E.O. Wilson's Trailhead

I found this "fiction” fascinating, but puzzled to see it characterized as narrative. I even Googled to see if there was another writer named E.O. Wilson. There isn’t! It was the complexity of this minuscule society that had me goggled.

I had also just finished reading about the Penn Museum’s Patrick McGovern who is a (What?) bio-molecular archaeologist! Using new high tech methods, he can tell you what the folks who buried King Midas drank at his burial many moons ago. He proves to my satisfaction, in addition, that brewing beer antedates baking bread in the human panorama. That in fact our ancestor first stumbled upon the exhilarating effects of alcohol, munching, say, on figs which were decomposing.

As a retired professor of English deep in the throes of determining why the English major is disappearing, I hypothesized that the adventurous spirits of E.O Wilson and Patrick McGovern recently got buried in a junk heap of nitwit lit crit theories that turned off potential English majors. What these nonhumanist scientists were wittily doing was redefining Humanism for our times. If I were 23 instead 83 once more, I’d follow the ants and delightedly investigate the prehistory of brewing.

Theirs is the New Humanism. As we bury J.D. Salinger, let us wonder at how he turned zillions of Teens inward for generations when the sciences should have engaged them in efforts to control the complexities of globalization.