Excerpts from Tom Wolfe

Before I take the book 'Hooking Up' (Picador 2000) by Tom Wolfe back to the library there are some little gems I must record here so I don't lose or forget them:
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'The term itself, "convergence" as used here in the digital age, was coined by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Another ardent Roman Catholic, Marshall McLuhan, broadcast the message throughout the intellectual world and gave the digital universe its first and most memorable name: "the global village". Thousands of dot-com dreamers are now busy amplifying the message without the faintest idea where it came from. p 68
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'Since so many theories of convergence were magical assumptions about the human mind in the digital age, notions that had no neuroscientific foundation whatsoever, I wondered what was going on in neuroscience that might bear uponn the subject. This quickly led me to...Edward O Wilson.

Wilson's life is a good argument for his thesis which is that among humans, no less than among racehorses, inbred traits will trump upbringing and environment every time." p 77

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"...Wilson compressed his theory into one sentence during an interview. Every human brain, he said, is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience, but as an "exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid." The negative might be developed well, or it might be developed poorly, but all you were going to get was what was on the negative at birth.

In one of the most remarkable displays of wounded Marxist chauvinism in American academic history...two of Wilson's well-known colleagues at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin, joined a group of radical activists called Science for the People to form what can only be called an 'Antiseptic Squad'.
pp 80-81
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As Freud once said "Many enemies, much honour".
p 81
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'Marx said social class determined a human being's destiny; Freud said it was the Oedipul drama within the family. Both were forces external to the newborn infant. Darwinists, Wilson foremost among them, turned that all upside down and proclaimed that the genes the infant was born with proclaimed its destiny.'
p82
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'The influence of genes was absolute. Free will among humans, no less than among ants, was an illusion. The "soul" and the "mind" were illusions too, and so was the very question of a "self."
p82
(Religions must have been arming themselves against this. Jude)
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'"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers' Party.'
pp 118-119
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'"Cultural genocide" was inspired, but in this entire opera bouffe of fascism racism and fascist-racist genocide, the truly high note was hit by one Susan Sonntag. In a 1967 article for Partisan Review entitled 'What's Happening to America', she wrote: "The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicate autonomous populations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesiser of the magnitude of Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee?

Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style...Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity...
p 120
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