[percy-l] End of homo loquens? [New DVD extended cut! Buy now!]
Karey Perkins
kareyperkins at gmail.com
Tue Jun 30 11:40:16 EDT 2020
Hi Wade, sorry for my belated reply. It gets busy around here when they suddenly and unexpectedly give you two summer courses that you have to teach online.
I for one appreciate your extremely interesting, thoughtful, and in-depth posts. Many profound insights on the state of our world today and Percy as well. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
Keep ‘em coming!
Thanks immensely,
Karey
Karey Perkins, M.A., M.A.T., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
296A Turner Hall, South Carolina State University
Orangeburg, SC 29117
kperkin1 at scsu.edu <mailto:kperkin1 at scsu.edu> | 803-536-7016
www.scsu.edu <http://www.scsu.edu/>
Member, Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-0002
kareperk at ttu.edu <mailto:kareperk at ttu.edu> | http://www.pragmaticism.net <http://www.pragmaticism.net/>
> On Jun 22, 2020, at 11:49 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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