Review / Books: Deus Ex Machina
By John Podhoretz

Review of: HOOKING UP, By Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 293 pages, $25).

    It's said that as men journey into old age, religion begins to
preoccupy them as never before  and judging from his sprightly new grabbag
of a book, that seems to be the case for the youngest 69-year-old in
American letters. "Hooking Up" is Tom Wolfe's first collection since 1976,
and it finds the most vivid American journalist of the past halfcentury in
an unusually spiritual mood. If a compendium of essays written over the
course of 30 years with a novella at its center can be said to have a
unifying theme, "Hooking Up" does: the complex interplay of religion and
science.

   For 150 years, Mr. Wolfe explains, religious thinkers have been
struggling in the most profound ways to reconcile the discoveries of
modern
science with the mysteries of faith. The results of that effort include
the microchip, the heart and soul of the new Industrial Revolution. In an
extraordinary essay called "The Two Men Who Went West," Mr. Wolfe reveals
in eyeopening detail the debt the world owes to a Congregational minister
named Josiah Grinnell  the very youth to whom Horace Greeley uttered the
immortal words, "Go west, young man."

   And West he did go, to Iowa, where he founded a tiny college in the
middle of nowhere that has had a greater impact on scientific advancement
in this century than almost any other institution. That was due in large
measure to a local boy and Grinnell grad named Robert Noyce, who not only
developed the microchip and started Intel but also created the Silicon
Valley culture  all of which emerged from the chrysalis of the Protestant
revival of the 19th century.

   While the mechanics that gave rise to the Internet can thus be
indirectly traced all the way back to Martin Luther, Mr. Wolfe traces the
philosophy of the Internet to the 20thcentury Catholic thinker Teilhard de
Chardin. In another eyeopening piece called "Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and
the Human Anthill," Mr. Wolfe shows how Teilhard's vision of a universal
"convergence" in which technology would bring all of mankind together like
a "living membrane" is at the core of all the highflown rhetoric about how
the Internet itself is going to transform human consciousness. Mr. Wolfe
dubs this "Digibabble," which he calls "the purely magical assumption that
as the Web, the Internet, spreads across the globe, the human mind expands
with it."

   Mr. Wolfe goes on: "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." The pseudoreligious Digibabble Mr. Wolfe quotes from Bill
Gates and Wired magazine is shot through with Teilhard's "dream of the
Christian unity of all souls on Earth"  and those who indulge in such
blather don't have a clue they've been spreading heterodox millennarian
Gospel rather than scientific fact.

   While presentday technology is thus indebted to religious precepts, Mr.

Wolfe discerns a reverseimage Calvinism in the work of the sociobiologists
and neuroscientists who are transforming our understanding of human
nature. A "sudden switch from a belief in Nurture, in the form of social
conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, is
the great intellectual event... of the twentieth century," he says. In a
sobering portrait of this "intellectual event" called "Sorry, But Your
Soul Just Died," Mr. Wolfe reveals how their pathbreaking studies on the
genetic components of what we variously call "soul" and "character" have
led many scientists and thinkers to call into question the "free will"
that the Bible holds is mankind's greatest gift from God  and his most
enduring curse.

   "I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of
sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the
course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that
the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea," Mr. Wolfe
writes. The implications of this reductive theory are evident. While the
most eminent sociobiologists "present elegant arguments as to why
neuroscience should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of
art, or the righteousness of political causes... the conclusion people are
drawing from beyond the laboratory walls is: The fix is in! We're all
hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!"

   Thus, the Calvinism that Max Weber said was the original creative force

in the manufacture of the American character is making its way back into
public discourse  only without the guiding hand of God to reassure sinners
that the universe is just in ways we poor humans cannot comprehend.

   But even in this nightmare world of atheistic determinism, in which man

is plunged "headlong back into the primordial ooze," Mr. Wolfe sees a
vision of the eternal peeking through the cloud cover: Man "is
floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze,
when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up,
like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He
names it God."

Perhaps that vision is an example of the consolations of age Tom Wolfe so
richly deserves for having so enriched us.

Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing
editor of the Weekly Standard.