Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Wade Riddick" <wriddick AT usa.net>]

        I'm late to the conversation, but I'll toss in my two cents.
        The body is nothing but a big message-passing system among cells and
organelles.  Think of cells as individuals who get handed the same book of
instructions (DNA), but it's marked up slightly differently according to
position in the body, cell type and other contexts.  Each cell reads
instructions - words written in molecules - off the book that tell it what
pages to go to next.  It generates messages and then sends them to itself
(autocrine) or to distant cells (paracrine signaling).  It receives messages
from other cells and those send it to different pages.
        Now imagine millions of pages getting read at once and interacting.
        That's going on in every organism with one central goal: extracting 
order out
of the environment (energy) and exporting the chaos (entropy).
        When we get sick with a disease like Covid-19 - a topic currently
preoccupying all of my writing time - it means something simply has hacked
part of our messaging network to redirect resources to its own ends - like a
sociopathic conman.
        Like economics and politics, evolution is one big argument among 
organisms
trying to mutually use one another.  This is why the signaling is so complex
in our bodies.  It prevents one simple organism with a limited set of
instructions from doing too much damage at once.  Viruses either die out with
the deaths of their hosts, reach an equilibrium where they are tolerated
(there are literally hundreds of harmless viruses in our cells and scattered
around our bodies) or incorporate those viruses into the genetic code.  We may
have evolved language itself when we absorbed bornaviruses into our genome
millions of years ago.
        That doesn't even begin to take into account the particular 
complexity of the
human brain and how we store memories and think about the future.  Spoken
language seems to be relatively old and use parts of the auditory system that
songbirds also employ.  What I'm doing here - writing - is that auditory
system more newly shackled onto older visual/spatial processing systems.
        What's interesting is where narcissism falls on a spectrum of 
diseases. 
Defects in the FoxP2 gene result in loss of spoken language.  From studies in
mice, it appears that neuroinflammation from viral infections damages FoxP2
signaling during fetal brain development.  If it occurs in the first
trimester, the result appears to be autism - and the future adult then suffers
from a world of objects that don't talk or have personalities.  If FoxP2 is
disturbed later in the second trimester, the result is schizophrenia - and the
sufferer endures a world filled with personality and meaning where there is
none; dead uncles talk to them through the ceiling fan and spy agencies compel
them to wrap their heads in tinfoil.
        Another way of looking at it is that the schiophrenic's hallucinating
consciousness straddles a waking and dreaming worlds while the autistic is
overly literal and has defects in personal empathy.  An extremely autistic
person can't read emotions on your face or understand why somebody can't . 
They can't make that leap into someone else.  Their mathematical obsession
with following rules and maintaining order (e.g., obessing about train
networks) may actually give them a sharper form of compassion when they see
another person hurt when the rules aren't followed or equitably applied. 
Schizophrenics can understand other emotional states; their overweening egoes
may simply not care.  They're on a superimportant mission to save us all. 
Autistics tend not to have hyge egoes while it's all personal for the
schizophrenic.
        These are all polar extremes on an axis, of course. 
        Genetically speaking, narcissism, bipolar disorder, 
sociopathy/pscychopathy
cluster at the schizophrenia end of genetic risk with dopamine overflow in the
brain and an inflated sense of self worth.  They *have* empathy and understand
the pain of others and their emotional states; they simply may not care -
which is a defect of conscience, not empathy.  There are far more
schizoaffective traits that are shared among this cluster than you'd think. 
The paranoia of the most notable public sociopath of our era, the lying and
the persecution complex are a diluted form of the full-blown hallucinatory
dream state of the schizophrenic.  Paranoia is imposing an emotional state
from your own mind on the actions of other people and lending them the most
unflattering interpretation all revolving around your own well-being and not
what's going on in their lives.
        Narcissism is often a useful trait in public figures, so long as they 
equate
their own personal success with that of their business or country.  But
narcissism  can often take a sharp, dark turn.
