More on Science Fiction

As Nathan Gilmour says, I “really have a way of drawing the ire of scientists.” After this week’s podcast on Fantasy literature and Science Fiction, we received a very long and well-reasoned dissenting opinion from Beth Crompton, who’s probably our most faithful listener who is not married to one of the hosts. She has two problems with the episode, and since both of them seem to have been sparked by things I said, I’ll be responding to them here in this post.

Her first problem is that our discussion of science fiction is “too general,” a fact that I admitted to during the podcast itself and will reiterate here: I’ve not read a lot of science fiction, especially the hard genre stuff, and so what I know about the genre is going to be based heavily on the literature that has been picked up by the Academy as transcending its genre.

My entire knowledge of literary science fiction thus boils down to four novels by Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love, and The Number of the Beast), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (I’ve not seen Blade Runner, however), and a larger number of novels in the related “dystopian” genre, particularly Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, both of which I have taught in classroom settings. So any statement I make about science fiction is going to be rather limited, a fact which I will freely admit and perhaps should have stressed further on the podcast. I am not qualified to make broad statements about science fiction as a genre.

Beth’s bigger caveat with our discussion revolves around my final mini-lecture on the podcast, in which I talked about some points Percy makes in his excellent self-help parody Lost in the Cosmos. (It’s absolutely the best starting point for Percy, in my opinion—don’t just pick up The Moviegoer; it’ll bore you to tears.) We were running short on time, and since the podcast wasn’t on Percy, I didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about what else he says in that book. Since I have as much space as I want here and since his argument is important to Beth’s objections, I’ll do so now.

One thing Percy does in this book—the main thing for what we’re talking about—is to expand Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere, really to move it into the modern world. Kierkegaard, as you may know, says there are three “stages on life’s way”: the aesthetic, in which a person lives for himself and the moment; the ethical, in which he lives for an idea; and the religious, in which he lives for God. (It’s much more complicated than that, and Kierkegaard wrote at least three books elucidating the spheres.)

So Percy goes about trying to find out who in the modern world best represents the ethical sphere, and his conclusion is that it’s represented by two groups: artists and scientists. The former, however, collapses back into aestheticism too easily, whereas the latter remain firmly convicted of their ethical beliefs “Because science works better, this is the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age.” So scientists are the modern embodiment of the ethical sphere and thus feel most at home in the world.

So when Percy brings up Carl Sagan and asks why he’s so lonely, he’s looking for chinks in that armor. Beth claims that she is “sort of depressed by the assertion that scientists are any more particularly lonely and depressed than anyone else.” The addition of the word depressed changes the meaning of the assertion. If I used it in the podcast, I certainly did not mean to. Percy never claims Sagan is depressed—only that he is lonely, a different kettle of fish. He has a worldview that seems to explain everything, an ethos by which he can live his life—and yet he’s looking for more, against what he knows is all reason. David was right to mark this as a “religious itch”—from my own Christian existentialist perspective, the desire for aliens to come down and increase our knowledge, or fulfill us, or whatever else, is a misdirected version of the first section of Augustine’s Confessions, i.e., “our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.”

(Our introductory music this week was very nearly Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien” incidentally, which is a great musical version of this same notion. The poor narrator of the song is lost in a world where everything is tied up and longs for something outside the circuit to come in and break it.)

Beth points out quite rightly that “just because something is well-understood and categorized doesn't mean it's not still freaking cool” and that scientists often have a sense of wonder about the universe. This is very true. But I didn’t accuse scientific materialism of not having a sense of wonder about the universe (at least I don’t think I did—I have not gone back and listened to the podcast). I accused them of having a worldview that does not allow for mystery as the word is typically understood. It’s true that mystery and wonder are related things, and I could have this wrong, but I see no place for mystery in Enlightenment scientism and the materialism that has followed in its wake and floats around scientific discourse to this day.

