The Human Beast by Tom Wolfe

heh ^ | 5 13 06 | Tom Wolfe

[Dark Skies]

His depiction of language as a qualitative leap is foreshadowed in the semiotic works of Walker Percy, also a novelist but a doctor as well.

But Walker Percy had heart, something that I find slightly absent in Tom Wolfe. I had a mutual friend with Percy and when my friend mention to Walker how fond I was of his works and what I thought of each of his novels, Percy sent me a copy of The Moviegoer with a carefully written personal note (as pertained to my comments) and autographed appropriately.

I have a pic of Percy hanging in my office. I like Wolfe, but I don't think his pic would inspire.

[Tom D.]

Wow. Wolfe is similar to Steyn, except that he goes into more detail and he goes deeper.

[cornelis]

A pleasure to read.

It was. Does he fall short of addressing the crucial point? These questions surrounding language are first taken up by Plato, especially in the Cratylus and the Phaedrus. In these dialogues, there is no ambivalence about the Socratic position. Never mind whether the conventional, natural, or solipsistic potencies of language are ever seen among lesser beasts. What Socrates found disturbing was the all-too-human presumption that the potencies of language gave license to pronounce the race divine. No doubt beastly are those who will not see what is at the heart of sophism.

In the Phaedrus, toward the end, we are told how to tell the difference between the words of an honest person and a sophist; that is, how to tell the difference between good and bad language. He says,

TYPE A:

If Lysias or anyone else ever wrote or ever shall write, in private, or in public as lawgiver, a political document, and in writing it believes that it possesses great certainty and clearness, then it is a disgrace to the writer, whether anyone says so, or not. For whether one be awake or asleep, ignorance of right and wrong and good and bad is in truth inevitably a disgrace, even if the whole mob applaud it.

TYPE B:

But the man who thinks that in writing there is necessarily much that is a game, and that there is no written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, that deserves to be treated so seriously, but in truth, thinks that the best of these [writings] serve as an aid to memory and who thinks that only in words about justice and beauty and goodness spoken by teachers for the sake of instruction and really written in a soul is clearness and perfection and of serious value, that such words should be considered the speaker's own legitimate offspring, first the word within himself, if it be found there, and secondly its descendants or brothers which may have sprung up in worthy manner in the souls of others, and who pays no attention to the other words,--that man, Phaedrus, is likely to be such as you and I might pray that we ourselves may become. . . If [anyonone] has composed his writings with knowledge of the truth, and is able to support them by discussion of that which he has written, and has the power to show by his own speech that the written words are of little worth, such a man ought not to derive his title from such writings, but from the serious pursuit which underlies them.

That last makes one think twice about the how precise one can really be in quoting John 1:1 and leaving out the fact that the Word John is talking about became flesh.

[Dark Skies]

Tom Wolfe is on Book TV (C-Span) at this moment.

I stand firmly behind the thought that his work would take a great step forward by his becoming a regular FReeper.

A writer's work becomes stale without attack...and FR if full of attack.

This is the new paradigm.

Writers in isolation...that is part of the old paradigm.

[DaveTesla]

Capturing control over language, especially the language
of morality, opens the doors to psychological control of
the masses.

"Most people will reject ideas and
institutions if they become convinced of their basic
immorality; most people, too, lack the kind of training
that will equip them to untangle the thicket of logical
fallacies that might be involved," writes Yates.

Having assumed control of the language of morality,
especially in institutions such as the media and academia,
the way is now clear for the Gramscian transformation of
society.

Yates points out that political correctness is the primary
weapon in the war against those values. Academic schools
of radical feminism, "critical race theory," gay and
lesbian "queer theory," the preoccupation with "diversity"
as an end in itself and all other forms of PC are direct
descendent's of Gramsci - they are the chief arm of
enforcement of the Gramscian transformation of American
society.

For all the attacks on the culture and beliefs of the GOD
of Abraham the end result is that the power hungry wish
to replace the church and GOD with themselves.
Of these things GOD gives us free will.....

The Marxist dictators / gods (Little g) will NOT.

[nothingnew]

Tom Wolfe didn't like paragraphs much, did he?

FMCDH(BITS)

[BlazingArizona]

Wow. Wolfe is similar to Steyn, except that he goes into more detail and he goes deeper.

An odd hypothesis, neo-Lamarckian, which is sure to be controversial.

The characterization of our species as Homo loquax, Talking Man, is an interesting one too. Now we have become Homo nokia, Man Who Won't Shut Up.

[BunnySlippers]

[DaveTesla]

Homo loquacious.....

[Revolting cat!]

FR is full of attack. True. It's full of one sentence sniping, pedestrianism, conventional wisdom (that's J.K. Galbraith's phrase, amazingly enough.) Tom Wolfe would be driven to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if he read the Da Vinci Code threads. No, FR is a laboratory illustrating some of Tom Wolfe's points in the essay.

The old paradigm is thinkers debating ideas on the pages of well read journals and magazines. The new paradigm is idiots writing letters to the editor which then get printed by idiots with J-school education. Sorry to be so harsh, but having witnessed the recent debates here on historical ideas (Da Vinci Code again) I just don't see it.

