[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.
----------------------------------
* Percy-L Discussion Archives:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/percy-l/* Manage Your Membership:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l* Contact the Moderator: percy-l-owner (at)
lists.ibiblio.org* Visit The Walker Percy Project:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy