![]() ![]() This binary is ultimately too limited and excludes those faculties that make us most human, such as love, self-sacrifice, and the dogged, daily pursuit of the transcendent. On the other hand, many people see humans simply as an amalgamation of chemicals, a collection of appetites that simply need to be satisfied. On the one hand, she says many humans tend to treat themselves like they’re made to be “the perfect computer,” empirical processing centers encased in flesh and bone. “We’re either just heads or guts,” said Hooten Wilson, who serves as scholar in residence at the University of Dallas, characterizing this view that persists today. The two are, in a sense, opposites, but More notes that they often coexist within the same person, and both are ultimately a denial of the fullness of our soul-body composite selves. ![]() Tell-tale signs of this condition are what More identifies as angelism and bestialism - the former a tendency to engage in pure abstraction disconnected from one’s incarnate context and responsibilities, the latter a proclivity for engaging in “natural” things like food, drink and sex with no account for man’s rationality or transcendent end. More, a psychiatrist and a believing but non-practicing Catholic, diagnoses the scenario as “the soul of western man flying apart here and now,” a process kicked off by Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes, who 500 years ago “ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.” Lewis - who Hooten Wilson says Percy read extensively - would call “the chest.” society, but his comment applies to a different center as well: man’s center, the unity between body and soul, what C.S. Tom More provides an indication with his observation that “the center did not hold.” More is speaking of U.S. ![]() What’s to blame for these maladies? Percy’s character Dr. Even so, it is still a novel ultimately concerned with a theme that runs through nearly all of the existentialist Catholic author’s works: the individual person’s struggle for meaning, identity and integrity within an epoch that breeds dislocation, alienation and malaise. Love in the Ruins is one of Percy’s more “social” novels, satirizing elements of American life like sex, politics and religion at a societal level. Throw in the widespread neuroses of anxiety and rage, the dominance of the cult of scientism, and the zealous expansion of euthanasia, and the parallels between the America of the novel and the America of today are downright uncanny. Church hasn’t splintered into the American Catholic Church (who celebrate Property Rights Sunday and play The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation) and the Dutch schismatics (whose priests’ request to be allowed to marry was soon followed by a request to be allowed to divorce) with a small remnant of actual Roman Catholics, the alternative currents of nationalism and progressivism are wreaking havoc within its ranks. Republicans may not have rebranded themselves “Knotheads,” and the left might not yet have succeeded in removing “In God We Trust” from the penny nor in adding “Abortion Now” to their party name - but our politics have become hyperpolarized, with the extremes more potent than ever before.īlatant segregation isn’t as much a problem as it was five decades ago and an armed band of Bantus are unlikely to form a separatist state anytime soon - but racial tensions have ratcheted up, and talk of shifting the balance of power along racial lines dominates national discussion. While the details differ, the sociopolitical backdrop Percy paints - one in which “Americans have turned against each other” along political, racial and religious lines - should seem eerily familiar today, even though the book was published in 1971 and is set in the mid-1980s. For the contemporary reader, working through Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins is likely to induce something along the lines of déjà vu. ![]()
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