She also says that “there's a lot more to science than classifying things, and also, it would be a strange categorization indeed that left out humans,” responding to my reference to Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, that he designed a system that explained everything, then stepped back and saw that he didn’t fit into it. Obviously science does more than classification, but it begins at classification, or at least classification takes place near the beginning of things—and when scientists can’t classify something (the unclassifiable is coterminous with the mysterious, of course), they are forced to leave it out, to leave it untouched.

(An example: in this Salon.com interview, a journalist asked Richard Dawkins what science can do about the why questions that science cannot answer. Dawkins, somewhat incredibly, actually claimed that such questions are just not worth asking. In other words, there’s no point in asking if there’s a meaning to life. Obviously not every scientist—not even every materialist scientist—is Richard Dawkins, but his attitude is instructive here.)

And while scientific systems may have a place for “humans,” I would argue that materialist science (a distinction which I am sure to make) has no place for the Self as understood by everything from Christian theology to Sartrean existentialism to 18th-century political thought. In my encounters with scientists (popular scientists, of course) who wish to deal with the concept of the Self, they either ignore it altogether (leave it out of their systems as something not worth talking about) or attempt to force it into a narrowly materialist worldview, as I heard Michael Shermer do just last week when he was talking about neuro-biology. The Self is a set of chemical reactions. Under such a schema, the scientist as a Self is left out of his own system in any meaningful way.

Beth helpfully gives me a list of science fiction that is life-affirming, which I appreciate and which I will try to read if I ever finish my comprehensive exams and dissertation (a dodge, yes, but at least I’m admitting it’s a dodge), but I do want to stress that I did not claim science fiction was depressing or nihilistic. In fact, when I brought up Carl Sagan’s loneliness, I said specifically that I was talking about sci-fi in its more optimistic strains. So the relative sadness of T.S. Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne vs. Neil Gaiman or Ursula LeGuin is not really relevant here. If anything, I’d argue that the realism I read is far more depressing than the sci-fi I’ve read—and of course there are materialists and non-materialists writing in both genres.

I do have to say one thing about depressing literature, however. Beth specifically calls out Hawthorne for his depressing approach to sin in The Scarlet Letter. (I respectfully disagree.) But she praises an R.A. Lafferty novel that I am not familiar with. Here is her description:

Sin in Lafferty's novels exists to be ridiculous. In The Annals of Klepsis, there is a woman who was exiled for committing the Unspeakable Sin, and she is badgered throughout the novel to reveal the nature of her sin, not so that she can be judged, but just because everyone is really curious about what it was. The most frustrating thing about the novel for the reader is not that this woman sinned and what this says about the treatment of women and society's lack of compassion, but that we never figure out what the Unspeakable Sin was either and we would really like to know, because it sounds fascinating.

I have two points here: (a) From my Christian point of view, making sin “ridiculous” rather than something very serious indeed is a grave misstep, and I’d much prefer a depressing novel that treated it seriously than an upbeat one that treated it as a joke; (b) the plot Beth describes parallels Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” to such a degree that I can only assume it’s an homage to him. So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that not everyone hates Hawthorne. [Insert smiley-faced emoticon.]

At any rate, I hope that clears up any misconceptions I may have given Beth or other listeners about my feelings on science and science fiction. I must again reiterate that I’ve got nothing against science. I just don’t trust materialism; I think it’s bankrupt as a worldview and is a complete failure at explaining the peculiar mystery of what it means to be a human being. Echoing Percy’s question about Carl Sagan’s loneliness was my way of suggesting that something deep inside the materialist is afraid of the same thing.

Thanks to Beth for writing such a long and thoughtful email. She clearly knows much more about science fiction than I do and has thought a lot about it. If you want to respond to anything you hear on The Christian Humanist Podcast, send us an email at thechristianhumanist@gmail.com.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Walker Percy, it’s strange to say, was brought to his strengths as a Catholic novelist by Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the 20th century’s most famous atheist. Confined to a sanitorium by tuberculosis, he made it his project to read through the literary and philosophical existentialists. After he was brought to theism by Kierkegaard, he came across Sartre, whom he loved. As biographer Jay Tolson explains, “Percy’s enthusiasm for Sartre may seem strange. After all, Sartre’s militant atheism could not have been more different from Percy’s convinced fideism. But Percy found the difference a tonic and a challenge” (238). He may have needed Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel to help him bring Sartre’s ideas into a Christian context, but Sartre is clearly a much bigger influence on him than most of his Kierkegaard-happy critics notice.

