The Human Beast by Tom Wolfe

heh ^ | 5 13 06 | Tom Wolfe

[dennisw]

[lesser_satan]

bump for later (when I have an hour or two to read all that)

[GOP Poet]

Ping for later!

[battlegearboat]

Very pithy.

[edweena]

Thanks for posting. Very interesting. He makes many insightful observations, and then sometimes he follows up with something that seems contradictory or unrelated. Is he checking to see if we're paying attention?

For example he cites Pope Urban II's successful exhortation to 12th century knights to start the Crusades as an example of clerical power, when in the paragraph directly above he said that when warriors didn't have a war they created artificial "wars" –tournaments. It seems to me that the knights were probably happy to find a real war to occupy them.

I really don't get this:
"In medical terms, Freud is now considered a quack. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this very moment, as we gather here in the Warner Theatre, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and hip-joint convulsions that are taking place at this very instant throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the power of the words of Sigmund Freud."

Is he saying that millions of people are engaging in sex only because Freud encouraged them to rather than explode with the pent up desire? You know, I bet that's not the first thing on their minds. But what a way with words!

[Dark Skies]

bump for later.

[BruceysMom]

What a great read! Thank you so much!
PJ

[bubman]

I am speechless!!

[Dumb_Ox]

A pleasure to read. I wasn't aware Wolfe thought that neuroscience is beginning to oppose neo-Darwinism. Is that a new development? I thought he was a big booster of evolutionary psychology in humans under the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

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.

[Getready]

Tom Wolfe is a great writer, with great insight into our
society. His ability to coin phrases and/or mangle our
current vernacular with incredible accurary is legendary.

His basic thesis that cultured humans strive for their
exaltation in their own "statussphere" is correct up to a
point. The striving will stop when people realize that the
statusphere is an illusion.This occurs when the "life"
these folks live is changed by positive entropic
effects (i.e. disease, physical degradation, and death).
Then the question of the meaning of existence and the future
of ones existing come into play. Saying that Jesus only
brought hope in this world was truly downplaying the
documents written about Christ. The documents about Christ
talk about his unearthly ways, and his domination of
death by his resurrection. The statussphere(if you will) to be obtained
is "living with the author of life" and not final
irreversible degradation.

[Sabatier]

The striving will stop when people realize that the
statusphere is an illusion.This occurs when the "life"
these folks live is changed by positive entropic
effects (i.e. disease, physical degradation, and death).

Positive entropic effects - that's a great way of putting it. It's true, people often don't get off the ego train until they are forced off by illness or loss of a loved one or some other major life event. And in modern times that awakening doesn't happen to many folks until at least middle age.

[operation clinton cleanup]

Thanks for posting. Interesting (long) read!

[razorback-bert]

I take Tom as saying Freud created what we call the "sexual revolution."

[nopardons]

bttt

[Tribune7]

"You and Me, Baby" by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals. / So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel"

IIRC, the video's theme was apes going to Paris to capture French people for exhibit.

[Dark Skies]

Thx for posting this dennis...

It was a long read and during the reading of it, I found myself (or at least my opinion of this article) evolving.

In the beginning I thought, "that Tom Wolfe sure can write...I wonder where he's going with this."

Sometime around the middle, I thought, "Tom sure has transformed a very complicated world into a much simpler one."

But by the end, I thought this article could be entitled, "Bart Simpson's History of the World."

If Tom wants to evolve, I suggest he leave his multi-million dollar co-op on Park Ave by way of the internet...and start FReeping. His article would be much meatier if he had subjected himself to the intellectual colosseum at Free Republic.com. It is obvious that he is gifted but just as obvious that he is not bringing his ideas down to street level...down to Freep Street.

[Revolting cat!]

Great essay!