Further Along the Road Less Traveled and A World Waiting to Be Born
Peck, M. Scott
FURTHER ALONG THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: THE UNENDING JOURNEY TOWARDS SPIRITUAL GROWTH M. Scott Peck, M.D. Simon & Schuster /255 pages / $21 ••••^^• A WORLD WAITING TO BE BORN: CIVILITY...
...Responsibility is missing...
...But then again, try imagining our refined Stage Four man building arks, facing mobs and lions, rebuking Pharisees, putting down heresies, transcribing Bibles, and raising up cathedrals...
...Are only backward Christians prone to hypocrisy...
...Instead of treating readers as simpering children in need of more indulging, he addressed the adult within...
...But it seems a slightly uncharitable remark for a Christian psychologist whose vocation is to help us see through the surface of things, the leatherette covers of life, into each troubled heart...
...Yet on the next page he declares: Fresh air is what the New Age movement at its best is about...
...Such distasteful Stage Two preoccupations as abortion, too, can be seen in their true light, free of "one-dimensional" and "atavistic" formulations...
...Viewed from a Stage Four consciousness, something, it turns out, is also missing from the Sixth Commandment...
...Never mind that John Paul II helped write Vatican II, and in the years since just may have pondered its meaning as much as M. Scott Peck has...
...The man, indeed, who brought all of Christianity into Stage Two, giving humanity in time the eternal feast of reason and doctrine and discipline and mystery of which Peck's own teachings, even at their wisest, are but transitory table scraps...
...Peck's great service in that book—now in its record 535th week on the New York Times bestseller list—was to restore to modern psychology a little humility and to call readers away from the cult of the self, which he diagnosed as among our deepest sources of unease...
...Far from being the endpoint, his "Stage Four" seems to be a place frequented only by spiritual stage-hogs, less a plateau than a chatty rest stop at which the more "advanced" turn back to point out how very small those other stragglers look from so far away...
...But as we read on, the impression deepens that Peck himself suffers from a spiritual snobbery that, in a lesser man, we could confidently diagnose as narcissism...
...Somewhere back he took to setting up new markers of his own making along the road, little spiritual travel advisories as if he himself were a pioneer instead of just another poor pilgrim treading deeply worn ground...
...these is missing from Scott Peck these days...
...Matthew Scully is a former literary editor of National Review and speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle...
...From there it's on to Stage Four, that "mystical/communal" stage, the endpoint of spiritual evolution where we first espy the lonely footprints of Scott Peck himself...
...One begins to notice it on that very first page of Further Along...
...At the beginning—the bottom, if you wish—is Stage One, which I label `chaotic/antisocial...
...On the other hand," his argument runs, those who follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion "lack compassion and integrity...
...This, at least, is what one hopes he is up to...
...The same dismissive tone recurs again and again, this rush to dissociate himself from those other Christians...
...They are the kinds of people who make up the backbone of organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility or the ecology movement...
...The virtues of the New Age movement are absolutely enormous...
...No one reading in Road Less Traveled why "Life is difficult"—his famous first sentence—or why suffering is meaningful and love a discipline, or why God and not us is at the center of reality, could ever again find perfect solace in a tearful hug from Leo Buscaglia...
...Never mind where, say, Mother Teresa would fall in the scheme, what with that underdeveloped reliance on rules and institutions...
...Here one might expect the author to note that for all the Swaggarts and Bakkers he has in mind, there have been evangelists like John Wesley or Billy Graham—neither one given to gold rings or two-thousand-dollar finery, and both having led their share of souls away from narcissism long before M. Scott Peck ever cast his net...
...Indeed, one of Pope John Paul II's enduring problems has been to figure out how to excommunicate all of Holland, because the entire country leans remarkably toward Stage Four culture...
...Lacking a sense of this "profoundly mysterious universe" we inhabit, Stage Two people "become very, very upset if someone starts changing forms or rituals"—Peck's favorite example being Pope John Paul II, who is always trying to suppress Vatican II reformers in his own Church...
...And what has become of Peck's guiding premise that we are all responsible for our own sins...
...Stage Two types "tend to be threatened by the skeptic individualists of Stage Three, and more than anything, by the Stage Four people, who seem to believe in the same things they believe in and yet believe them with a kind of freedom they find absolutely terrifying...
...I firmly believe that the sins New Age is reacting against are very real sins...
...As Viktor Frankl had done a generation earlier in Man's Search for Meaning and Erich Fromm after that, Peck reminded us that the great question of psychology is less what we want from life than what life demands of us...
...On the other hand...
...On the other hand, if we are thinking with integrity, then "it is possible for extramarital sex to be quite chaste...
...an absolution his less progressive fellow Christians never get, though by Peck's own objective criteria their mistakes would seem no worse...
...But he never does qualify these judgments...
...When traditional Christians go wrong, they're "blasphemous...
...The Dutch Jesuits are very sophisticated people...
...I don't mean to suggest that I have become that kind of evangelist...
...So my friend fell into the hands of these sophisticated and accepting Jesuits...