[Dark Skies]

FR is full of attack. True. It's full of one sentence sniping, pedestrianism, conventional wisdom (that's J.K. Galbraith's phrase, amazingly enough.) Tom Wolfe would be driven to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if he read the Da Vinci Code threads. No, FR is a laboratory illustrating some of Tom Wolfe's points in the essay.

The old paradigm is thinkers debating ideas on the pages of well read journals and magazines. The new paradigm is idiots writing letters to the editor which then get printed by idiots with J-school education. Sorry to be so harsh, but having witnessed the recent debates here on historical ideas (Da Vinci Code again) I just don't see it.

I probably haven't thought long enough before responding to your post, but I must defy the convention and at least applaud your courage...you are one of the leaders of the unconventional opinion. There is no doubt that the lack of accountability makes for a rude venue...but the cream of ideas and dialogue still rise to the top. And the trash sinks to the bottom of the heap.

The debates are certainly insane here. It is a raw journal of the jungle of ideas.

But as disgusting as it is...it is the "cinema verite" of our time.

Can it be so bad? Genius mets idiocy...and is humiliated...but still alive!

FR is the Hyde Park Corner of the electric world. Freedom of speech has never had such immediate power.

Don't give up! You are one of the reasons that reason will defeat insanity.

Here the pain is felt in the ego. Courage and wisdom is always greater than ego...when ego is dead, they will remain.

IMHO

Sorry for such a silly response but I am watching "Braveheart" on TV and it always makes me voluble and, well, Scottish.

[Revolting cat!]

No, no, not a silly response (and I've downed a few myself this evening.) I'm just a bit depressed over those Da Vinci Code threads and the responses I read on the WSJ site (opinionjournal.com) to a great Tom Wolfe interview published 2-3 weeks ago on a Saturday (I'm not sure if it's still there, but it's worth looking up.)

One of the great quotes from that interview, which I'm paraphrasing here, was Wolfe quoting Hegel, I think, saying that "one can't rise above the moral tone of the times." That one had me thinking for the following week, and then someone, who also read the interview used it as an excuse for their (I don't want to say "her" or "his, so let it be the ungrammatical "their") nasty behaviour. But one must try anyway, and Wolfe certainly does. This carries a price, needless to say, you are a snob and elitist, and get depressed seeing yourself surrounded by consumers of trash, with whom you're unable to communicate. ("Oh, it lonely at the top", sang Randy Newman.)

As for Tom Wolfe lacking heart, I agree, but that's what we have to settle for on this side of the intellectual spectrum. It occured to me that Wolfe was in a way forced into writing fiction, since his New Journalism non-fiction didn't take off, or rather, was hijacked by the likes of Hunter Thompson with their agendas and ideologies. Wolfe was, when he and Terry Southern invented New Journalism back in the early 60s, a participating observer, a heartless sceptic, if you will, a classic journalist with no agenda whatsoever. I used to know one like him, no new journalist, older than Wolfe, well known in his time, drank himself to death.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn't have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States. And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation.

Bush/Rove are nuts if they think amnesty will create a republican majority among hispanics.

Hispanics will prove quite receptive to the poisonous racist demagoguery that is the special gift of the democRat party. Republicans will never get more than 35-40% of that vote at best.

[cornelis]

one can't rise above the moral tone of the times

He was pushing this idea in his speech at Duke (on BookTV). What is it supposed to mean? If it means "you can't be human without living in a body" that's a rather mundane observance. Perhaps Hegel and Wolfe are trying to be profound about a world where exits are useless.

[Dark Skies]

Great response...too much input. Will spend tomorrow trying to respond.

Your electric friend (not imaginary, just electric)...

DS

[Revolting cat!]

What does it mean? It means, as I interpret it, and as my acquaintance I referred to earlier did, that you can't help but in one way or another participate in the trends and fashions of the day and act out the ideologies of the day. You can't escape it, and even if you choose to escape to Nepal and become a Buddhist monk, as Jean-François Revel's scientist son did, well, you're are still following a trend. While it's possible, nobody wants to be an outsider.

[DCPatriot]

BBBT!

[Revolting cat!]

OK, well, let's keep this thread going, but you see, it ain't easy (and my rule is to stay under 10% of thread posts, but I do break it occasionally.)

[cornelis]

Well, does it means that if I have to use English to disagree with it, critique it, does that doom me? I'm not sure how this found its way to your admiration. Are we supposed to dislike the fact that we live in time?

[Revolting cat!]

Are we supposed to dislike the fact that we live in time?

Perhaps. If we don't like the time we live in, then yes. Otherwise, it means to be aware of it. And mostly we aren't. Example: the racial obsession in this country. I don't know about you, but I refuse to participate in it, and have on these pages actively mocked it. Paul Weyrich, I think it was, once called on the Christians in America to totally withdraw from the dominant culture.

(I don't quite get your reference to using English. It doesn't get as fundamental as the language we use to communicate.)