The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  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?

  What are the symptoms of the deprivation?

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  When the scientific component of the popular wisdom is dressed up in the attic finery of a Judeo-Christianity in which fewer and fewer people believe, and men try to understand themselves as organisms somehow endowed with mind and self and freedom and worth, one consequence is that these words are taken less and less seriously as the century wears on, and no one is even surprised at mid-century when more than fifty million people have been killed in Europe alone. In fact there is more talk than ever of the dignity of the individual.

  Do not imagine that what has occurred is a victory of science over religion. In the end science suffers too. As the pure research of the first half century, the revolutionary physics of Planck and Einstein, devolved into the technology of the second half, more and more youths turned their backs on both, the new science and the old God, and sought instead the fragile Utopias of the right place and the right person and the right emotion at the right time.

  What happens when these Utopias don’t work?

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  There is a secret about the scientific method which every scientist knows and takes as a matter of course, but which the layman does not know. The layman’s ignorance would not matter if it were not the case that the spirit of the age had been informed by the triumphant spirit of science. As it is, the layman’s ignorance can be fatal, not for the scientist but for the layman.

  The secret is this: Science cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals. The layman thinks that only science can utter the true word about anything, individuals included. But the layman is an individual. So science cannot say a single word to him or about him except as he resembles others. It comes to pass then that the denizen of a scientific-technological society finds himself in the strangest of predicaments: he lives in a cocoon of dead silence, in which no one can speak to him nor can he reply.

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  At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.

  It was not an accident that in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the high-water mark of the old modern age, when the world had been transformed by Western man and the scientific revolution to his own use and people lived peacefully in the ethical twilight of Christianity, man should begin to feel most homeless in the same world where he had expected to feel most at home.

  How can the Harvard behaviorist, living in the best of all scientific worlds, begin to understand the behavior of the Harvard undergraduate who comes from the best of all lay worlds, the affluent, informed, democratic, and ethical East (let the professor specify this world, make it as good as he chooses), who nevertheless turns his back on both worlds and prefers to live like Dostoevsky’s underground man?

  How can the Unitarian minister, good man that he is, who believes in all the good things of the old modern age, the ethics, the democratic values, the tolerance, the individual freedom, and all the rest—how can he begin to understand his son, who wants nothing so much as out, out from under this good man and good home and the good things professed there? It is of no moment what the son chooses instead—Hare Krishna, Process, revolution, or Zen; to him anything, anything, is better than this fagged-out ethical deadweight of five thousand years of Judeo-Christianity.

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  A theory of man must account for the alienation of man. A theory of organisms in environments cannot account for it, for in fact organisms in environments are not alienated.

  Judeo-Christianity did of course give an account of alienation, not as a peculiar evil of the twentieth century, but as the enduring symptom of man’s estrangement from God. Any cogent anthropology must address itself to both, to the possibility of the perennial estrangement of man as part of the human condition and to the undeniable fact of the cultural estrangement of Western man in the twentieth century.

  By the very cogent anthropolog
y of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment, by being “creative” or enjoying “meaningful relationships,” but as the journey of a wayfarer along life’s way. The experience of alienation was thus not a symptom of maladaptation (psychology) nor evidence of the absurdity of life (existentialism) nor an inevitable consequence of capitalism (Marx) nor the necessary dehumanization of technology (Ellul). Though the exacerbating influence of these forces was not denied, it was not to be forgotten that human alienation was first and last the homelessness of a man who is not in fact at home.

  The Judeo-Christian anthropology was cogent enough and flexible enough, too, to accommodate the several topical alienations of the twentieth century. The difficulty was that in order to accept this anthropology of alienation one had also to accept the notion of an aboriginal catastrophe or Fall, a stumbling block which to both the scientist and the humanist seems even more bizarre than a theology of God, the Jews, Christ, and the Church.

  So the scientists and humanists got rid of the Fall and reentered Eden, where scientists know like the angels, and laymen prosper in good environments, and ethical democracies progress through education. But in so doing they somehow deprived themselves of the means of understanding and averting the dread catastrophes which were to overtake Eden and of dealing with those perverse and ungrateful beneficiaries of science and ethics who preferred to eat lotus like the Laodiceans or roam the dark and violent world like Ishmael and Cain.

  Then Eden turned into the twentieth century.

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  The modern age began to come to an end when men discovered that they could no longer understand themselves by the theory professed by the age.

  After the end of the modern age, its anthropology was still professed for a while and the denizens of the age still believed that they believed it, but they felt otherwise and they could not understand their feelings. They were like men who live by reason during the day and at night dream bad dreams.

  The scientists and humanists were saying one thing, but the artists and poets were saying something else.

  The scientists were saying that by science man was learning more and more about himself as an organism and more and more about the world as an environment and that accordingly the environment could be changed and man made to feel more and more at home.

  The humanists were saying that through education and the application of the ethical principles of Christianity, man’s lot was certain to improve.

  But poets and artists and novelists were saying something else: that at a time when, according to the theory of the age, men should feel most at home they felt most homeless.

  Someone was wrong.

  In the very age when communication theory and technique reached its peak, poets and artists were saying that men were in fact isolated and no longer communicated with each other.

