Sex, determinism, and Charlotte Simmons

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:

I saw you mentioned Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons [here and here] in relation to the Duke “sex thesis.” I actually think this is now an underrated Wolfe book. He is treating the insights of socio-biology and genetics as an intellectual revolution nearly complete—see his former essay “Look Your Soul Just Died.” I think it is an excellent work that tries to retrieve free-will in an environment, college, where taboos have been so reversed that we are left with our uncivilized impulses for status, sex, and power and little else. I find the novel disturbing and I say this as someone who, theologically, is as strongly predestinarian as a Papist can safely get.

Carol Iannone replies:

Yes, that’s the meaning of the title, I am an individual person, not a collection of driven genes. I make choices that hurt or help, and so on.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2010 10:32 AM | Send