Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
Rick McGinnis
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
by Walker Percy
When the writer Walker Percy wrote to explain why he converted to Catholicism for the forward of a book about Catholic converts, he began by stating that “my tradition was scientific.” Born into a Presbyterian but essentially agnostic Southern family and trained as a medical doctor, he became curious about faith while listening to Monsignor Fulton Sheen on the radio and even wrote to Sheen asking about taking instruction with him but was told that traveling to New York City would be inconvenient for the writer, and to look closer to home.
Detailing his conversion in Walker Percy: A Life, his Jesuit biographer Patrick Samway notes that this was harder than one would imagine in the American south, and that the “one thing lacking was a Catholic environment congenial to those who were committed to the beliefs and tenets of the Catholic faith.” When Percy and his wife moved to New Orleans, they found themselves suddenly on a Catholic island in the middle of a Protestant sea.
Percy, recalling his conversion, said that “I thought science explained the cosmos – until one day I read what Kierkegaard said about Hegelianism, the science of his day: that Hegel explained everything in the universe except what it is to be an individual, to be born, to live, and to die.”
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He would tease at this idea in novels like The Moviegoer, The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, but he threw himself into the question with Lost in the Cosmos, a very curious nonfiction volume published in 1983. Subtitled “The Last Self-Help Book,” it was meant as a satire of the then-endless wave of prescriptive bestsellers capitalizing on the neurotic zeitgeist of post-1960s society, which began with I’m OK – You’re OK in 1969 and would include titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Passages, Looking Out for #1 and The Road Less Traveled.
Framed with chapter-length multiple choice quizzes full of hypothetical situations and even diagrams with titles like “The Immanent Self feeling somewhat Problematic and therefore staking everything on Interactions with other Selves and with the World,” the book begins by asking the reader to “Imagine that you are reading a book about the Cosmos.”
Because more than Gail Sheehy’s Passages, Percy’s book is an answer to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, another bestseller, published as a companion to Sagan’s hit 1980 PBS miniseries of the same name. But before he makes this plain, Percy plays with the “pick a persona” exercises that make up so much self-actualization pop psychology and diverts for several chapters into an exploration of semiotics.
For those of you who don’t know (or care), semiotics is the theoretical study or signs and symbols in human language and communication. It was divided by the dyadic model conceived by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the triadic one of American scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (of which Percy was a devotee). It became an academic craze for about a quarter century, starting in the ‘70s with intellectual “celebrities” like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida, before being subsumed by the sort of post-structural and postmodernist theory Percy would have abhorred. In any case it has subsided out of fashion and disinterested readers can comfortably skip these chapters of Lost in the Cosmos.
Percy gets more engaged when he takes on the (then-brewing) conflict between Neo-Darwinism and scientific creationism and the persistent longing to scientifically prove that chimps, whales, and dolphins are capable of language in the sense we understand it. He wonders if we’re so invested in this possibility because “man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself…Therefore he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk.”
He writes admiringly of Carl Sagan “ridiculing the absurd pseudosciences now so popular. He is admirable in his defense of science as a reliable and self-correcting method of attaining truth.” But he wonders at Sagan’s obsession with life on other planets and the quest to make contact with extraterrestrials. He wonders: “Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?”
Is it because “he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which…there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all.” Or because “chimpanzees don’t talk, dolphins don’t talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing from random noise from the Cosmos.”
Or is it because “once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere or immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.”
Percy ends the book with a sci fi fantasia, imagining some future Space Odyssey (his words) where the survivors of a generational space mission return to a devastated earth and have to choose a course moving forward, one a new age colonization of Io, Jupiter’s moon, the other a Catholic retreat to the caves of Tennessee.
Anticipating the story of Sagan’s own novel Contact – which wouldn’t be published for two years – he has both colonies receive a verifiable message from an extraterrestrial intelligence and asks us where we’d want to be when the message arrives: “Are you in trouble?” they ask the remnant of humanity. “Are you conscious? Do you have a self? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are doing? Do you love? Do you know how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.”
