinfantry-wars’ bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterêts, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.
“With the evolution of Man,” he wrote, “a new law of Nature has come into force—that of convergence.” Biological evolution had created step one, “expansive convergence.” Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating “compressive convergence.” Thanks to technology, “the hitherto scattered” species Homo sapiens was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.”
One can think whatever one wants about Teilhard’s theology, but no one can deny his stunning prescience. When he died in 1955, television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a computer you could buy ready-made. Computers were huge, hellishly expensive, made-to-order machines as big as a suburban living room and bristling with vacuum tubes that gave off an unbearable heat. Since the microchip and the microprocessor had not yet been invented, no one was even speculating about a personal computer in every home, much less about combining the personal computer with the telephone to create an entirely new medium of communication. Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet.
What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it. When Teilhard had first felt his call to the priesthood, it had been during the intellectually liberal papacy of Leo XIII. But by the 1920s the pendulum had swung back within the Church, and evolutionism was not acceptable in any guise. At this point began the central dilemma, the great sorrow—the tragedy, I am tempted to say—of this remarkable man’s life. A priest was not allowed to put anything into public print without his superiors’ approval. Teilhard’s dilemma was precisely the fact that science and religion were not unified. As a scientist, he could not bear to disregard scientific truth; and in his opinion, as a man who had devoted decades to paleontology, the theory of evolution was indisputably correct. At the same time he could not envision a life lived outside the Church.
God knew there were plenty of women who were busy envisioning it for him. Teilhard’s longest, closest, tenderest relationship was with an American sculptress named Lucile Swan. Lovely little Mrs. Swan was in her late thirties and had arrived in Peking in 1929 on the China leg of a world tour aimed at diluting the bitterness of her recent breakup with her husband. Teilhard was in town officially to engage in some major archaeological digs in China and had only recently played a part in discovering the second great “missing link,” the Peking man. In fact, the Church had exiled him from Europe for fear he would ply his evolutionism among priests and other intellectuals. Lucile Swan couldn’t get over him. He was the right age, forty-eight, a celebrated scientist, a war hero, and the most gorgeous white man in Peking. The crowning touch of glamour was his brave, doomed relationship with his own church. She had him over to her house daily “for tea.” In addition to her charms, which were many, she seems also to have offered an argument aimed at teasing him out of the shell of celibacy. In effect, the Church was forsaking him because he had founded his own new religion. Correct? Since it was his religion, couldn’t he have his priests do anything he wanted them to do? When she was away, he wrote her letters of great tenderness and longing. “For the very reason that you are such a treasure to me, dear Lucile,” he wrote at one point, “I ask you not to build too much of your life on me … Remember, whatever sweetness I force myself not to give you, I do in order to be worthy of you.”
The final three decades of his life played out with the same unvarying frustration. He completed half a dozen books, including his great work, The Phenomenon of Man. The Church allowed him to publish none of it and kept him in perpetual exile from Europe and his beloved Paris. His only pleasure and ease came from the generosity of women, who remained attracted to him even in his old age. In 1953, two years before his death, he suffered one especially cruel blow. It was discovered that the Piltdown man had been, in fact, a colossal hoax pulled off by Charles Dawson, who had hidden various doctored ape and human bones like Easter eggs for Teilhard and others to find. He was in an acute state of depression when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-four, still in exile. His final abode was a dim little room in the Hotel Fourteen on East Sixtieth Street in Manhattan, with a single window looking out on a filthy air shaft composed, in part, of a blank exterior wall of the Copacabana nightclub.
Not a word of his great masterwork had ever been published, and yet Teilhard had enjoyed a certain shady eminence for years. Some of his manuscripts had circulated among his fellow Jesuits, sub rosa, sotto voce, in a Jesuit samizdat. In Canada he was a frequent topic of conversation at St. Michael’s, the Roman Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Immediately following his death, his Paris secretary, Jeanne Mortier, to whom he had left his papers, began publishing his writings in a steady stream, including The Phenomenon of Man. No one paid closer attention to this gusher of Teilhardiana than a forty-four-year-old St. Michael’s teaching fellow named Marshall McLuhan, who taught English literature. McLuhan was already something of a campus star at the University of Toronto when Teilhard died. He had dreamed up an extracurricular seminar on popular culture and was drawing packed houses as he held forth on topics such as the use of sex in advertising, a discourse that had led to his first book, The Mechanical Bride, in 1951. He was a tall, slender man, handsome in a lairdly Scottish way, who played the droll don to a T, popping off deadpan three-liners-not oneliners but three-liners—peopie couldn’t forget.