I didn’t notice it either until I started reading through Being and Nothingness with Nathan Gilmour. The whims of my reading list for my comprehensive exams have dictated that I read Percy’s Lancelot while still in the middle of Being and Nothingness, and the two books play off each other in ways I never noticed before. I’ve written about Lancelot before on this blog without really understanding what Lance’s quest for sin is really about; Sartre explains most everything.

This is, at its bottom, a novel about freedom and responsibility, about one’s relationship to one’s past self and about the lies one tells oneself in order to live comfortably in the present. In his old life, Lancelot was marked by bad faith. He instructs Percival to “Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.” It’s a sham; it’s pretending to be something he’s not; it’s attempting to force oneself into an objective role.

That’s the essence of bad faith for Sartre. In the most famous section of Being and Nothingness, he gives the example of the waiter who

applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

The problem with bad faith is that it is an attempt to treat oneself both as subject and object, as both being-for-itself and being-in-itself. This formulation is impossible for Sartre. His problem with God, in fact, is that He would need to be both being-for-itself and being-in-itself, an impossibility. So any act of bad faith—of self-deception as regards one’s freedom—is an attempt to be God.

The solution, one might imagine, is to be authentically oneself. Not so fast, says Sartre, and offers us another example. He gives us a closeted homosexual and his friend, who gets annoyed at his bad faith and demands “that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty, that the homosexual declare frankly—whether humbly or boastfully matters little—‘I am a paederast.’” The friend, too, is in bad faith, since he “demands of the guilty one that he constitute himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing.”

Attempts at “authentic” living are, in other words, yet another type of bad faith. Sartre acknowledges that to end the state of bad faith, one needs a “self-recovery we shall call authenticity” but immediately says that “the description of [it] has no place here.” To my knowledge he never presents such a solution. His view of the world becomes cynical—we’re all trapped in self-deceit (including, it seems, Sartre himself), and there’s no way out. Percy might present such a way, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

As the waiter plays at being a waiter, of course, Lance plays at being a liberal lawyer—he fits himself neatly into the role and does all the things he is expected to do in that role without questioning them. He’s broken out of this habit by his discovery of his wife’s infidelity; when he discovers that his daughter does not belong to him, he also discovers “my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first.” The reader knows the reason, however: It’s that his bad faith has been revealed to be a sham, and Lancelot realizes that he’s able to do anything he wishes.

The end result, however, is that he ends up literally imprisoned. I will direct you to my post about Karl Jaspers, Emerson, and Milton, where I finally solve the problem of religious existentialism once and for all. (Note my irony, please.) We see it again here. Lance improbably likes his imprisonment; he is “glad to be here.” Sartre would no doubt define this as a further manifestation of bad faith, but Percy has other ideas. The prison (or more probably the mental institution) is a submission to a higher power, and furthermore, it is voluntary; he says that “Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall.” Thus, his suspension of freedom is largely self-enforced.

And that, Percy seems to be saying, is what breaks us out of bad faith—it’s what allows us to move from potential freedom (which is, after all, the way most of us live—we’re free but we don’t really acknowledge it) to submission to a higher authority to genuine or actualized freedom, which is why Lancelot ends the novel out in the beautiful countryside of Virginia. But he needed to submit himself to the mental institution in order to do so.

If this schema sounds familiar, it’s because it basically conforms to Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence. The aesthete is free, although he acts for all the world as though he is not. The ethicist voluntarily submits himself to an ethical system. The religious personality is given true freedom once he takes the leap away from that ethical system. For Percy, as for Kierkegaard, the whole thing revolves around God; we see this when he reproduces the lyrics to Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee”:

Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing left to lose
Nothing ain’t worth nothing, Lord, but it’s free
Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues
Feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and Bobby McGee

Fans of Kristofferson will immediately notice that Percy adds two Lords to the lyrics, suggesting an added religious dimension to the song’s exploration of freedom. If freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose, then Lance receives his freedom by having his illusions shattered. His illusions were all he had to cling to.

