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Sex in the Society (cont.)
By Steve Garber
Before he is done, Wolfe offers an almost-Schafferian apologetic, pushing the deconstructionist worldview that stands behind the “hooking up” world to the logic of its presuppositions. If there are no certainties about anything, if everything in life and the world has been “constructed” and is therefore to be “deconstructed,” then why not see our deepest longings for intimacy, to know and be known, to love and be loved, as mere “hooking up”? He writes,
“Oddly, when deconstructionists require appendectomies or bypass surgery or even a root canal job, they never deconstructed medical or dental ‘truth,’ but went along with whatever their board-certified, profit-oriented surgeons proclaimed as the last word.”
You say that you believe there are no “truths,” only perspectives and voices? Well, why not take that commitment with you to your doctor’s office and the operating room? to the way you relate to medicine? Are there truths and certainties in that realm, but not where you teach? Are these ideas you argue for, but don’t really live? Schaeffer would have been honored.
The second essay is an analysis of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience, a book by the noted Harvard biologist-philosopher which argues that, in the end, we are sophisticated machines. We are our DNA, nothing more, nothing less. Wilson is brilliant, a gifted scholar with a passion to explore the world and to understand it. An image-bearer of God he sees something of the truth of our existence, and does so with Harvard-class sophistication.
We are from the dust, and to the dust we shall return. We live in our bodies. Much of what we know of life is our material existence. And not a day passes when new discoveries of the mystery of DNA fail to bring forth awe from those with eyes to see. In my own state of Virginia two men were released today from decades of imprisonment because DNA testing proved beyond a doubt that they were falsely accused. We are our DNA, yes-- but we are also much more.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright-prisoner-politician, reflecting on the victim status and identity of the Czech people after decades of totalitarianism from the Nazis and the Soviets, wrote “The secret of man is the secret of his responsibility.” At the very core of our humanity is our ability to respond, our responsibility. Havel saw that as long as his people saw themselves as victims, they had no future. They were politically paralyzed, unable to act, unable to imagine a way forward, unable to organize for a more truthful and just society.
Havel argues that if we lose God in the modern world then we lose access, philosophically and politically, to four weighty words: meaning and purpose, accountability and responsibility. With uncanny insight he sees where the line-in-the-sand is for everyone everywhere.
As gifted artists with social and political concerns, Wolfe and Havel are “feeling” the contemporary worldview, and know that it has consequences; in different ways they both understand that ideas have legs. Wolfe takes his critique of Wilson back into the 19 th-century, and listens to Nietzsche comment on the world that came into being, bringing forth his announcement of the death of God, but also his insistence that his fellow atheists be honest and stop using the words “moral” and “meaning.” Nietzsche saw the price tag for a world without God, even as he welcomed it.
Wolfe’s argument is longer and more complex, but after walking through the growth in a DNA-shaped view of the world with very materialist assumptions at its heart, he observes “The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We’re all hardwired! That, and: Don’t blame me! I’m wired wrong!”
Reminiscent of Steve Turner’s brilliant poem, “Creed” Wolfe situates his analysis in tension with the parameters of the worldview formed and framed by the secular trinity of Marxfreudanddarwin. Rightly seeing them as the intellectual fathers of the modern world whose thinking has affected generations, Wolfe says,
“Meanwhile, the notion of the 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 of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away… slipping away….”
In the new world of neuroscience hailed by Wilson and critiqued by Wolfe, the social conditioning of Marx and Freud seem passé; but the evolution of Darwin’s vision seems ever-more important and intriguing. (Think here of the very hard lines being drawn over the intelligent design debate, with the secular elite voices that dominate the universities and the national papers and magazines so celebrative of the Darwinian hypothesis that Everything is a result of time working matter in the framework of chance; any other opinion is unworthy of “public” discussion.)
Hear Wolfe again, imaging a new Nietzsche bringing the news in 2010 or 2030, proclaiming “the greatest event of the new millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.’ Unless assurances of the Wilsons and the Dennetts and the Dawkinses also start rippling out, the madhouse that will ensue may make the phrase ‘the total eclipse of all values’ seem tame.”