        Human beings have been sharing experience through an exchange of 
symbols for
maybe a million years.  We keep finding archeological examples of religious
iconography, funerary rights and other symbolic items even among the
Neanderthals.  I don't think talking to each other is going away any time
soon, even if Elon Musk reams of turning us all into pod people extensions of
some vast electronic nervous system.  Marshall McLuhan never seems to die.  He
said electronic symbol exchange would turn us all into a global village with
one shared experience.  With cameras everywhere and everyone spilling out
their most intimate personal details into full public view on antisocial
media, is it any wonder we've had such an explosion of intolerance and a
backlash?
        If Walker Percy was writing _Lancelot_ today, he'd ditch movies for
antisocial media.  It's the perfect echo chamber for narcissitic, intolerant
rage.  Facebook, in all its stoking of genocidal pograms around the world, is
the perfect expression of the lack of compassion that arises from detaching
our communications from the lives of others and Trump embodies that - from its
ire to its futile incompetence - like no one else.
        Of course Trump doesn't read and has no attention span.  He's 
Chayefsky's
Chancy Gardner meets Percy's Lancelot.  Social media tweets seem to be
returning us to the oral thought habits of Homer's era without the necessary
poetry.  Travel, contact and conversation used to be expensive and thus words
carefully considered - but wait, here comes electronic representation.   We'll
do it all for you cheap and spread it everywhere.  To Hell with editting and
reflection - literally (because, for some reason, we all can't stop using
"literally" - literally).
        But what here is any different than the alienation of Baudelaire, the 
last
lyric poet at the dawn of an era of cheap commodification of words and grand
Parisian vistas where the flaneur and shopping malls were first invented, and
what insight here can I offer that Walter Benjamin has not?
        Walker Percy's mallification of America is dead.  First it shattered 
into
strip mals and Walmart.  Now it's virtual and run by Amazon from arehouses
with stringers and that's the new model economy.  The shops, vistas and
windows are virtual now, kept in our pockets and carried with us like our of
little casinos and shopping temptations.  We even shop for mates this way now,
swiping left or right as the mood suits us - and somewhere, some alienated
part of our soul hidden deap inside is screaming that others treat us this
way.
        Those screams are overflowing in burned out police departments and 
fast food
joints as people finally protest the for-profit policing system that has
denied people fair treatment.  A quarter century after Percy's death and we're
still wrestling with the legacy of the Lost Cause - now with its own
Presidency embodying it and what looks like border crossing checkpoints at
state boundaries, which we haven't seen since the idiocy of the Confederacy
rained down on us during the Civil War.
        For-profit policing and jails, for-profit medicine, for-profit wars 
that put
more military contractors in Iraq than U.S military - the plantation model
reigns supreme again thanks to money turning into speech and bribes being
recast as innocuous "campaign donations."  As they say in Silicon Valley, if
you're getting something for free, you're not the customer; you're the product
being sold.  When was the last time we were citizens and not products?
        But then how is the antisocial media alienation of contemporary 
Silicon
Valley going to be any different than Musk's accelerated future version of
it?
        I wouldn't lay this at Musk's feet, or even Zuckerberg's or Hitler's. 
 I'd go
all the way back to Bernays, Freud's son-in-law who took the great insights
that each of us is a microcosm of conflicting impulses, a world of politic
unto ourselves, and turned that into a way to alienate us so we would be
dependent upon large corporations for redemption.  _Madmen_ didn't sell
products; they sold *lifestyles*.  They told us we weren't good enough if we
weren't associated with the right plantation. - er, product.
        Why can't Johnny read?
        Money doesn't want him to.
        And now back to the cornoavirus/bonfire of the inhumanities.
        Greetings, Marcus, from up the road in Baton Rouge.  Sorry I couldn't 
pop
into the meeting in St. Francisville last year to say hello to my old
classmate Rod Dreher.


Wade Riddick