The novel’s violence becomes clear now. Man’s humanity is bound up in his ability to do the wrong thing, i.e., his freedom. To put this in Sartrean terms, man, confronted with vertigo on the edge of the cliff, absolutely must be able to jump. This is why the modern world’s elimination of sin bothers Lance so much—if man cannot sin, if he cannot do something truly terrible, he is not a human being. So in order to become a human being again, to truly break out of his bad faith, he must kill the movie director and accidentally/on purpose set fire to his old life. It is in this way that he is confined to the mental institution that will eventually bring him genuine freedom.

Torn Curtain

I wrote my master’s thesis on the novels of Walker Percy and Frederick Buechner and tried desperately for months to find one of them commenting on the other one. Far as I can tell, Percy was completely unaware of Buechner’s existence, but I did manage to track down an interview with Buechner in which he spoke very unfavorably of Percy:

I must say he just leaves me literally cold. That’s just the right word for it. I don’t feel any excitement, any passion. It seems very cerebral and planned out and cold. I always feel that the characters sound like what I imagine Walker Percy would sound like. I have a hard time believing in them as real human beings.

Buechner actually understates it. Percy’s characters are for the most part a royal bore, and his own voice, evidenced in his nonfiction writing, is far more nuanced, elegant, and interesting. I’ve now read every word Percy has written (he’s probably the only author about whom I can reasonably be considered an expert), and I’ll shout it from the rooftops: He’s not a novelist. He’s a philosopher who wants to be a novelist. Of his seven novels, only two, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, have anything resembling an interesting or coherent plot; the rest are mere philosophical exercises.

Not that that’s a bad thing. At their best, Percy’s novels serve to inject his philosophy into more-or-less real-world applications, and taken on these terms, they’re pretty good. In some respects, they are more or less interchangeable—they all take some aspect of Kierkegaard’s “spheres of existence” and throw characters into them. They’re all about the sick condition of the modern world, and they all hint at the same solution for that condition. (It’s not for nothing that one of the worn-out descriptions of Percy as a philosopher is that of the dianostician.)

The problem with the modern world, for Percy, is that the human being has been completely split along Cartesian lines. On the one hand, you have a soul/mind; on the other, you have a body, and never the two shall meet. (Obviously, Percy is following his existentialist forbearers in this diagnosis; both Heidegger and Sartre describe Descartes’ sins along these lines.)

One of Percy’s main concerns in the split modern world is sex, an act which he variously portrays as splitting the self further and bringing it back together in a type of religious redemption. (This was the subject of my thesis, incidentally—if you’re interested, Buechner’s Lion Country portrays only the latter; virginity is atheism in that novel, and sex is redemption.) This concern with sex and alienation and wholeness might make you think of John Updike—by all means a reasonable connection, since Updike and Percy share similar religious views and have a similar mission in writing.

But Percy hated Updike as a theologian, as much as he might admire him in terms of sheer writing. Biographer Jay Tolson reports that Percy’s reaction to Updike’s controversial Couples was almost entirely negative, calling the novel muddled Kierkegaard and noting its treatment of “[sex] elevated to a kind of religion” (351).

Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that in The Last Gentleman Percy gives us a thinly veiled version of Updike in the novelist Mort Prince (the name, of course, suggests “prince of death” in French). Here’s one character’s description of his latest novel:

You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what thiis book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about ----ing. And in a sense it is! . . . But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deely religious . . . It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying . . . Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found. (Bowdlerization Percy’s)

That sounds like Updike to me. The Last Gentleman precedes Couples by two years, but this description could just as easily apply to 1961’s Rabbit, Run. Percy’s protagonist, Will Barrett, is confused by this description; he wonders, “What the devil does he mean telling me it’s about ----ing? Is ----ing a joking matter? Am I to understand that I am free to ---- his daughter? Or do we speak of ----ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of ----ing anyone in the vicinity?” Updike/Prince and his fans, then, are guilty of taking sex too seriously and simultaneously not seriously enough. It’s a type of religious rite, but at the same time it doesn’t mean anything.

