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A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse
Why There Is No Cultural War in America and Why We Will Perish Nonetheless
By Eduardo Velásquez ISI Books
Copyright © 2007 ISI Books
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-933859-28-6
Chapter One
News of the Soul's Death Greatly Exaggerated
America is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed. That should not be surprising.... Americans do not read Descartes' works because their social state turns them away from speculative practices, and they follow his maxims because this same social state disposes their minds to adopt them. -Alexis de Tocqueville
Tom Wolfe is a seer with powers to make his prophecies come true. Such is the nature of the literary mind. In 1996, Forbes magazine published an essay of Wolfe's titled "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died" (later collected in Wolfe's book Hooking Up). If we are fascinated by the digital web that links us all in cyberspace, says Wolfe, just wait. By "2010, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that rightnow is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories" (Hooking Up, 89-90). The revolutionary technology is "called brain imaging, and anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it" (90). The dawn came and went. It is a new day and a new world. We now bask in the noonday sun.
Brain imaging "refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions, in real time," Wolfe tells us. Invented for medical diagnoses, of "far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, current neuroscientific theories about 'the mind,' 'the self,' 'the soul,' and 'free will.'" This developing science of the brain and nervous system, says Wolfe, "is on the threshold of a unified theory that will have an impact as powerful as that of Darwinism a hundred years ago" (90). Speaking of a "soul" will soon sound as absurd as speaking of witches and warlocks.
How do we find ourselves in such a situation? Neuroscientists, reports Wolfe, begin "with the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's 'Cogito ergo sum,' 'I think, therefore I am,' which they regard as the essence of 'dualism,' the old-fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body." Descartes' statement gives rise to the so-called "ghost in the machine" fallacy, "the quaint belief that there is a ghostly 'self' somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations." Neuroscientists engaged in "three-dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self-consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located." Consciousness and self-consciousness are illusions "created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert" (97). We can mark the success of this understanding of human beings by noting that in 1970, when the Society for Neuroscience was founded, the organization had a meager membership of 1,100. In 1996, Wolfe estimated membership at over 26,000. The impact is felt on college campuses. After all, Wolfe asks, "Why wrestle with Kant's God, Freedom, and Immortality when it is only a matter of time before neuroscience, probably through brain imaging, reveals the actual physical mechanism that fabricates these mental constructs, these illusions?" (98). Philosophy is revealed as pathology-as is religion.
The neuroscientific view emerges in concert with (and may even draw sustenance from) the "most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's 'God is dead.'" According to Wolfe, Nietzsche's claim is not a statement of atheism, though an atheist he was. Rather, Nietzsche simply brings "news of an event." The news was that "educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years" (98). Nietzsche is by no means sanguine about this fact. In his autobiographical Ecce Homo he predicts, Wolfe notes, "that the twentieth century would be a century of 'wars such as have never happened on earth,' wars catastrophic beyond all imagining." Unable to surrender our guilt to God, we turn our revenge on one another. The age of total war coincides with the "'total eclipse of all values.'" If we doubt Nietzsche's predictive powers, Wolfe invites us to consider the "world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?" (99).
