Walker Percy: The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

Start with B. F. Skinner and man decreed as organism who learns everything he does by operant conditioning and you’ve lost every reader who knows there is more to it than that and that Skinner has explained nothing. Skinner explains everything about man except what makes him human, for example, language and his refusal to behave like an organism in an environment.

I take it as going without saying that current theories of man are incoherent. There does not presently exist, that is to say, a consensus view of man such as existed, for instance, in thirteenth-century Europe or seventeenth-century New England, or even in some rural communities in Georgia today. Prescinding from whether such a view is true or false, we are able to say that it was a viable belief in the sense that it animated the culture and gave life its meaning. It was something men lived by, even when they fell short of it and saw themselves as sinners. It was the belief that man was created in the image of God with an immortal soul, that he occupied a place in nature somewhere between the beasts and the angels, that he suffered an aboriginal catastrophe, the Fall, in consequence of which he lost his way and, unlike the beasts, became capable of sin and thereafter became a pilgrim or seeker of his own salvation, and that the clue and sign of his salvation was to be found not in science or philosophy but in news of an actual historical event involving a people, a person, and an institution.

I am not suggesting that there are not believing Christians today for whom this view of man or some variant of it is still viable. What I do suggest is that if one attempts to state a kind of consensus view of man in the present age, the conventional wisdom of the great majority of the denizens of a democratic technological society in the late twentieth century, this Judeo-Christian credo is no longer a significant component.

What has survived and is significant in the culture are certain less precise legacies of this credo: the “sacredness of the individual,” “God is love,” the “Prince of Peace,” “the truth shall make you free,” etc. Almost everyone is in favor of love, truth, peace, freedom, and the sacredness of the individual, since, for one thing, these prescriptions are open to almost any reading.

What does exist is a kind of mishmash view of man, a slap-up model put together of disparate bits and pieces. The other major component of the conventional wisdom, along with the ethical legacy of Christianity, is what the layman takes to be the consensus of science — whose credentials after all are far more impressive than those of Judeo-Christianity — that, myths aside and however admirable ethics may be, man is an organism among other organisms.

One sign that the world has ended, the world we knew, the world by which we understood ourselves, an age which began some three hundred years ago with the scientific revolution, is the dawn of the discovery that its world view no longer works and we find ourselves without the means of understanding ourselves.

There is a lag between the end of an age and the discovery of the end. The denizens of such a time are like the cartoon cat that runs off a cliff and for a while is suspended, still running, in midair but sooner or later looks down and sees there is nothing under him.

My growing conviction over the years has been that man’s theory about himself doesn’t work any more, not because one or another component is not true, but because its parts are incoherent and go off in different directions like Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu.

Those who don’t take this matter seriously forfeit the means of understanding themselves. Many people in fact are quite content to live out their lives as the organisms and consumer units their scientists understand them to be; to satisfy their needs, even “higher” needs, according to the prescription of those who profess to understand such things.

Those who do take it seriously find themselves involved in certain characteristic dilemmas and predicaments all too familiar to the denizens of the late twentieth century. One tires of the good life and the best of all possible worlds one has designed for oneself. One feels anxious without knowing why. One is at home yet feels homeless. One loves bad news and secretly longs for still another of the catastrophes for which the century has become notorious.

It is an inevitable consequence of an incoherent theory that its adherents in one sense profess it — what else can they profess? — yet in another sense feel themselves curiously suspended, footing lost and having no purchase for taking action. Attempts to move issue in paradoxical countermovements. As time goes on, one’s professed view has less and less to do with what one feels, how one acts and understands oneself.

If asked to define the conventional wisdom of the twentieth century, that is to say, a kind of low common denominator of belief held more or less unconsciously by most denizens of the century, I would think it not unreasonable to state it in two propositions which represent its two major components, the one deriving from the profound impact of the scientific revolution, the other representing a kind of attenuated legacy of Christianity.

(1) Man can be understood as an organism in an environment, a sociological unit, an encultured creature, a psychological dynamism endowed genetically like other organisms with needs and drives, who through evolution has developed strategies for learning and surviving by means of certain adaptive transactions with the environment.

(2) Man is also understood to be somehow endowed with certain other unique properties which he does not share with other organisms — with certain inalienable rights, reason, freedom, and an intrinsic dignity — and as a consequence the highest value to which a democratic society can be committed is the respect of the sacredness and worth of the individual.

I make the assumption that most educated denizens of the Western world would subscribe in some sense or other to both propositions.

I make the second assumption that the conventional wisdom expressed by these two propositions, taken together, is radically incoherent and cannot be seriously professed without even more serious consequences.

How does a man go about living his life if he takes both propositions seriously? He sees himself as an organism highly evolved enough to have developed certain “values.” But what he doesn’t realize is that as soon as he looks upon his own individuality and freedom as “values,” a certain devaluation sets in.

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There is an astronomer who works at night on Mount Palomar, observing, recording, hypothesizing, writing equations, predicting, searching the skies, confirming, writing papers for other astronomers. During the day he comes down into town to satisfy his needs as organism and culture member, eats, sleeps, enjoys his wife and family and home, plays golf, and participates in other cultural and recreational activities.

He is one of the more fortunate denizens of the age because he functions well as both angel (scientist-knower) and beast (culture organism). But the question is, what manner of creature is he? Draw me a picture of Dr. Jekyll and a benign Mr. Hyde inhabiting the same skin.

Yet he is one of the lucky ones. It is his century and he is one of its princes. His is the best of both worlds: He theorizes and satisfies his needs. He is like one of the old gods who lived above the earth but took their pleasure from the maids of the earth.

But what about the villagers? What happens to a man when he has to live his life in the twentieth century deprived of the sovereignty and lordship of science and art? What is it like to be a layman and a consumer? Does this consumer, the richest in history, suffer a kind of deprivation?