ROSZAK'S GREAT ADVENTURE
Anderson, Fenwick
ROSZAK'S GREAT ADVENTURE where the wasteland ends, by Theodore Roszak. Doubleday. 465 pp. $10. reviewed by Fenwick Anderson Theodore Roszak is a seeker. Like many others in a land that...
...This ironic failure is displayed in microcosm in his numerous sentence fragments, none of them justified by any literary purpose transcending grammar...
...Anderson is a doctoral student in communications at the University of Illinois...
...The problem is that the rise of science as the pinnacle of all knowledge and the growth of industrial capitalism were necessarily accompanied by a secularization of culture...
...To contribute to this fund, please send as little or as much as you can to the NAACP Emergency Relief Fund...
...But T. S. Eliot's brilliant poem about Twentieth Century man, "The Waste Land," earns just one brief excerpt despite the obvious allusion to it in the title...
...Even more disturbing, albeit more subtle, is the reductionism which objectifies people into mere things for study...
...Mr...
...Contributions are tax-deductible...
...However this renewal develops, he envisions it—not the space race—as the great adventure of our time...
...A couple of years ago, as recorded in The Making of a Counter Culture, Roszak looked for the answer among young people who had dropped out of the urban-industrial chaos into communal living...
...That is no mean achievement nowadays, as illustrated by a family of confirmed tourists he observed at Yellowstone National Park...
...The forward movement of scientific "single vision" did not go unopposed...
...Rather it is manifested in a variety of ways, including the quest for community, Gestalt therapy groups, the study of Eastern religions, and interest in astrology and the occult...
...In any case, this visionary new culture won't result from an old-style political revolution because "the technocracy cannot be overthrown...
...Roszak, who teaches history at California State College, is no Luddite demanding the destruction of all machines...
...Thus people still attend church on Sunday, but religious sensibilities are no longer integrated with their activities the rest of the week...
...But to appreciate the solution, a statement of the problem and a history of its development are needed...
...Consequently, freedom of scientific inquiry often means a search for knowledge per se without reference to wisdom, beauty, or simple humanity...
...He asks, "Where everything — everything — has been stalced out as somebody's specialized field of knowledge, what is the thinking of ordinary people worth...
...Many children of tenant farmers and seasonal workers have actually never known what it is like nor to be hungry...
...Their diets are so inadequate that hunger and malnutrition have become part of their lives...
...He feels a return to religion and mysticism, properly understood, can heal the psychic wounds inflicted on Western man by technology and loss of community...
...Right here in the U.S.A...
...Like many others in a land that has seemingly lost its soul, he wants to transcend alienation and live as a whole human being...
...He argues convincingly that science, although a worthwhile human skill, does not merit the pseudo-religious worship it receives...
...The tone of the book suggested that his heart wanted to believe they had found the answer, but his head knew better...
...Organized religion, however, mostly cooperated in reducing popular mythology to cold, literal narrative...
...The NAACP Emergency Relief Fund is now in its fourth year of collecting money to buy Food Stamps for the neediest of these families...
...Their considered opinion was that Old Faithful was a poor entertainment value compared to Disneyland...
...Such are the apparent vagaries of book titling...
...NAACP Emergency Relief Fund Dept...
...10019 Roszak believes, and as such is inseparable from what poet William Blake denounced as "single vision and Newton's sleep...
...The author provides a lively account of them, though it will not replace the more thoughtful, if overly pessimistic, statement of the problem by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society...
...Yet after a careful reading of Where the Wasteland Ends the nagging thought remains that its many interesting sections somehow add up to less than a whole book...
...TP I, Radio City Sta...
...And may your Christmas dinner be a little more enjoyable this year...
...Neither is he naive enough to trust that problems caused by technology can easily be solved by more technology—or so conditioned to our artificial environment that the ersatz sparkles more than the real...
...For those who respond, science gradually will decrease in importance to the obscure work of an isolated priesthood...
...it can only be displaced, inch by living inch...
...Precisely zero...
...Under the federally sponsored Food Stamp Plan, your $10—an amount that buys "just another Christmas gift" for more fortunate kids —can mean over $80 worth of urgently needed nourishment to help a family survive...
...Right now...
...Such reductionism is part of the mainstream of basic scientific values, On the back roads of Mississippi, Alabama and other parts of the deep South, there are still many thousands of families facing slow starvation...
...New York, N.Y...
...It was resisted heroically, though often quixotically, by the Romantics and, later, individual artists, whose alienation from technology won them the epithets of rebel and kook...
...Therefore, the religious restoration Roszak sees is not tied to the churches...
...Blake's four-fold poetic vision is quoted approvingly throughout the book...
...Roszak deserves credit for trying to point the way toward wholeness of the human psyche...
...On the contrary, its increasing importance over the past two centuries has reached a point where it has stifled the imagination of most non-scientists...
...Thank you...
...While avoiding the excesses of the True Believer, Roszak offers a tentative answer in this second attempt, Where the Wasteland Ends...
...Examples range from the mass destruction of modern weaponry to be-haviorists' efforts to force proper attitudes through what one euphemistically terms positive brainwashing...
...Ecology might prove a lone exception because it is the science closest to an integrated wisdom, unafraid to make value judgments about health and natural harmony...
Vol. 36 • December 1972 • No. 12