In telling the story of the ascent of neuroscience, the demise of Freudianism and Marxism-and with them, the entire belief in social conditioning-is of principal concern to Wolfe (100-103). Rather than explain the maladies of the "self" by reference to a social environment, neuroscience redirects our attention back to the body. To be sure, this shift in emphasis does not deny the importance of environment in shaping our biological endowment, an issue we will return to shortly. But a renewed emphasis on the body does have implications for our capacity for self-government. The issues raised by neuroscience are not simply epistemological or biological. They are political. Wolfe writes:
The notion of a self-a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds-this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away ... slipping away.... The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cipher into a giant among men, a faith that ran from Emerson ("Self-Reliance") to Horatio Alger's Luck and Pluck stories to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World-that faith is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882. (104)
By this circuitous route we come to Wolfe's own prophecy: [I]n the year 2010 or 2030, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: "The self is dead"-except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche the First, he will probably say: "The soul is dead." He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: "The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists." (107)
the quarrel between philosophy and poetry
That new poetic Nietzsche just might be Wolfe himself. Roughly ten years removed from the Forbes essay, Wolfe delivered a bold and daring book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, that depicts the consequences of the death of the soul and God. Wolfe's book tells the story of a young teenage high school graduate from Sparta, North Carolina. The novel chronicles Charlotte Simmons's journey from a small Southern town where the old virtues of religion, patriotism, austerity, and self-command reign to one of America's elite universities, a place that, like most elite universities in America, is steeped in "political correctness." The emphasis that Wolfe placed, in his Forbes essay, on what "educated persons" believe points to why the modern university is the novel's proper setting. This is the arena where intellectual movements take root and are spread among rising generations. It is also the place where the young put their newly acquired lessons into practice. Charlotte may have arrived at Dupont University with a soul. But after less than a year, the stifling social and intellectual atmosphere asphyxiates that original breath of life which is the source of moral integrity and emancipates her latent lawlessness. Her nascent moral and intellectual longings crushed, Charlotte emerges at the end of the novel animated by little more than a Nietzschean "will to power," courting recognition for its own sake, appearance substituting for moral substance.
At first glance, I Am Charlotte Simmons seems to be a translation of Wolfe's Forbes essay into novel form. Wolfe himself provides evidence for this interpretation. Within the first hundred pages (what counts for an introduction in Wolfe's terms), we learn that Charlotte is enrolled in a course taught by Dr. Lewin titled "Modern French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq." For the day's discussion, Lewin has assigned Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a work that is arguably among the first modern novels and depicts a nascent modernity that ends in suicide. That Wolfe has Lewin select Flaubert-and Houellebecq-is no accident. Let us listen in:
"For a moment [Lewin begins] let's consider the very first pages of Madame Bovary. We're in a school for boys ... The very first sentence says"-he pushed the glasses back up on his forehead and brought the book back up under his chin, close to his myopic eyes "'We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in "civvies" and a school servant carrying a big desk.' And so forth and so on ... uhmmm, uhmmm"-he kept his face down in the book-"and then it says, 'In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen, taller than any of us-.'"
Lewin notes that Flaubert begins the book with "We were at preparation," and "taller than us," referring to Charles Bovary's schoolmates. But then, Lewin continues, Flaubert "never tells the story in the first person plural again, and after a few pages we never see any of these boys again. Now, can anybody tell me why Flaubert uses this device?" (99). Charlotte answers:
Well, I think he does it that way because what the first chapter really is, is Charles Bovary's background up to the time he meets Emma, which is when the real story begins. The last two-thirds of the chapter are written like a plain-long biography, but Flaubert didn't want to start the book that way ... because he believed you should get your point across by writing a real vivid scene with just the right details. The point of the first chapter is to show that Charles is a country bumpkin and always has been and always will be, even though he becomes a doctor and everything.... "Une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d'expression ... comme le visage d'un imbécile." So you start the book seeing Charles the way we-the other boys-saw him, and the way we saw him is so vivid that all the way through the book, you never forget that what Charles is, is a hopeless fool, an idiot. (100-101)
Lewin is aghast. Wolfe makes it clear that these are not the kinds of intelligent responses professors at elite universities expect. "Thank you.... That's precisely why. Flaubert never simply explained a key point if he could show it instead, and to show it he needed a point of view" (101).
It would seem that Wolfe's novel is a demonstration of the lessons of "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died." But appearances are deceiving.
