Walker Percy on Scott Adams on Donald Trump

A good friend recently steered me to Scott Adams's blog, where I found the creator of Dilbert has assembled a frustratingly persuasive account of Donald Trump's rise. Go check it out.(See, for example, Adams's take on Trump's loathsome "Ban All Muslims" proposal.)

If you are persuaded by the claim that Trump is master persuader, make sure to ask yourself how much of that may be due to Adams's own persuasion techniques.

For the intersection with Catholic legal theory, consider what Adams's account of Trump rests upon and tells us about anthropology, in the sense of what kind of beings we are as human beings.

There are strong affinities, it seems to me, with the account offered by Walker Percy in his lecture/essay "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" In brief, Percy thinks we are best understood as "symbol-mongerers":

[O]nce man has crossed the threshold of language and the use of other symbols, he literally lives in a new and different world. If a Martian were to visit earth, I think the main thing he would notice about earthlings is that they spend most of their time in one kind of symbolic transaction or other, talking or listening, gossiping, reading books, writing books, making reports, listening to lecturers, delivering lectures, telling jokes, looking at paintings, watching TV, going to movies. Even at night, asleep, his mind is busy with dreams, which are, of course, a very tissue of symbols.

So sweepingly has his very life and his world been transformed by his discovery of symbols that it seems more accurate to call man not Homo sapiens--because man's folly is at least as characteristic as his wisdom--but Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-mongerer, or Homo loquens, man the talker. To paraphrase William Faulkner: Even if the world should come to an end and there are only two survivors, what do you think they would be doing most of the time? Talking, talking about what happened and what they plan to do about it.

Assuming, then, that this is the case, that man is truly a different kind of creature, something new under the sun, a symbol-mongerer, does that bring us any closer to the beginnings of a minimal theory of man; that is to say, a model of man which would do justice to his uniqueness while at the same time giving a coherent account of his place in the hierarchy of creatures, an account, in other words, which might be acceptable both to behavioral scientists and to theologian?

Percy answers yes, and explains himself in a Peircean way, but you'll have to read the essay yourself to get the full story. 

A quick search did not reveal an open-source version to link, but J.D. Bentley's Bourbon & Tradition offers a taste. The full essay is included in Signposts in a Strange Land (edited by Patrick Samway, S.J.). 

For a later Percy lecture developing his Peircean ideas further, check out "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind," also available on video from C-SPAN.