Deus ex Machina

...But from the sterility of the New Atlantis, Roszak proclaims, only the Old Gnosis can redeem our sense of human possibility and reverse a demonic descent into alienation and nihilism...

...Like a scholar who writes pro-lifically on the virtues and requirements of silence, Roszak's method undermines his message: A work exalting the mystic imagination should not smack so patently of reading and reflection...

...Now, supplementing Boorstin's analysis with more sweeping historical generalizations and premonitions of nuclear and ecological disaster, Theodore Roszak announces how reality may finally be grasped: The secret is the Old Gnosis, the intuitive understanding of transcendent truths that the West's systematic use of science and reason has buried below consciousness...

...the most durable base on which to build communities," Roszak neither examines nor explains the half-life that has been the fate of nearly all Utopian settlements...

...The author, who teaches at California State College at Hayward, should be credited with a serious stab at short-hand intellectual history, assembling the voices of all those, from Rousseau to Mumford, from early Krutch to late Koestler, who have shrunk in horror before the mechanism, reductionism and positivism of modern thought...

...Yet despite his ingenuity and perceptiveness, his ability to pick out the contrived and the artificial, the author confessed his ignorance of reality itself (thus becoming, in his words, "a sitting duck for my more profound philosopher colleagues...

...The validity of their complaints about a scientistic society, though, does not require us to ignore the weaknesses of Roszak's advertisement on behalf of the questionable Old Gnosis, even if criticism may be regarded as one more example of the stifling pervasiveness of "objective consciousness...

...Eliot's own wasteland ended at an Anglican altar Roszak repudiates...

...True, the social scientist's or physician's self-consciousness removes the hope of successfully going native, and prevents the complete union of the soul with the universe that is the mystic ideal...

...Perhaps victims of political oppression should be provided with the Datura plant instead of seats on the next plane out...

...For Roszak, the Old Gnosis blends the mystic and prophetic, Vedic and Amerindian, Taoist and Romantic, animist and Joycean, Druidic and Hermetic—all "those other kinds of knowledge . . . born of sensuous penetration, loving participation, ecstasy, [and] transcendent aspiration" needed to achieve "joy, wisdom, salvation...

...Poised between an empty and artificial realm he detests and a "visionary commonwealth" he does not yet claim to know, Roszak fails to provide a coherent pattern of ethical purposes that might be imposed upon an altered landscape...

...Imitate Don Juan, the Yaqui sorcerer who insisted that trances induced by "devil's weed" were flight...

...Indeed, those who believe that Truth is One may well make political debate, to which this book is designed to contribute, more oversimplified and precarious than it already is: Resolving conflicts is difficult enough among liberals and conservatives, corporations and workers and consumers, classes and sections, ethnics and nationalists, bureaucrats and radicals, urbanites and suburbanites and farmers, lobbyists and crusaders, without also having to mediate disputes among mystics...

...But Where the Wasteland Ends, with its footnoted announcement of spiritual need, is unlikely to provoke the serious pursuit of union with the divine...

...However justified his hostility to scientific influence may be, his description of the Western alternative of romanticism is not so much critical intellectual history as interior decoration...

...Still, detached analysis can promote other virtues, like the skeptic's capacity to correct his own errors more readily than the possessed would ever dream of doing, and such qualities are too precious to scuttle simply because no "transcendent correspondences" can be found...

...To forsake the citadels of thought and art for the shaman's hut is to be cheated of the fullest range of human endeavor and to forfeit the possibility of making its present impulses more benign...

...His New Atlantis articulated a faith in science not merely as an experimental method but as the basis of a technocratic civilization that would eventually restrict everything to a "single vision" of reality...

...Oh," the proud parent replies, "you should have seen his photograph...

...Sympathetic readers may be rather baffled by the extensive pages devoted to the most sinister enemy of transcendent truth: Francis Bacon (1561-1626...

...This Roszak also fails to ponder, but it is history that cannot be denied any more than time can be stopped by unplugging clocks...

...In order to live with, if not to cure, our diseases of the spirit, it should not be necessary to perform a lobotomy on the Western mind...

...Roszak scorns the "absurd arrogance of the book-learned sociologist who insists that...

...Or the sort of psychotherapy that assumes the doctors know more about alcoholism or psychosis than those who have lived through the terrors...

...Paul Goodman, a hero of Roszak's earlier Making of a Counter Culture, was never so fuzzy...

...He is thus engaged in a special sort of information retrieval, reclaiming the "sacramental vision of nature" known to children before they have been educated, to artists unleashing the forces of the creative unconscious, to the tribes living in communes and collectives, to "dissenting young technicians, dropped-out professionals, young scientists who are well into Tantric sad-hanas...

...The virtues of probity, modesty and equipoise should continue to be cherished and should in fact be among the standards for judging the products of factory and laboratory...

...After praising Blake's pro-Jacobin poems and politics, Roszak treats Wordsworth at almost equal length without mentioning his Tory apologetics...

...For example, citing airline passengers' reports that they "never knew we were in the air...

...he knows more about slums and ghettos than the people who live in them...

...And for a recent world's fair the people who gave us Disneyland concocted a mechanical Abraham Lincoln capable of 48 separate body actions and 17 head movements and facial expressions—thereby reducing our most humane President to a golem...

...The exchange is a joke, of course, but one not very far from our present reality...

...These spokesmen for human dignity, autonomy and enterprise cannot be heard often enough, and Roszak's association with them is honorable...

...He never quite decides whether science is wrong, or simply inadequate, and could be quoted in behalf of either position...

...Roszak chalks up another meaningless triumph for aeronautical engineering...

...These days people watch eclipses on television, surrounded by plastic fruit and flowers...

...Deliberately fly into turbulence...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University "What a lovely baby," remarks a friend...

...Fewer machines may well make life easier and more meaningful, as he assures us...

...At Yellowstone, tourists can be heard to mutter in judgment of Old Faithful: "Disneyland is better...

...Far more disturbing is the desire for organic wholeness that led others to fascism...

...the religious dimension of his Utopian thought never intruded upon the specific merits of his generally anti-technological proposals...

...Ignoring the recalcitrant complexity of human life, Roszak wishes to see an absolutism no less total, and therefore no more liberating, than the scientific and rational world view he would replace...

...For Roszak elaborates an avowedly total world view that, as with other holistic systems such as Marxism and Freud-ianism, manages to incorporate and explain away every possible disagreement...

...But the implication is that because the scientific method has not achieved everything, it has done nothingexcept make the planet less tolerable than our remotest ancestors left it...

...Permeating the book is an anti-intellectual tone that seems to derive from the familiar American cult of experience...

...but to accept a criterion that future technology must "be valid for all men for all time" is to violate the romantic ethos of diversity, spontaneity, nuance, and plenitude...

...But what should be done...

...Roszak sees the price of progress but rarely its value: His only discussion of medicine is a condemnation of the experiments of Nazi doctors...

...Actual descriptions of religious transfigurations, such as Saint Theresa's, have ennobled the lives of readers through their immediacy and imaginative power...

...Eleven years ago Daniel Boorstin captured much of the inauthenticity of American life in his book, The Image...

...Though he calls the "visionary strain...