Upon its publication, conservatives lauded I Am Charlotte Simmons as a fitting testimony to the failure of American higher education to provide a moral setting for young teenagers. Liberals vilified Wolfe for the puerile imagination it allegedly revealed (Wolfe is not shy about revealing the absence of shame that is the fruit of our wallowing in the body); after all, Wolfe is now in his seventies, and by virtue of his age alone cannot possibly understand the mind and mores of the rising generation. But these partisan attempts to eulogize or vilify Wolfe ignored several key features of the novel that give it a subtle and not readily perceptible complexity. When considering the "self" as envisioned and propagated by neuroscientists, Wolfe raises some vexed questions that call into question the soundness of scientific reductionism and materialism. In this respect, I Am Charlotte Simmons goes well beyond the Forbes essay in showing the perils of reducing humans to animals. Wolfe does not now deny the explanatory power of scientific reductionism. But he does expose the dangers that arise when humans no longer believe themselves to be spiritual creatures.
Wolfe's response to materialism and reductionism, then, is neither to adopt a disembodied idealism nor to take pietistic refuge in religion. Rather, there is evidence to suggest that Wolfe is concerned with the Protestant assault on the medieval or Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. By placing religious sensibilities out of the reach of reason, Protestant theology makes a curious and unwitting alliance with modern antirationalism. Yet Wolfe does not arrive at a Catholic or medieval conclusion. Given the fact that, under Protestantism, Christianity has become a religion of the willful self, Wolfe takes another route toward the rediscovery of the soul. In fact, his book is curiously Socratic, infused with faint but audible suggestions about the importance of the classical Greek heritage in higher education, understood as distinct from the effort by Christians to baptize Greek philosophy. In this book, at least, as opposed to his previous novel, A Man in Full, Wolfe is less Stoic than he is Greek.
i am therefore i think
Let us return to the beginning. The title of Wolfe's novel is, in my estimation, a reference to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Descartes' dictum is, for philosophers and scientists alike, the fountainhead of mind-body dualism (or perhaps we should say dichotomy). The separation between body and mind is now typically regarded as one of the most pernicious and misleading developments in Western philosophy. We are more enlightened these days; we speak of "Descartes' Error" and of the "embodied mind." The title of the novel indicates that Descartes is also the starting point for Wolfe's own meditation on mind-body duality. Throughout the novel we find various protagonists struggling to contend with the contradictory pulls of their passions and their reason. Indeed, Aristotle, often cited as an authority on the relationship between moral and intellectual virtue, makes a crucial appearance that brings the struggle between the rational and arational faculties forcefully into view (589-90). Wolfe, in other words, wishes to reflect on our Cartesian heritage in an effort to discern the connection between mind and body.
Unlike our neuroscientific brethren, however, Wolfe is no reductionist. A trinity of mind, body, and culture immediately supplants dualism in this work. In the "Foreword," Wolfe introduces us to Victor Ransome Starling, who we later learn is Charlotte's professor in the course "Descartes, Darwin, and the Mind-Body Problem." Wolfe's "Foreword" is supposedly taken from The Dictionary of Nobel Laureates (a publication that actually exists but does not include this fictitious entry). Back in 1983, we are told, Professor Starling "surgically removed the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals, from thirty cats" (3). When our mammalian brethren are surgically altered in this way, they "veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another." Extracting the amygdala induces "boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal" (3). The amygdalectomized cats, we are told, enter into a state of "sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme." The surgically altered cats attempt copulation with "such frenzy, a cat mounted on another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems (colloq., 'daisy chains') as long as ten feet." When the men in white coats released thirty normal cats "used as controls," Starling's assistant soon discovered that the normal cats mimicked the behavior of the amygdalectomized cats. "In that moment originated," we read in the fictitious entry, "a discovery that has since radically altered the understanding of animal and human behavior: the existence-indeed, pervasiveness-of 'cultural para-stimuli'" (4). Starling's experiment shows that "a strong social or 'cultural' atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals" (4, emphasis added). Fourteen years later Professor Starling had become the "twentieth member of the Dupont faculty awarded the Nobel Prize" (4).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse by Eduardo Velásquez Copyright © 2007 by ISI Books. Excerpted by permission.
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