One time I asked him how it was that Pierre Trudeau managed to stay in power as Prime Minister through all the twists and turns of Canadian politics. Without even the twitch of a smile McLuhan responded, “It’s simple. He has a French name, he thinks like an Englishman, and he looks like an Indian. We all feel very guilty about the Indians here in Canada.”
Another time I was in San Francisco doing stories on both McLuhan and topless restaurants, each of which was a new phenomenon. So I got the bright idea of taking the great communications theorist to a topless restaurant called the Off Broadway. Neither of us had ever seen such a thing. Here were scores of businessmen in drab suits skulking at tables in the dark as spotlights followed the waitresses, each of whom had astounding silicone-enlarged breasts and wore nothing but high heels, a G-string, and the rouge on her nipples. Frankly, I was shocked and speechless. Not McLuhan.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“What is, Marshall?”
He nodded at the waitresses. “They’re wearing … us.”
“What do you mean, Marshall?”
He
said it very slowly, to make sure I got it:
“They’re … putting … us … on.”
But the three-liners and the pop culture seminar were nothing compared to what came next, in the wake of Teilhard’s death: namely, McLuhanism.
McLuhanism was Marshall’s synthesis of the ideas of two men. One was his fellow Canadian, the economic historian Harold Innis, who had written two books arguing that new technologies were primal, fundamental forces steering human history. The other was Teilhard. McLuhan was scrupulous about crediting scholars who had influenced him, so much so that he described his first book of communications theory, The Gutenberg Galaxy, as “a footnote to the work of Harold Innis.” In the case of Teilhard, however, he was caught in a bind. McLuhan’s “global village” was nothing other than Teilhard’s “noösphere,” but the Church had declared Teilhard’s work heterodox, and McLuhan was not merely a Roman Catholic, he was a convert. He had been raised as a Baptist but had converted to Catholicism while in England studying at Cambridge during the 1930s, the palmy days of England’s great Catholic literary intellectuals, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Like most converts, he was highly devout. So in his own writings he mentioned neither Teilhard nor the two-step theory of evolution that was the foundation of Teilhard’s worldview. Only a single reference, a mere obiter dictum, attached any religious significance whatsoever to the global village: “The Christian concept of the mystical body—all men as members of the body of Christ—this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions.”
I don’t have the slightest doubt that what fascinated him about television was the possibility it might help make real Teilhard’s dream of the Christian unity of all souls on earth. At the same time, he was well aware that he was publishing his major works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), at a moment when even the slightest whiff of religiosity was taboo, if he cared to command the stage in the intellectual community. And that, I assure you, he did care to do. His father had been an obscure insurance and real estate salesman, but his mother, Elsie, had been an actress who toured Canada giving dramatic readings, and he had inherited her love of the limelight. So he presented his theory in entirely secular terms, arguing that a new, dominant medium such as television altered human consciousness by literally changing what he called the central nervous system’s “sensory balance.” For reasons that were never clear to me—although I did question him on the subject—McLuhan regarded television as not a visual but an “aural and tactile” medium that was thrusting the new television generation back into what he termed a “tribal” frame of mind. These are matters that today fall under the purview of neuroscience, the study of the brain and the central nervous system. Neuroscience has made spectacular progress over the past twenty-five years and is now the hottest field in science and, for that matter, in all of academia. But neuroscientists are not even remotely close to being able to determine something such as the effect of television upon one individual, much less an entire generation.
That didn’t hold back McLuhan, or the spread of McLuhanism, for a second. He successfully established the concept that new media such as television have the power to alter the human mind and thereby history itself. He died in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine after a series of strokes, more than a decade before the creation of the Internet. Dear God—if only he were alive today! What heaven the present moment would have been for him! How he would have loved the Web! What a shimmering Oz he would have turned his global village into!
But by 1980 he had spawned swarms of believers who were ready to take over where he left off. It is they, entirely secular souls, who dream up our fin de siècle notions of convergence for the Digital Age, never realizing for a moment that their ideas are founded upon Teilhard’s and McLuhan’s faith in the power of electronic technology to alter the human mind and unite all souls in a seamless Christian web, the All-in-One. Today you can pick up any organ of the digital press, those magazines for dot-com lizards that have been spawned thick as shad since 1993, and close your eyes and riffle through the pages and stab your forefinger and come across evangelical prose that sounds like a hallelujah! for the ideas of Teilhard or McLuhan or both.