Unsurprisingly, then, Percy compares Mort Prince multiple times to Descartes, suggesting that he is the product of the mind-body division that is the chief ill of the modern age. With the body split from the mind, we’re left with desire for carnal knowledge and desire for angelic knowledge—but no knowledge whatsoever of what it means to be human, between the extremes of the angelic and the bestial. That’s why Prince can see sex as simultaneously disconnected from the soul, that is, purely bodily, and as an attempt to reunite the soul and the body.

Will Barrett, however much he is offended by Mort Prince, tries to make the same connection when he sleeps with his asinine girlfriend, Kitty Vaught. (Kitty, I suspect, has the name she does because it suggests curiosity, Heidegger’s word for a sort of constantly moving stasis.) But you can’t have a real relationship with another person if your own identity is constantly in question, as it must be in a world split into mind and body. Thus, Will promises her that “I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible” (167). Of course, that’s not possible, and Will’s relationship with Kitty, like every sexual relationship in Updike’s novels, leads only to further alienation.

All of that said, I suspect Percy is slightly misreading Updike here. The latter’s reliance on sex (and his steadfast commitment to depict every nauseating detail of it) can mask the fact that sex almost always fails to produce the effect his characters would like for it to produce—that is, the reunion of soul to body. If anything, Percy has a more optimistic view of sex, as evidenced in the sequel to The Last Gentlemen, 1980’s The Second Coming.

Sherman McCoy Fulfills Lance Lamar's Quest

How odd that I decided to read The Bonfire of the Vanities, which has been languishing on my bookshelf for six months, directly after Lancelot. It seems fitting, since Wolfe, in his overblown and occasionally hamfisted way, wants to answer the question Percy asks.

Wolfe's characters live in the same amoral wasteland that Percy sets up in Lancelot; a combination of Rousseauian Romanticism ("You're good--it's society that corrupts you") and pop psychology ("It's not your fault--you were made this way") has created a world in which no one has any faults, let alone sins. For example, one of the book's protagonists, Sherman McCoy, gets caught in flagrante delicto by his wife and manages to successfully convince himself none of it is his fault:

It was in the air! It was a wave! Everywhere! Inescapable!...Sex!...There for the taking!...It walked down the street, as bold as you please!...It was splashed all over the shops! If you were a young man and halfway alive, what chance did you have?

By the end of the chapter, Sherman has convinced himself that his wife is a "bitch" and had it coming to her. Bad faith reigns, and we're responsible only for our successes--if, that is, we have any failures at all.

But Sherman's undebateable sin is not his adultery--after all, he slips right out of that one--but his complicity in a hit-and-run. As he and his mistress, Maria, are lost in the Bronx, his Mercedes stalls, and two young black men approach him and ask if he needs help. Without warning, he attacks them, and as he jumps back into the car, Maria gets it started and backs into one of the men, putting him into a coma. The pair speed away and decide not to say anything to the cops, not wanting their adultery to be discovered.

Sherman is a bonds trader at Pierce and pierce, a wealthy and successful man (he calls himself a "Master of the Universe" when he's not naming his erection "King Priapus") whose life and selfhood are subsumed by his work. No pangs of conscience are allowed through the gates of his 50th-floor fortress, not even when his wife discovers his adultery. But his role in this possible homicide makes it impossible for him to work; he can only think about the damage his sin may cause to his life and reputation.

Now, I realized that's not exactly redemption and is still full of the selfishness that characterizes the rest of his life, but this event has shocked him and made him aware of his own responsibility for what appears to be the first time ever. The old world is shattered, and perhaps he can build a new one. He even develops, as Lance Lamar suggests, as newfound need for God; one section closes with Sherman (who once considered praising his grade-school-age daughter for doubting the existence of God) begging the Almighty for assistance--financial assistance, sure, but assistance.

I'm only about 170 pages into this 700-page novel, though, so I'm sure all this is going to be complicated.