From within his own paradigm, Nietzsche prophesied that a world without God would by the beginning of our century be one marked by “the total eclipse of all values.” It is with some irony that it was Nietzsche, after all, who argued for the word “values,” understanding that we would need a new word if we no longer had access to “morals” and “meaning.” He or she who has ears, let them hear. I think that Schaeffer would be honored here too, as Wolfe is “taking the roof off” of the Wilsonian view of human life—if we are only and evermore DNA.
To say it simply: I Am Charlotte Simmons is a story based upon a narrative vision of the worldviews criticized by Wolfe in these two essays. So the novel must be seen as a culturally-serious effort to understand our world. Yes, sometimes to lay it bare. And yes, sometimes to stick it in our collective face. But always to allow us to see and hear what the modern world feels like, for those who are living in its center.
One good friend, a mother of a first-year student at the University of Virginia, read the book in four days. She devoured it. Accomplished and aware, sophisticated and savvy, she was aghast at some of what she read—and she called her son. His response? “Mom! I’ve been sexiled four times already, and we’re only half way through the year.” For the uninitiated, “sexiled” means that one roommate asks another roommate to leave the room so that a “hookup” can happen. She looked at me, eyes full of wonder and care, and said, “And I know his roommate!”
Wolfe does not bring a coherent worldview himself to bear on his subject. From the best I can do with what I have read, and from one conversation with him, the closest he gets to a philosophical root that makes sense of the world is Stoicism. A Man in Full is the best literary expression of that. But while there are echoes of reality in that vision, it stops short of the Incarnation and has no eyes to see the meaning of a Trinitarian God who has revealed himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What it does see is the suffering and pain of the world, and that I honor. The Stoics take that seriously; where they miss the mark is seeing that it is possible to step into the messes and hurts and pains and wounds, and to hold onto them in imitation of Christ, for the sake of the kingdom.
I spent most of day with Wolfe a few years ago, and listened with great interest. Over lunch I told him that I almost always assigned his work in my classes, and that I had given a week of my life to A Man in Full, enjoying it all the way to the very… well, not quite. I didn’t really think the conclusion was right for the story he had told, and it disappointed me. He had shown Stoicism to be wanting at the critical point in the story; it was believed, but it could not address the need of the moment. The Schaefferian apologetic one more time—but surprisingly Wolfe was unwilling to bite the bullet in the end, and offered Stoicism as a true answer to our deepest hopes.
There he was across the table, white linen suit and carnation—Tom Wolfe as the man in full –and he looked back at me, finally saying, “I don’t finish my stories very well, do I?” It was an amazing moment. I have not read a Wolfe novel yet where he has, I Am Charlotte Simmons being the most recent. His story-telling stumbles, and rather than offering an Anna Karenina or a Kristen Lavransdatter he offers something that is less-than-satisfying, as his story fails to follow-through the logic of his own insight.
In his great work of cultural apologetics, Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy argues that “Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.” With uncommon brilliance and bravery in a secularizing, pluralizing world, he goes on to ask, “Have you read any good behaviorist novels lately?” And then right on through James Sire’s “universe next door.” Any good Buddhist novels lately? Any good Marxist novels lately? Any good Freudian novels lately? And with each question he sets forth why that would be hard, given the beliefs about the human condition at the heart of each worldview.
Percy finishes well, setting forth his own conviction that it is the Jewish and Christian view of life, with its understanding of human nature and history, that alone can produce a good novel, and that when novelists tell a good story with no apparent reference to that tradition, they are “living off of the fat,” as he puts it.
With that standard, Wolfe sees clearly, understanding that we live in a moral universe where real right and wrong exist—whether we believe in them or not, whether we want them or not –and that men and women who suppress that reality do so at their peril. ‘If a man debauches himself, believing this will bring him happiness, then he errs from ignorance, not knowing what true happiness is.’
For months this past year, the NY Times on-line had as their most prominent pop-up ad one for the film “Kinsey.” So while reading David Brooks I was always aware of the film too; two different universes, next door to each other, competing in the public square. Does the NY Times have a view of the world that it wants the rest of us to buy into? Yes, from beginning to end—and we should not be surprised.
I think that is why the secular, sexualizing world of the early 21 st-century has been sneeringly dismissive of Wolfe’s story. In the words of Jesus, it “hates the light” of the truth about the human condition that is woven through what is only a common grace account of life. Wolfe is not writing as a Christian, making a Christian argument.
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