Theory of convergence

Trust is built on a track record. We trust God because He has been as good as His word. And indeed, He everywhere invites us to trust Him on this basis: "Remember what I did to Pharaoh."

In 1832 a preacher named William Miller went on tour predicting that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. That's why you've never heard of him. A better prophet may be Russian scholar Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who warned, twenty-three years before "9-11," about underestimating the ideological gulf between us Westerners and Muslim countries. If he got that right, maybe we should listen to what else he has to say:

The persisting blindness of superiority [of the West] continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems,…that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction.

But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development bears little resemblance to all this.

Solzhenitsyn thus rejects the prevalent doctrine of the eventual "convergence" of nations: "It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these world are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence."

Something for the next administration to think about when devising foreign policy.