I am Deaf-Mute, Eye of a Statue

Lancelot is the only Walker Percy novel that I haven't read in the past couple years, and now that the vague rumblings of an idea for my dissertation have begun popping up in the back of my mind, I'm giving it another chance. It's simultaneously like and not like his other novels--there's a plot in there somewhere, but it's buried in a mental patient's mind, and like Notes from Underground (the novel Percy clearly wants us to think of when we read it), we shift rapidly from trust to skepticism when Lancelot Andrewes Lamar says something.

Language has always been important for Percy. At least half of his nonfiction essays deal with language in some form, building off of Charles Saunders Peirce and forcing linguistics into existentialism. In "The Delta Factor" (from The Message in the Bottle, his first anthology of non-fiction), he goes so far as to claim that language is what makes human beings human beings, and says that it's the key to understanding man in an age where we simultaneously believe we're the image of God and just another animal.

But here the most important things are ones that can't be vocalized. I'm reminded of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, in which our young aesthete, "A," declares the musical to be the erotic and the demonic (and of Melville's Pierre, which has a strikingly similar theme). But here, the unspeakable seems neither musical nor demonic. Lance connects it with innocence--his plan for a new society involves the girl in the room next to him in the insane asylum, who cannot speak but communicates vaguely through taps on the wall. (When Lance attempts to create a code to have an actual conversation, she can't follow it.)

But a new society is necessarily because of an unspeakable evil, the evil that Lance makes it his quest to find. He sets himself up as a knight-errant on an unholy quest, a "quest for evil," a quest to find "one sin, one pure act of malevolence." Doing so would shatter the complacency of the psychiatric age, in which "mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children." Lance finds himself surrounded by "good" people, people whose faults are either not faults at all or at least not their fault, and he's disgusted. Finding one pure, unspeakable sin would destroy the modern world and allow him and Anna to build a new and superior one.

In doing so, he modifies Kierkegaard--the musical-erotic-demonic is a stage (like Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere) that must be passed through in order to reach something better. I hated Lancelot when I first read it five years ago, but now that I've read the existentialists (and Percy's other novels), it makes perfect sense and has a strange and sinister beauty.

If No One's at Home Out There, Someone Else Has Got to Fill That Need

In a desperate attempt to get my students to think about heavy philosophical issues last semester, I assigned my Freshman Comp I class a brief excerpt from Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome. In it, Bob Comeaux admits to Dr. Tom More that his organization has placed a chemical into the water supply at and around Angola Prison, and that

One: The admissions to Angola for violent crime from the treatment area have declined seventy-two percent since Blue Boy began . . . Two: The incidence of murder, knifings, and homosexual rape in Angola, which is of course in the treatment area, has--declined--to--zero . . . We're treating cortical neurones by a water-soluble additive, just as we treated dental enamel by fluoride in the water fifty years ago--without the permission or knowledge of the treated . . . The hypothesis is that at least a segment of the human neocortex and of consciousness itself is not only an aberration of evolution but is also the scourge and curse of life on this earth, the source of wars, insanities, perversions--in short, those very pathologies which are peculiar to Homo sapiens.

More feels instinctually that there's something evil and sinister in Comeaux's plan, and while he cannot articulate a logical argument against it, he does his best to stop Blue Boy from getting into the water supply of the rest of New Orleans.

This puts him a step ahead of my children, not one of whom had any objection to a plan like Comeaux's. All of them would be perfectly fine with adding such a chemical to prison water supplies (after all, prisoners are sub-human anyway), and only a few of them had vague reservations about it hitting the populace at large.

I was horrified, of course, and so I decided to try again. This semester, my kids read Don DeLillo's White Noise, a major plot point of which is the distribution of a drug called Dylar, which will ostensibily allow mankind to overcome its fear of death:

It's not just a powerful tranquilizer. The drug specifically interacts with neurotransmitters in the brain that are related to the fear of death. Every emotion or sensation has its own neurotransmitters. Mr. Gray found fear of death and then went to work on finding the chemicals that would induce the brain to make its own inhibitors.

