Pornosophy: When Camelot Was Occupied by Bonobos

It's hard to accept the concept that consciousness is just like breathing and that it’s not some superior attribute that separates man from animal. Yes Descartes famously stated, "cogito ergo sum," but he was a dualist. Though consciousness is still regarded as a mystery by some philosophers and neuroscientists, most accept it as a purely material process. "Disenchantment" was a word Max Weber used to to describe scientism replacing a belief in the ineffable and invisible. The phenomenon is roughly the equivalent of the kind of insult that occurred when Copernicus and Galileo put forth the then heretical supposition that the sun not the earth was the center of what we now know to be the solar system. When you regard consciousness simply to be another attribute of homo sapiens behavior and an extension of traits represented in species further down the food chain, it’s easy to understand why mankind has gotten itself in a fix. Humans think they're better than animals because they possess a highly developed language cortex, but they're really inhabiting the same territory as their country cousins in the animal kingdom. When you open up the newspaper and curse the dunderhead du jour for his or her latest pronunciamentos, you're simply suffering from a problem of expectations. There’s been no great decline, no worsening since the great Adamic fall. If you read Mimi Alfford's Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath, you'll hear how JFK watched as his White House intern gave a blow job to one his pals. Camelot, it turns out, was occupied by bonobos.