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

["janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com" <janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com>]

All these words and then reedited so you want us to read them twice, all in the service of a preposterous conclusion.

Come out of your head and look at the real world. Anarchists are tearing down statues, murdering people, creating havoc in the first phase of their grand plan to destroy this magnificent country and all you can talk about is what?

Sorry, as Whittaker Chambers said to

Ayn Rand, Du calme, Monsieur.

Janet Cantor

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 11:50 PM, Wade Riddick

<wriddick AT usa.net> wrote:

[Apologies for the haste of the earlier post.  Now edited, revised and

extended.]

      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 world 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 find

their keys when the autistic can see them but the other person can't.  They

can't make that leap into someone else's mind.  Their mathematical obsession

with following rules and maintaining order (e.g., obsessing 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 huge 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. 

Indeed a sociopath can't torture you if they can't project themselves into

your existence to understand what hurts the most; they just don't have the

conscience to care.

      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.  These conditions

are also marked by distinct disinhibitions.

      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 dreams 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 malls and Walmart.  Now it's virtual and run by Amazon from

warehouses 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

own little casinos and shopping temptations and personal Stazi informant

wrapped into one.  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

deep 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 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.

      But it's the sense of money that the Romans imposed with their

crucifixion of Jesus, who literally - there's that word again - wanted debt

forgiveness, a Jubilee year (a concept borrowed from ancient Babylon to

prevent small farmers from falling into slavery over their debts).  The world

didn't listen to Jesus and the Roman obsession with repayment lead us into a a

feudal dark ages we're still trying to transcend.  These two halves of the

American soul - Lincoln and Calhoun - are again fighting it out in the streets

today under the pale shadow of plague death - how's that for existential

symbolism Camus would appreciate?  Covid-19 is worse than Percy's TB, but

offers us the same chance to pause and reflect.  Maybe its inhibition on

personal contact will bring back our appreciation for it.

      Thanks to antisocial media, people are now chopped up into interests and

parcelled out to each other with Hell to pay when the tribal lines are

crossed.  Pluralism trumps democracy.  Personal narrative beats universal fact

and law.  The deconstructionists destroyed the Western canon and the

Charismatics destroyed the Gospels.  Trump and the paranoid leftists obsessed

about being touched in the workplace are branches of the same movement,

tribalist projectors of immediate personal outrage over stoic reflection and a

thirst for universal truth, the immanent vs. the transcendent.

      We've all got to be in a group now - gay, straight, black, white, Star

Trek fans, left-handed gardeners, Pharma lobbyists - because we can't just be

"people."   

      How would Facebook even tag that?  How would you sell ads for that?

Isn't that the old broadcast model?  Zuckerberg's genius is he made us all

produce our own TV shows for him, and then made us the ads too.  In a world

where we were too carved up, he carved us up even more - and he made us do the

dirty work for him.  We all became our own personal Bernays.

      Modern Monetary Theory is an attempt to return the world to a community

sense of money as a symbol of trust among us all - the world of debt

forgiveness Jesus was crucified for trying to bring back in the face of Roman

creditors.  The Southern plantation oligarchy with its obsession for ownership

rights and profits has to alienate all of us from that natural sense of social

justice or it can't maintain control.

      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

(c) 2020

    Comment on Percy-L message from Marcus Smith <marcus AT loyno.edu>

------ Original Message ------

>Elon Musk says speech and human language in final years.

>https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/elon-musk-joe-rogan-podcast-language-neuralink-grimes-baby-a9506451.html

>Musk seems as big a narcissist as Trump, but Percy would have read the

article and had something to say.  Can’t begin to guess what he would have

said. 

>Why do I recall Umberto Eco’s definition of the “sign”?  Anything that

can be used to tell a lie. 

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