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Rolling Stone’s 40th Anniversary: Talking With Tom Wolfe
Today we present The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test author and New Journalism forefather Tom Wolfe. One of the truly brilliant critical minds of the last half-century, Wolfe helped revolutionize the non-fiction genre. A frequent contributor to Rolling Stone over the years, Wolfe and his fictional novel The Bonfire of The Vanities enjoyed an exclusive serial run in the magazine. For our fortieth anniversary issue, Mark Binelli sits down with Wolfe to discuss the 1960s, his firsthand experience of the madness of Ken Kesey, witnessing the Apollo 17 launch and his thoughts on God.
Excerpt:
ROLLING STONE: You are lamenting the loss of God in our lives, but I don’t see in your writing any professions of belief. Are you a religious person?
TOM WOLFE: No, I’m not a believer. I was raised as a Presbyterian, and when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I just kind of wandered off…I never had this moment when I said there was no God.
ROLLING STONE: But as a non-believer, you still seem to be defending belief.
TOM WOLFE: Anyone who thinks that religion is bad for society is out of his mind. We are now beginning to see what happens when you don’t have it. People get depressed when they don’t have something to believe…This is my problem with the atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They’re saying that there is no ghost in the machine, that it’s all physical. And if it’s all physical, it’s going to obey certain laws. And the endpoint of the argument is that there is no free will, that you and I are machines that have had a certain genetic foundation, and as soon as we know enough about that, we’ll be able to predict what’ll happen when you meet me. We just need the information. That’s a very depressing thought.
