Books: Whiff into the Midnight

AN ESSAY ON MORALS (204 pp.) — Philip Wylie—Rinehart ($2.50).

Philip Wylie makes a good living out of his writing, and spends most of the year in Florida. But from reading his stuff, you would think he lived in a Grub Street attic, with specially trained vultures tearing at his liver.

This studiedly angry study in moral philosophy is charged with the same sophomoric ferocity as his best-selling Generation of Vipers was. But this time Wylie has some leaflets to scatter as well.

Wylie thinks he has the answer for juvenile delinquency, the high divorce rate, national psychoses such as Naziism and “iron curtains.” He presents his answers, as usual, in ups & downs of personal sharpness and pseudo-scientific bombast, glib epigrams and gassy notions, often pungent and more often appallingly slipshod prose. At his best, Iconoclast Wylie pinpricks as sharply as H. L. Mencken ; at his worst, he is as full of unenlightening heat as Westbrook Pegler.

Vanity of Vanities. “Instinct” is the heart of Author Wylie’s philosophy, and he defines it as famed Psychiatrist Carl Jung did, as the “collective unconscious,” i.e., the idea that hidden in all men is a “common instinct” or basic “energy,” which “governs living behavior in individuals, species, and in evolution.” Individuals and nations that thwart this timeless instinct — either through unnatural laws and institutions or by catering to the day-to-day vanities of the ego —call down upon their heads neuroses, national-madness, and even extinction of their species.

Author Wylie has little difficulty in showing that much of U.S. life is lived in opposition to what he calls instinct. He considers it intolerable that crude and artificial concepts of patriotism, economics, racial distinctions or hoary traditions should confine the individual to a limited scope of learning and living.

School for Hypocrites. To Author Wylie, the churches and the laboratories are the chief villains of the piece. Modern man, he holds, first created God in his own image (a normal, instinctive act), then permitted this image to develop into a “school for hypocrites and university of ignorance.” Meanwhile, scientists have gone to the other extreme: in the name of Pure Reason they have omitted morality from their researches. The result: an average citizen who is no better than a “bred sheep”—cut off by church, industry, shibboleths and social fear from self-knowledge and spiritual freedom.

“Insight into natural law” is Author Wylie’s proposed solution. Children, he demands, must be taught that they are animals, not souls. They must be suckled not on clerical and patriotic values, but on Darwinism, anthropology, ethnology, Freudianism (one of Author Wylie’s wilder notions is that some children should be placed on an island, “reached by tunnel from the mainland,” where feeding-bottles and other nourishment will hang from bushes—giving peeking scientists a chance to study inborn faculties at their most virginal). Only when the resulting adult is thus “aware” and “conscious in the instinctual sense” will he experience true “illumination,” “inward experience.”

Many readers may accept some of his diatribes against contemporary life, but just as many are likely to feel that his magic “instinct” is largely a grab bag into which he pops anything he approves of—e.g., the human conscience, which he blandly describes as “the natural candor . . . of instinct.” Most readers will find the Essay’s philosophy half-baked.