While the world is eagerly anticipating the Y2K apocalypse, a far more serious "bug," created 300 years ago, gets very little attention-a situation we need to recognize and rectify.

I am talking about the Enlightenment, when people decided to split reason from faith and from the literature of the ancients.This dissociation freed science and technology from the shackles of religion and fueled the Industrial Revolution. The success of industrialization confirmed the wisdom of this division and reinforced the three-way separation among "techies" (who put their faith in technology), the "humies" (humanists) and the religious believers. But with success came problems. Techies began questioning their purpose. Humies became disaffected with gadgets and materialism dominating ideas. Youth, sensing something was missing, turned to drugs. And people focused increasingly on themselves, celebrating possessions and lamenting depressions. Governments separated faith from reason in the school curricula. A politically correct population became increasingly reluctant to say "God." And universities isolated techies from humies in neat cubbyholes. By now, the split has become so ingrained that we're not even aware of it.