  In the very age when the largest number of people lived together in the cities, poets and artists were saying there was no longer a community.

  In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives, poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid.

  In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were lonely.

  Why were poets and artists saying these things?

  Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?

  Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings however which could not be understood by the spirit of the age?

  Nobody wants to hear about his unspeakable feelings. It is only when the feelings become speakable, that is, understandable by a new anthropology, that people can bear hearing about them.

  It was easy not to take poets and artists seriously because they often behaved badly, seemed to enjoy their suffering and, though they made fun of the spirit of the age, science, and technology, were as willing as the next man to enjoy its benefits. Has anyone ever heard of a poet who refused penicillin when he got a streptococcus?

  But most of all, the poets and artists who attacked the spirit of the age had nothing to offer in its stead. If the modern theory of man didn’t work, and they said it didn’t, what theory did?

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  The end of the age came when it dawned on man that he could not understand himself by the spirit of the age, which was informed by the spirit of abstraction, and that accordingly the spirit of the age could not address one single word to him as an individual self but could address him only as he resembled other selves.

  Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado, being able neither to speak for himself nor to be spoken to.

  A man is after all himself and no other, and not merely an example of a class of similar selves. If such a man is deprived of the means of being a self in a world made over by science for his use and enjoyment, he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible.

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  At the end of an age the theorists of the age will go to any length to stretch their theory to fit the events of the age in the name of science, even if it means that theory is stretched out of shape and is no longer scientific.

  What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history.

  The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle.

  Future ages will look back on the attempts to account for man’s perverse behavior in the twentieth century by the theory of the old modern age as one of the curiosities of the history of science.

  First, given the consensus wisdom of the time, it was to be expected of man, understood as an organism in an environment with a roster of “needs,” that as the scientific revolution succeeded in transforming the environment for man’s use and increasing man’s knowledge and as culture evolved according to rational democratic and ethical principles, man should himself progress toward peace and happiness.

  Next, when that did not happen, when men in fact seemed to prefer bad environments to good, a hurricane on Key Largo to an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in Short Hills, and even war to peace—war, the worst of all possible environments—the theorists of the age had only one recourse: to search for explanations either within the “organism” or within the “environment.” Accordingly, it did not strike anyone as peculiar when scientists sought an explanation for man’s perversity and upsidedownness in this or that atavism from man’s evolutionary past. Man blamed the beasts for his madness.

  Next, it seemed natural to look for the source of man’s “aggressive” behavior in the aggression and “territoriality” of more primitive species, for example, the male stickleback, or in this or that putative ancestor of man, even though no stickleback or any other creature but man has been observed to wage war against itself (suicide) or against its own kind (war).

  To the Martian, it seemed curious. If it was the case, as it appeared to be to him, that man exhibited two observable traits wherein he differed most clearly from the beasts, (1) that he had crossed the language barrier and spent most of his time symbol-mongering and (2) that man, alone among creatures, had a perverse penchant for upside-down feelings and behavior, feeling bad when he had expected to feel good, preferring war to peace, and in general being miserable at the time and in the place which he had every reason to expect to be the best
of all possible worlds, it seemed to the Martian that earth scientists might do well to search for the explanation of trait 2 in trait 1, or at least to explore the connection between the two.

  Instead he discovered that earth scientists were studying sticklebacks and male dominance in baboons and even hypothesizing a putative killer-ape, which perhaps had roamed the African prairies killing for pleasure and whose perverse behavior had somehow persisted in man.

  The United States government, he discovered, spent millions funding the study of chimpanzees and other primates, crowding them into cage ghettos or isolating them in cage hermitages in the full expectation of shedding light on man’s hatefulness and man’s loneliness. Hundreds of papers were written on such subjects as “Sibling Rivalry in a Gibbon Colony” or “Electrically Induced Anxiety in the Macaque.”

  Very good, said the Martian, the more knowledge the better. But why doesn’t the government spend a single dollar or you scientists write a single paper on such subjects as:

  “Suicide in San Francisco, or the End of the Frontier: Correlations between Point of Origin, Level of Education, Time of Arrival, and Number of Rotations between New York and San Francisco of 150 Suicides Who Jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,”

  or “Sadness in Suburbia: Psychiatric Profiles of Twenty-five Housewives before and after Reading Betty Friedan,”

  or “Scientific Transcendence and Sexual Imminence, or the Relationship of Lust to the Spirit of Abstraction: The Sexual Behavior of Twelve Scientists at Los Alamos in 1942–45, the Zenith of Transcendence of Twentieth-Century Physics Interrupted by Periodic Re-entry into the Organismic and Cultural Imminence of Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and New York; Sexual Intercourse as Prototype of Re-entry,”

  or “The Aesthetic Reversal of Depression on Commuter Trains: Before-and-After Muscle-Tension Studies on Ten Depressed Commuters Reading a Book about Depressed Commuters on a Train,”

  or “How Bad Is Bad News? A Survey of the Selective Predelicion of 250 New York City Subway Riders for News Stories Headlined ‘War,’ ‘Plane Crash,’ ‘Assassination,’ ‘Rape,’ ‘Murder,’ ‘Kidnapping,’”