Books: The Craven Idol

ODYSSEY OF THE SELF-CENTERED SELF (184 pp.)—Roberf Elliot Fitch—Harcourt, Brace & World ($3.95).

This is the agin’ book of the season. Robert Elliot Fitch, Dean of California’s Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley, is agin’ atheism, agnosticism, romanticism, rationalism, humanism, positivism, existentialism and cubism. He is agin’ progressive educators. Method actors, permissive parents, Vedantists, Taoists, Zen Buddhists and Bohemians. Getting personal, he is agin’ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer. Walt Whitman, Alfred Kinsey. Adlai Stevenson, Aldous Huxley, Jack Paar, Caryl Chessman, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, Charles Van Doren, Tennessee Williams, Françoise Sagan, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Archibald MacLeish, Albert Camus. Samuel Beckett, D. T. Suzuki and James F. Powers. He is also agin’ sin.

The sin that presumably links these varied souls, sects and sentiments is worshiping the false god of self, modern man’s craven idol. The ammunition that Author Fitch, 59. brings to the neo-orthodox,-neo-conservative battle camp is shiny with polemical wit and brilliance, but his essential targets have long since been peppered by profounder critics, among them Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nattire and Destiny of Man), Bernard Iddings Bell (Crowd Culture), José Ortega y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses’). He seems temperamentally torn between being a Christian critic and playing the Spenglerian doomsayer in tones that resemble that carbuncular Shakespearean scold, Thersites (“Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery”). Between the wailing and the railing, some valid points get made.

Dreadful Joy. There has been a kind of five-phase decline of religion via pseudo religion, as Fitch sees it. Man began with God, “the only true faith,” and then switched to the surrogate faiths of Nature, Humanity, Society (in the form of nationalism) and finally the Self. Today self-worship is in acute crisis, argues Fitch, and “atheism is at the end of its tether.”

Before it went bankrupt, the Self was a proud and preening god. Nearly a century ago, Walt Whitman trumpeted: “I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.” The Self as deity pursued power (Faust) and pleasure (Don Juan). It achieved satiety, the rake’s progress “from pain to ennui, from lust to disgust,” which Fitch finds symbolically typified time and again in Aldous Huxley’s heroes. At the end of Point Counter Point, the lovers, Burlap and Beatrice, “pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The logic of self-realization, as Huxley saw it, divided men into two camps-the Good-Timers, who dwell in the City of Dreadful Joy, and the High-Lifers, who “go a-whoring after abstractions, and try to make life fit into some formula.”

The Beat Hamlet. The self that is sick of self succumbs to self-analysis, self-pity, self-hate, and finally the obsession to be rid of self. “I am emptiness, I am not different from emptiness, neither is emptiness different from me; indeed, emptiness is me,” says one of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. The big flirtation between the beatniks and Zen and other forms of Eastern passivism, as Fitch sees it, is a desire to be emptied of self. But it is the self-pitier who truly commands stage center in modern drama, fiction and even life. In a narrow and somewhat unfairly argued attack on Pasternak, Fitch claims that Doctor Zhivago is a kind of beat modern Hamlet who “is born in pathos, lives in pathos, peters out in pathos—the artist-anarchist who can never be at home in any system of public responsibility, communist or capitalist.”

Rampant self-pity has produced an ethic of irresponsibility: “Blame it on God, the girls, on the government, on heredity, or on environment, on the parents, on the siblings, on the cold war, on the pressures toward conformity, on being unloved and unwanted. But don’t blame it on me, the very center around which the whole universe revolves.” Topsy-turvily, compassion is extended to the evildoer rather than to his victims. Thus the recent U.S. scene has offered the spectacle of “The Martyr as Manly Rapist” (Caryl Chessman), “The Martyr as High-Minded Gigolo” (Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth), and “The Martyr as Put-Upon Professor” (Charles Van Doren, self-proclaimed victim of the TV quiz riggings). The ultimate in 20th century “compassion” is to declare God irresponsible. In a Jules Feiffer cartoon a kindly chap standing on a stool concludes his monologue with God thus: “Listen up there—if you ever start a war, I’ll understand. It’s an attention-getting device. It’s not your fault you’re emotionally immature.”

Hoi Polloi. After a book-length orgy of beating the breast beaters, Author Fitch’s one-sentence grace note at the end sounds stark and anticlimactic, albeit traditional: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” No Christian will quibble with that. One may, however, argue heatedly over, or reject totally, the basic assumption that the pop culture—bestsellers, TV shows, advice to the lovelorn columns, cartoons, comic strips, dialogues with taxi drivers—constitutes the best method for judging the drift and destiny of a civilization. No one judges Greece and Rome that way—there is no reason to believe that the hoi polloi in 5th century B.C. Athens knew any more about Euripides than an average TV watcher knows about T. S. Eliot. In this, as in other matters, Author Fitch is rather too much the glib child of his times. In the ’20s Author Fitch was a student expatriate in Paris and an atheist (originally a Presbyterian, he later became a Congregationalist). In the ’30s he was a Socialist bent on electing Norman Thomas. In the ’50s he became a conservative and began writing sophisticated, neo-orthodox epistles to the agnostics. Tacking with such skill with each decade’s winds of doctrine, Fitch almost manages to be a symbol of what he wants to cure.