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