I did just that, and in Wired magazine my finger landed on the name Danny Hillis, the man credited with pioneering the concept of massively parallel computers, who writes: “Telephony, computers, and CD-ROMs are all specialized mechanisms we’ve built to bind us together. Now evolution takes place in microseconds … We’re taking off. We’re at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled organisms. We are amoebas and we can’t figure out what the hell this thing is that we’re creating … We are not evolution’s ultimate product. There’s something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar can comprehend turning into a butterfly.”
Teilhard seemed to think the phase-two technological evolution of man might take a century or more. But you will note that Hillis has it reduced to microseconds. Compared to Hillis, Bill Gates of Microsoft seems positively tentative and cautious as he rhapsodizes in The Road Ahead: “We are watching something historic happen, and it will affect the world seismically.” He’s “thrilled” by “squinting into the future and catching that first revealing hint of revolutionary possibilities.” He feels “incredibly lucky” to be playing a part “in the beginning of an epochal change …”
We can only appreciate Gates’s self-restraint when we take a stab at the pages of the September 1998 issue of Upside magazine and come across its editor in chief, Richard L. Brandt, revealing just how epochally revolutionary Gates’s Microsoft really is: “I expect to see the overthrow of the U.S. government in my lifetime. But it won’t come from revolutionaries or armed conflict. It won’t be a quick-and-bloody coup; it will be a gradual takeover … Microsoft is gradually taking over everything. But I’m not suggesting that Microsoft will be the upstart that will gradually make the U.S. government obsolete. The culprit is more obvious. It’s the Internet, damn it. The Internet is a global phenomenon on a scale we’ve never witnessed.”
In less able hands such speculations quickly degenerate into what all who follow the digital press have become accustomed to: Digibabble. All of our digifuturists, even the best, suffer from what the philosopher Joseph Levine calls “the explanatory gap.” There is never an explanation of just why or how such vast changes, such evolutionary and revolutionary great leaps forward, are going to take place. McLuhan at least recognized the problem and went to the trouble of offering a neuroscientific hypothesis, his theory of how various media alter the human nervous system by changing the “sensory balance.” Everyone after him has succumbed to what is known as the “Web-mind fallacy,” the purely magical assumption that as the Web, the Internet, spreads over the globe, the human mind expands with it. Magical beliefs are leaps of logic based on proximity or resemblance. Many primitive tribes have associated the waving of the crops or tall grass in the wind with the rain that follows. During a drought the tribesmen get together and create harmonic waves with their bodies in the belief that it is the waving that brings on the rain. Anthropologists have posited these tribal hulas as the origin of dance. Similarly, we have the current magical Web euphoria. A computer is a computer, and the human brain is a computer. Therefore, a computer is a brain, too, and if we get a sufficient number of them, millions, billions, operating all over the world, in a single seamless Web, we will have a superbrain that converges on a plane far above such old-fashioned concerns as nationalism and racial and ethnic competition.
I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That
one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble.
May I log on to the past for a moment? Ever since the 1830s, people in the Western Hemisphere have been told that technology was making the world smaller, the assumption being that only good could come of the shrinkage. When the railroad locomotive first came into use, in the 1830s, people marveled and said it made the world smaller by bringing widely separated populations closer together. When the telephone was invented, and the transoceanic cable and the telegraph and the radio and the automobile and the airplane and the television and the fax, people marveled and said it all over again, many times. But if these inventions, remarkable as they surely are, have improved the human mind or reduced the human beast’s zeal for banding together with his blood brethren against other human beasts, it has escaped my notice. One hundred and seventy years after the introduction of the locomotive, the Balkans today are a cluster of virulent spores more bloodyminded than ever. The former Soviet Union is now fifteen nations split up along ethnic bloodlines. The very Zeitgeist of the twenty-first century is summed up in the cry “Back to blood!” The thin crust of nationhoods the British established in Asia and Africa at the zenith of their imperial might has vanished, and it is the tribes of old that rule. What has made national boundaries obsolete in so much of Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia? Not the Internet but the tribes. What have the breathtaking advances in communications technology done for the human mind? Beats me. SAT scores among the top tenth of high-school students in the United States, that fraction who are prime candidates for higher education in any period, are lower today than they were in the early 1960s. Believe, if you wish, that computers and the Internet in the classroom will change all that, but I assure you, it is sheer Digibabble.