This proposition would perhaps not be so sinister if DeLillo hadn't already cued us to think that there's something about being human that makes us fear death. He speaks much earlier in the novel of "the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die." To remove our fear and knowledge of our mortality is to make us somehow less than human. To know you're going to die is to know you're alive and to realize that means something.

The students responded much more negatively to Dylar; only a few of them said they would take it, although they couldn't really explain why not. A bunch of them used the old chestnut that "awareness of death makes life more precious," but as the protagonist of White Noise says, How precious can thirty years of fear and anxiety be?

What interests me more is that, when I asked them what the difference was between Dylar and anti-anxiety-disorder medications, they said, "not a lot." I have students--perhaps not the majority, but a lot of them--who believe that it's wrong or weak or sinister to take mood-stabilizing drugs. I had to tiptoe gingerly around the issue to some extent; I felt strange outright asking if anyone took them. But a few students volunteered that information and talked openly about their experiences with Adderall and Prozac, the way they worked for them and the way they resented having to take them to be "normal."

In a way, I sympathize with the students who fear and distrust pharmopsychology. Over Christmas break, I read David Healy's Let Them Eat Prozac, a disturbing history of Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). The pharmaceutical industry, according to Healy, pushed these drugs even when it might not have been such a great idea, and even today most patients with mild depression are unaware that Prozac can increase their risk of suicide (in addition to completely flattening them out or sending them into what's called a "mixed episode," a combination of mania and depression that is, as far as I know, the most dangerous psychiatric state there is).

And then there's the issue of social phobia disorder, a supposed "mental illness" that Christopher Lane alleges was invented wholesale by the pharmapsychology industry in order to push medication. Shyness--a condition that's more or less benign and that's existed throughout human history--became illness. Have trouble stating my opinion in my class? Take this pill. Or, as Bill Mallonee, ever insightful, puts it,

When a need is nonexistent, you've got to create desire
Eastern Europe is the most likely buyer
They've been dying for it, crying for it, ever since the Wall
For syringes, porn, designer drugs, orgasms, and shopping malls

That lyric sounds like something both Percy and DeLillo could get behind, this conflation of soft science with consumerism and sexual misethics.

Meanwhile, This article claims that scientists are nowhere near understanding how the human brain works and that it's irresponsible at best to toss medication at an organ we don't understand. Psychiatry is a soft science masquerading as a hard one.

I've got a personal stake in this debate. A year and a half ago, I was diagnosed with cyclothymia, a "low-level" form of bipolar disorder. (I hesitate to use the term "low-level" because it's just as dangerous as full-scale bipolar--I just shift poles more quickly.) The suicide rate for unmedicated bipolar patients is one in three. My psychiatrist told me I was doing well not to have killed myself--and I complicated it.

The treatment I was given was Lamictal, an anti-seizure medication that somehow treats bipolar disorder--particularly that type of it that features depression more heavily than mania. Lamictal is not really comparable to SSRIs--it has few side effects. But there's something disturbing to me about the fact that I have a mental illness that psychiatrists cannot explain and that I take a medication that they also cannot explain. Like my students, I resent having to buy and take medication to get along in the world. My therapist told me to think of it like a diabetic who has to take insulin--the party line is that "chemical imbalance" stuff--but no one can tell me what chemical I naturally lack and need to have made up. I have by necessity an almost religious devotion to Lamictal, a blind faith in the pharmapsychology industry.

And yet I've been set free. I don't have depressive or manic episodes anymore, and I can function well in day-to-day life. My faith is rewarded, at least until that point in time when my body grows adjusted to Lamictal and I have to take another crapshoot to find another medication to make myself functional.

I'm afraid these are questions without easy answers; it's not as simple as my students want it to be (or as the pharmapsychology industry wants it to be, for that matter). I feel that in terms of psychiatry, we're still in the Dark Ages, applying leeches and mercury until we find something that we can explain. Doctors, as Hippocrates and Foucault suggest, are the new priesthood, and the rest of us are lighting tapers and dropping coins in the collection plate.