"Awe" Shucks: New Studies about which Emails Turn You On!

Musing disconsolately recently over the sudden dip in English Majors, I had multiple epiphanies!

It began with my astonishment at research microbiologist Patrick McGovern’s discoveries over at Penn’s Anthropology Museum. Take their discoveries at the recently discovered tumulus of King Midas. (Yes, that famous goldfingering galoot.) Now normally, tomb sleuths would carefully gather their dirty old finds and whisk them home and carefully clean them for scientific examination.

Not McGovern’s gang: they wanted to use their new high tech instruments to scrutinize “remains” of their royal partying! All of this accruing from their speculations that humans discovered “beer before bread”. Yes, I’m convinced by their careful calculations that mankind discovered the marvelous if sometimes confusing effects of intoxication by accidentally munching, say, figs that were converting their sugars into alcohol. Damn, some ancient forebear exclaimed, in ancient tongue. “Damn! This shit something! Pass me that flask!”

Baked bread came much later after they preserved, say, an accidentally composed gruel by baking it! Now if that doesn’t move you to up your annual gift to Penn, listen to what they’ve been doing at Wharton according to John Tierney in the New York Times, “Will you be E-Mailing this Column? It’s Awesome!” (February 8, 2010).

Penn researchers Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman have been birdogging the most emailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for six months to see which are most emailed!” People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they like to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.” Hmm.

It just so coincides with my recent readings. Now I’m a traditionally ignorant humanist about science: physics and chemistry in high school, 22 months in the Navy learning how to repair aviation electronics (which gave me a residual awe flawed by incompetent repairs!) followed by chemistry in university and several years of unearned humanist disdain at Science with a capital “S” (The C.P. Snow flap coincided with my dissertation years.)

Now I find myself suddenly totally awed by Times pieces on such esoterics as microbiologists that have discovered how certain tiny bugs survive Arctic winters: they devise what I can only call anti-freeze by shifting molecules as temperatures drop. (As Spring approaches, these marvels defreeze their “anti” molecules.

And then there’s the Bronx Zoo whose director is upset by dam building on an African river because it will wipe out a species that can only thrive in the microclimate waterfall spray has “devised” for this lucky creature. Dr. Bronx flies a crew over, collects 4500 of the microscopic toads (the adult takes up a U.S. dime, its live born pollywoggy offcrawl the tip of a pin!) flies them back to the Bronx and other participating zoos to devise artificial microclimates and plot the rediffusion of this dinky endangered species back to artificially livable environments in the partly Darkened Continent (absent these momentous minis.) It reminds me of Whitman’s line, “A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels” or Keats’ phrase “silent on a peak in Darien” on that astonishing first glimpse of the Pacific!

And speaking of “awe” I pick up my New Yorker and find E.O.Wilson’s “story” about a war between two ant colonies. Jesus, what those tiny bugs are up to simply wiped me out. Yes it’s that E.O.Wilson, emeritus 50 year stellar Harvard microbiologist. And this is a “teaser” of his first novel. Why not. Humanist novelists use their knowledge of people to devise narratives of their interactions. Wilson knows ants equally well and creates narratives out of his knowledge of their natures.

I couldn’t believe my imagination his ant war was so enthralling! Now what this got to do with my gloomily musing about the decline of the English major. Just this. In the decades (1982-2010) I relished my second career as a cultural reporter, my former English fraternity freaked out with the attempted assimilation of polysyllabic French and German philosophers who relished creating new kinds of thought. Ironically the Humanists were motivated by a hunger for the same kind of status that their peers in the natural sciences were pursuing, successfully.

Curious about this contradiction, I ordered on interlibrary loan three highly regarded volumes of this to me as yet unknown discourse, even though I was an undergraduate philosophy major, with one doctoral prelim on American philosophy. It’s gibberish. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Harvard, 2008) is technologically unreproducible! That he is the icon of this “deep” philosophy movement is an intellectual scandal.

He is even more obscure and rattled than his main follower, Marshall McLuhan. Marshall’s claim was that he found his first class of freshmen at Madison, Wisconsin an unintelligible mob after a youth in Winnipeg and a doctorate at Oxford. And his first book, “The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man” is an anthropologist’s handbook to first generation “Boobus Americanus”. It had to be intelligible, or he couldn’t have printed the pieces in that hard-pressed lay Catholic weekly, “Commonweal”. Later, financed by Ford in the quarterly “Encounter”, he became more and more unintelligible.

The title of Mark Bauerlein’s “Literary Criticism: An Autopsy”(Penn,1997) is a 157 page critical glossary. R.I.P. The book begins at a English faculty meeting where they can’t decide what kind of appointments to make. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Commonwealth” (Harvard, 2009) ties to formulate how concepts like poverty and hegemony must morph to make modern sense.

Words, words, words. Instead of sedulously identifying and teaching the innocent and ignorant what is most revealing in contemporary literature, they dream of being the next Foucault or Heidegger.

And you wonder why bright-eyed freshman would prefer the freshness of McGovern or E.O. Wilson to polysyllabic rants. The “awes” win it, easily.