...And what of Paul himself, the man Peck is always invoking as the "original," untainted evangelist...
...He means this literally, having become a Christian a year or two after publishing The Road Less Traveled in 1978...
...Since writing Road Less Traveled he has come to see himself as an "evangelist"—but, he adds hastily: The word "evangelist" carries the worst possible association and probably brings to your mind the image of a manicured and coiffed preacher in a two-thousand-dollar suit, his gold-ringed fingers gripping a leatherette-covered Bible as he shouts at the top of his lungs: "Save me, Jee-sus...
...It's a little disconcerting, then, to find in these books that Dr...
...Into Stage Two, for starters, go all the saints, just ahead of .the sociopaths, just behind the Dutch, and far, far behind our Virgil of the psycho-spiritual realm...
...The clarity and humility with which he began his journey...
...Peck himself The American Spectator March 1994 73 seems to have lost his way...
...T hus liberated, one begins to shed what Peck once described to Playboy as "the old program" with its "outworn" and "sexist" creeds...
...Of these, the more restless sometimes experience a dramatic crisis, "and so it is that they convert to Stage Two, which I have labeled 'formal/institutional.'" Here we find most churchgoers, people who have yet to outgrow their dependency on rules and authority...
...Although "ahead of Stage Two people in their spirituality . . . they are not religious in the ordinary sense of the word...
...We learn to "think with integrity": Obviously life begins at conception, and obviously any interruption of that life involves the killing of a human being...
...Continuing our ascent, we meet Stage Three people, the "skeptic/individual...
...El 76 The American Spectator March 1994...
...Perhaps, though, despite this selective severity, Peck is in a sense doing here what he does best: anticipating, with an evangelist's guile, the antipathy his sophisticated readers bear toward traditional religion...
...N ew Age people, by contrast, receive a gentle reproach: If they wander far afield, he writes in Further Along, this is only an understandable reaction to "the emptiness of spirit and the arrogance, narcissism, and blasphemy of the Christian church...
...Whether this extra incentive to spiritual excellence is a perk reserved only for mystical/communal types is unclear, but in any event, all comes into focus in this 74 The American Spectator March 1994 case study of a friend of Peck's "raised in a Stage Two Irish Catholic home...
...If you want to think with integrity . . . all you need to do is ask this single question, 'What is missing?' [And] if you ask what is missing in a law that proclaims 'Thou shalt not abort,' the answer you get is responsibility...
...Are there no gold rings and expensive threads to be found in the fresh air of Sedona, Malibu, or San Francisco...
...What about the Apostles...
...A ferocious, unbending Stage Two man if ever there was one...
...Roughly 20 percent of all people fall into this category...
...It's doubtless true, as Peck observes, that the Inquisitors were Stage Two types...
...Of course we all know the type he is describing...
...The new program requires such broader terms for God as "She/He," "He/She" or just "She"—Peck's own tiresome usage throughout these books...
...What about Augustine, Milton, Pascal, Joan of Arc...
...Passing over this tribute to the delightful Dutch (modern Amsterdam, we can all agree, appears to be in the advanced stages of something), there are a few problems with this whole amazing construct—what a reader begins to regard as Stage Five, the pedantic/self-referential phase of spiritual evolution...
...When he came back to Amsterdam at the age of nineteen, he was already in early Stage Four...
...He might reflect with a little more gratitude on the sort of folks who spread it during the 100,000 weeks before that...
...Among other things it does not allow for a whole lot of doubt as to who stands where in this profoundly mysterious universe of ours...
...For instance, "because organized religion has been very intolerant of beliefs other than its own, the New Age movement has tended to incorporate an extraordinary hodgepodge of ideas, including many esoteric notions ranging from astrology to astral projections to ethereal bodies...
...They make committed and loving parents...
...In a book full of nuanced discussions about the "mysteries" of faith and character and personality, Peck doesn't seem to mind at all if readers take away a false, simplistic, and unkind view of ordinary evangelists and the folks who make up their flocks—just so long as we all understand he's not one of them...
...Bantam/366 pages /$27.95 reviewed by MATTHEW SCULLY M Scott Peck, he tells us himself in Further Along the • Road Less Traveled, is not just another self-help psychologist but an "evangelist...
...Just as he was entering his adolescent rebellion period, his father's company transferred the family to Amsterdam...
...Fear not...
...Five hundred thirty-five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list is quite an achievement for any writer, especially for a self-described evangelist called to spread the Christian message...
...On one page, Peck fears that in rebellion against traditional religion New Agers are flirting with ideas he himself regards as "heretical" and indeed in some cases "evil...
...When the beautiful people succumb to more fashionable errors—that wonderful "hodgepodge of ideas" already stale two millennia ago—they are merely "adventuring without discernment...
...Take for instance his detailed scheme of spiritual "stages," developed at length in Further Along...
...Marital fidelity, we learn, is usually what God has ordained...
...There my friend was sent to a Dutch Jesuit school...
...Simon & Schuster /255 pages / $21 ••••^^• A WORLD WAITING TO BE BORN: CIVILITY REDISCOVERED M. Scott Peck, M.D...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
