Tom Wolfe and John Derbyshire

The Kalends of Saturnalia bring thoughts of weight-loss after binging on succulent holiday edibles of many varieties, especially the Greek pastries and meat dishes my wife provides in astounding profusion.

But now too is time to muse a bit on more permanent things, as one year glides into another, and no single writer excels the National Review's
John Derbyshire on bringing perspective into the squalid materialism that is the signature of this decade.

I happened on a National Review piece on Tom Wolfe's disturbing novel I am Charlotte Simmons wherein the heroine, in JD's words:

an innocent young girl from back country North Carolina who wins a place at an elite university, where she — or at any rate, her innocence — is destroyed as swiftly, coldly and thoroughly as a kitten that has wandered on to a busy six-lane expressway. In the last chapter of the novel, titled “The Ghost in the Machine,” we see a Charlotte who has finally lost touch with her soul, thereby becoming a well-integrated member of the elite culture. She loves Big Brother... who in this particular story is a dimwitted college athlete.

This will not be a review of Wolfe’s book (which, however, I enjoyed, and recommend to readers with strong stomachs for cold-eyed observations of modern depravity). It is only that the fate of poor Charlotte

reflects, as JD goes on, something modern that now is becoming a pervasive fact. JD's
article paraphrases Tom Wolfe further:

Studies of the social behavior of animals by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, whom Wolfe refers to ...as "Darwin II" [are paramount in his book]. The fictional university Charlotte attends is, amongst other things, a place where dominant males — fraternity bluebloods and star athletes — browse freely on the sexual favors of nubile females, as in a chimp colony. [Wolfe also stresses]Neuroscience. Charlotte Simmons herself takes a course in this subject, giving Wolfe the excuse to insert slabs of it into his novel. Our understanding of brain function has gone much further than most nonscientific people realize. Nowhere in that understanding is there any trace of a notion of the conscious self. According to Wolfe, practically no working neuroscientist believes that such a thing exists. The “I” that is the first word of Wolfe’s title may, science tells us, be an illusion; and the fate of his heroine suggests that this is indeed so.

JD says that at first glance, the new science may paradoxically support traditional conservative values:

Genes for human intelligence? “Sure, we have several nailed down, and more are showing up all the time. See here... and here...”

I have been interested in these aspects of the human sciences, in a dilettantish way — a Tom Wolfish way — for twelve or fifteen years. At first I welcomed these new understandings in biology, neuroscience, and genetics. They seemed to me to reinforce the conservative view of human nature, and refute the liberal view. Yes, men and women are fundamentally and immutably different. Yes, human races exist, and differ in ways other than the physically obvious. No, the human personality is not infinitely malleable, cannot be molded to perfection by social engineers shuffling environmental variables around. Yes, religious belief is a source of health and strength, both personal and social. (From the point of view of Mother Nature, sub specie Darwini if you like, success is reproduction; and the only really philoprogenitive groups of humans are the religious ones.)

However, the new discoveries have implications far beyond cultural and politics. The deeper abysses reveal a profound nothingness that resonates to something profoundly moral and beyond that:

Lately, however, and particularly after reading I am Charlotte Simmons, I have begun to worry about the darker side of these discoveries — about their dehumanizing, deconstructing effects. The neuroscience is especially troubling. The vulgar metaphysics we all carry round with us includes the vague idea of a self, an “I,” imagined as a little homunculus crouched inside our heads an inch or so behind the eyes, observing and directing all that goes on in our lives. It seems probable that this is as false as the medieval notion of the sky being a crystal sphere. Yet if the self is indeed an illusion, then what is to prevent that dissolution of all values foreseen by Nietzsche? In Charlotte Simmons’s world, a world without the self, what is virtue? What is wisdom? What is responsibility?

What, indeed, is beyond human values? Are we trapped in Sartre's Huit Clos?

Here, in a largish area of life and jurisprudence, the self has yielded to the organism, morality to biology. And this is the way the tide is running, fast and strong, in channels carved by science. Wolfe: "We now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is no appeal."

The end of his bleak prognosis may be a case of the wish being father to the thought, but here is his
elegant plea on our need for a new metaphysic:

We Americans are heading into a "crisis of foundations" of our own right now. Our judicial elites, with politicians and pundits close behind, are already at work deconstructing our most fundamental institutions — marriage, the family, religion, equality under law. The human sciences are showing human nature in a strange new light. Yet perhaps all this will matter as little in the daily lives of Americans a few decades from now as Russell’s paradox and G?del’s theorem matter to working mathematicians. Perhaps we shall come to our senses and stop trying to analyze and deconstruct our humanity down to the bitter end. Perhaps we shall realize that in order to get on properly with life, as with mathematics, a great many things just need to be taken for granted. What will our new metaphysic be? Perhaps the one that sustained Bertrand Russell’s grandmother: “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”

Or, in the words of George Santayana, a greater philosopher than Grandma Russell's grandson: "There is no God, and Mary is His Mother."