Arcadia Revisited

By Melvin Maddocks

WHERE THE WASTELAND ENDS

by THEODORE ROSZAK

492 pages. Doubleday. $10.

A GOD WITHIN

by RENE DUBOS

325 pages. Scribners. $8.95.

Two live as one

One lives as two

Two live as three

Under the bam

Under the boo

Under the bamboo tree.

--T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes

The myth of Prometheus has commanded the allegiance of moderns, insofar as moderns have bothered with myths at all. What could suit the Age of Technology better, after all, than the legend of a discontented hero who snatched fire from the gods, enabling men to modify their destiny by exploiting this marvelous new kind of power?

Alas, the Promethean gift has come to appear cruelly ironic, if not demonic, to a post-technology age that possesses--or is possessed by--the ultimate fire: nuclear power. Today, weary hindsight makes "progress" seem a mocking, self-defeating process by which men promise to improve themselves and their planet right out of existence.

Into this "wasteland" climate of despair, a countermyth of hope, has been introduced. It may be identified as the myth of the New Arcadia. The New Arcadians see their salvation in a return to Eden innocence. Arcadian man will not reprogram the world; externalized change is the Promethean trap. Arcadian man will change his own head. He will retap the sources within his archetypal self. A million individual religious experiences will take place, and these will change the world.

In The Greening of America, Charles Reich tried (and failed) to define this spiritual revolution: a mysticism of self-renewal that would save modern man from himself. In Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak fails too, perhaps inevitably. But in the meantime he has brilliantly summed up once and for all the New Arcadian criticism of what he calls "postindustrial society." His book expresses almost as an act of autobiography the needs and demands he first began to detail in The Making of a Counter-Culture (1969).

Once upon a time, says Roszak, perhaps in Old Arcadia, man was in harmony with his unpolluted universe and his unpolluted self. He had his myths, his rituals, his visions: his "sacramental awareness" of nature and of his place in it. Then he became a devotee of Reason. He lost his "energies of transcendence," and turned into that modern monstrosity, "intellect divorced of its visionary powers." According to the Roszak bill of particulars, Christianity bears a heavy share of the blame. It excluded other myths in the name of one myth. It tended to abstract God into the Word: the pulpit crowded out the altar. Protestantism especially stripped man of "the inarticulate wisdom of the instincts," preparing the way for the Scientific Revolution.

Roszak struggles to be fair, but the scientist is the devil in his cosmology. The goal of science, B.F. Skinner once said, is the destruction of mystery. Roszak believes science has succeeded all too well. "Machines, gadgets," not to mention "the computers," represent "mankind tyrannized by the work of his own hands." Furthermore, he sees "objectivity," the scientific act of knowledge, as an act of alienation, if not of sacrilege. "Break faith with the environment," reads Roszak's version of the scientist's Faustian compact, "and you will surely gain power."

From Francis Bacon to the Era of Research & Development, Roszak sees science "turning people and nature into mere, worthless things." Science has led to "the politics of technocratic elitism." Worst of all, it has despoiled the human imagination.

"How are we to create a sane life?" "How do I save my soul?" These, Roszak thinks, are the pertinent questions for Arcadian man, cornered by urban-industrial necessities and manipulated by "a vast mandarin establishment of hysterical professional obfuscators."

"It is the energy of religious renewal," Roszak concludes, "that will generate the next politics." He sees the counterculture, with its spiritual ragtag of yoga, I Ching and the signs of the zodiac, as "a massive salvage operation" to reclaim the wholeness of man by "magic and dreams."

Hip Artisans. At this point--the crucial point of the manifesto--Roszak becomes vague. To be overly specific, he suggests, would be to commit the sin of "single-vision" rationalism that he objects to. So he runs on about "a drastic scaling down and decentralizing," a "massive de-urbanization." He proposes making "antigrowth" a positive value. He suggests a new economics of "low-consumption" based on "kinship, friendship, cooperation." If they are not paralyzed by cynicism or timidity, a saving remnant of "hip artisans," "ecological activists," "people's architects" and "dropped-out professionals" will find their way back to Arcadia and the "rich religious disciplines of self-realization."

This is not prospectus enough. But, as William Blake, one of Roszak's cultural heroes, said: "Man must and will have Some Religion." Roszak seems to equate demand and supply. If enough "enthusiasm"--a favorite Roszak word--is present, surely the justification for that enthusiasm must shortly follow.

Roszak argues from Apocalypse. He might well ask: What other choice does man have today? At first glance, Rene Dubos, a distinguished microbiologist and Pulitzer prizewinner (So Human an Animal), seems to agree. Like a proper New Arcadian, he writes: "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature and a substitute for magic." The very title of his book, A God Within, is his translation of enthusiasm ("one of the most beautiful words in any language").

But Dubos, unlike Roszak, is not possessed by a thesis. While deploring man's policy of conquest toward nature, he denies masochistic readers the tidy comfort of feeling that ecological abuses are the exclusive products of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and modern technology. Plato, he points out, testified to the deforestation of Greece. Far from reverencing life, men (Arcadian as well as Promethean) have always been inclined to operate on the theory: "If it moves, kill it."

Dubos not only wonders if there was an Old Arcadia, he wonders if there is a New Apocalypse. He suspects that when man became an agricultural animal, the earth was ravaged worse than when he became a technological animal. "All living systems are irreversibly changed by almost any kind of experience," he writes, adding the hopeful corollary: "Destruction always results in a different creation."

Roszak and Dubos are both, in some sense, optimists. But Roszak posits a crisis that only a radical and desperate hope can respond to. More convincingly, Dubos argues that history has been an unending crisis--with a pretty fair record of self-restoration or at the least survival. Man's greatest complacency, he implies, may be to presume he can destroy the universe of which he is only one product. "Be realistic," says Roszak, quoting a counterculture slogan. "Plan for a miracle." The miracle, Dubos might undramatically demur, is that life in infinite, apparently inexhaustible variety (with or without man's blueprints) just keeps going on.

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