Lost in the Cosmos

an impoverishment, due at least in part to a loss of respect for human life as evidenced not only by the acceptance of abortion but by mounting child abuse, euthanasia, and indifference to human suffering. Recent studies have shown, however, that Westerners, that is, Europeans and Americans, own more pets than ever and spend more money on pet food and veterinarians than the food costs of the entire Third World.
    (c) There is such a sadness and impoverishment because in an affluent society, where there is a surfeit of goods and services, there is a corresponding devaluation. Whereas the poor peoples of the Third World, despite or because of their material deprivation, appreciate the simple things in life. Small is beautiful, the best things in life are free, etc.
    (d) Because the poor in heart are blessed, i.e., receptive to the Gospel, whereas the rich may gain the whole world but lose their souls.
    (e) Because Western society is an ethic of power and manipulation and self-aggrandizement at the expense of the values of community, love, innocence, simplicity, values encountered both in childhood and in non-aggressive societies (e.g., the Eskimo). As Ashley Montagu says, adulthood in the Western world is a deteriorated and impoverished childhood.
    (f) Because Western society is itself a wasteland, its values decayed, its community fragmented, its morals corrupted, its cities in ruins. In the face of the deracination of Western culture, all talk of self-enrichment through this or that psychological technique is cosmetic, like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. The Moral Majority is right. The only thing that can save us is a return to old-time religion, a revival of Christian Fundamentalism.
    (g) None of the above. All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only are unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring—no small contributor indeed to the dreariness of Western society in general. The so-called détentes and reconciliations between “Science” and “Religion” are even more boring. What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will? The traditional scientific model of man is clearly inadequate, for a man can go to heroic lengths to identify and satisfy his needs and end by being more miserable than a Calcuttan. As for the present religious view of man, it begs its own question, the question of God’s existence, which means that it is not only useless to the unbeliever but dispiriting. The latter is more depressed than ever at hearing the goods news of Christianity. From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.
    Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.
    Thought Experiment: If Mother Teresa is right and there exists in modern technological societies a paradoxical impoverishment in the midst of plenty, in the face of what is by traditional objective scientific criteria the most extensive effort in all of history to identify and satisfy man’s biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural needs, consider a different model. Consider a more radical model than the conventional psycho-biological model, a semiotic model which allows one to explore the self in its nature and origins and to discover criteria for its impoverishment and wealth.
    The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical—i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical—what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough—and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry, i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

A Semiotic * Primer of the Self
    A Short