279 - Walking M. Scott Peck's Less-traveled Road

Walking M. Scott Peck's Less-traveled Road

By Walter Wink

"In [The Road Not Traveled], Peck clearly sees himself among a tiny and elect group of saints who, by participating in God's omniscience, also 'share His agony, and who walk ahead, utterly alone. This is a curiously elitist view of mystical development, and it is sharply at odds with his understanding of community in [The Different Drum]. He has apparently learned, in the intervening years, that spiritual development means not isolation, but the capacity for community."

M. SCOTT PECK'S record-setting longevity on the New York Times bestseller list (his book The Road Less Traveled has run for more than four hundred weeks-that's seven and a half years!-and has sold around five million copies) surely qualifies him as a "popular theologian." And that throws up an immediate roadblock to a fair evaluation. What aspiring writer, or even reader for that matter, can behold such success without envy? The reviewer is tempted to say some complimentary things first, in order to establish his broadmindedness, and then to flourish the knife. So, let me make one thing clear from the outset: Yes, I am reeking with envy, but the works of Peck are neither pop nor pap. He just happens to write about extremely important things exceedingly well.

Road (1978) should never have sold well at all, because the first section is devoted entirely to discipline. No formulistic, do-it-yourself spiritual manual would dare demand so much of its readers as Peck does his. His People of the Lie (1983-750,000 copies sold), which (with the qualification I make later) I regard as his best book, should never have sold because it deals with radical evil, a subject people avoid like cholera. The Different Drum (1987-350,000 copies sold) calls for the rebirth of community in defiance of the American fixation on rugged individualism. And his novel, A Bed by the Window (1990), is set, of all places, in a nursing home.

Road is a slow starter. The first half, on discipline and love, says little that similar writers (Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Karl Menninger, Paul

Walter Wink is professor of New Testament at Auburn Theological Seminary. His many books include two volumes of innovative approaches to biblical study, The Bible in Human Transformation (1973) and Transforming Bible Study (1989), and two original treatments of the New Testament concept of "the powers," Naming the Powers (1984) and Understanding the Powers (1986).

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Tournier) have not said already and as well. My own excitement grew in the last half, where he synthesizes science, psychology, and religion, showing that one's worldview is effectively one's religion, and that we are all, therefore, religious. His treatment of the limitations of science is especially lucid.

Drum is the opposite. It begins well, with a sparkling analysis of how community can happen, and then, in the second half, dribbles off into a series of forays into the broader implications of community that are doomed from the start, given his definition of community. People, on the other hand, sustains interest straight through and makes a major contribution to the understanding of evil, possession, exorcism, and love. I will not linger over his novel, which is entertaining and thoughtful, if at times a bit too illustrative of ideas, nor over his multimedia attempt at evangelism, What Return Can I Make? (1985), produced with songwriter-singer Marilyn von Waldner and artist Patricia Kay. I found the songs sentimental and Peck's commentary on them preachy and, on the cassette tape, badly read.

The highest respect I could pay to Peck is to take him seriously enough as a theologian to argue with him. Each of his more serious books raises for me one major question. In Road, it is his assertion that we not only must play God, but we must aspire to become God. In People, it is the danger he runs of demonizing enemies, and, in Drum, it is the question: Where does he plan to go with this business of community?

I

Doctors and scientists are fond of describing their capacity to alter human life, and even nature, as "playing God." Peck uncritically parrots this view: "For whenever we exercise power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of humanity, and we are thereby playing God."¹ I fail to see how the attempt to influence the course of the world is anything but human and, often, for the worse. The expression "playing God" merely reflects the titanism and idolatry in which many scientists and doctors are caught. They do not play God, though some of them clearly enjoy posturing as if they had divine credentials. Unlike God, they do not know the consequences of their acts. They are not omniscient. Nor are they possessed of divine omnipotence, so as to guarantee the desired results of their interventions in nature. They must risk, like all human beings, uncertain of the outcome, gambling on the mix of information and guesswork that makes science work. "Playing God" is reserved for messianic pretenders and psychotic patients. It is enough that we attempt to be human.

More serious, however, is Peck's notion that the goal of spiritual growth is to "become God:"

¹M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 155.

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For no matter how much we may like to pussyfoot around it, all of us who postulate a loving God and really think about it eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. We don't want God's responsibility. As long as we can believe that godhood is an impossible attainment for ourselves, we don't have to worry about our spiritual growth, we don't have to push ourselves to higher and higher levels of consciousness and loving activity; we can relax and just be human....

The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness.²

If Peck merely meant that we are to be "like" God, as in the last sentence quoted, there would be no problem. But he insists on identity. The problem is logical in part. Consider a point (A) inside a large circle (B). We may say that A is like B, related to B, in B, of B, is B; but A is not identical to B, because B is more than A, and may even be, in other ways, different than A. Peck oversimplifies the ancient issue of divinization. He sees only the danger of laziness in our refusal to be God, but overlooks the opposite dangers of perfectionism, inflation, arrogance, loss of ego boundaries, and self-idolization.

Peck argues that grace (and therefore God) does not reside in human consciousness, but in the unconscious mind of the individual. When we say "I," however, we are talking preeminently about the conscious part of us, the ego. So, on his, own terms, "I" cannot be God. "Our unconscious is God," he says.³ But how can I become my unconscious? By making it conscious. That is the goal of all therapy and spiritual growth. But we can never make but a fraction of the unconscious conscious, and it is not accurate to equate God with the unconscious, either. Dreams are not unambiguous revelations. They are not uncut oracles of God. The vast majority of images kicked up by the unconscious is garbage, especially the kaleidoscopic rush of images one experiences on first lying down to sleep. More ominously, the unconscious is home to archetypal images not at all friendly to life. Hitler, after all, called up the latent violence of Wotan from the collective unconscious of the German nation. God undoubtedly speaks through the unconscious, but discernment and discrimination are required. God is able to speak through conscious and unconscious, but neither is the inviolable sanctuary of God.

Peck admits that Jung never went quite so far as to state explicitly that God existed in the unconscious. Nevertheless he rushes incautiously ahead: "In my vision the collective unconscious is God."⁴ Peck is correct that the unconscious can be "a benign and loving realm," and that it tends to work for the individuation of the person.⁵ But Jung avoided identifying God with the unconscious precisely because of his

²Ibid., pp. 269-271.

³Ibid., p. 281.

⁴Ibid., p. 282.

⁵Ibid.

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discovery of the range and variety of the archetypes, in both their benevolent and malignant aspects.

It is one thing to attempt to incarnate God, even, as Peck puts it, to become "a new life form of God."⁶ It is quite another to say that "We may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally wholly God"⁷ Here Peck fully identifies A with B. This is a statement of psychic inflation, and it is highly dangerous to people all too eager to believe themselves gods. There is an immense difference between relating to God and becoming God. Such identity collapses transcendence. Nothing still stands "over" or "beyond" the individual. Spiritually, this is an unendurable position. Indeed, I would regard it as one of the most banal forms of spiritual pathology. To allege that the goal is to "develop a mature, conscious ego which can then become the ego of God," to encourage people to "identify our mature free will with that of God" so that God can assume "through our conscious ego a new and potent life form,"⁸ is to invite inflation.

However, Peck seems to vacillate. In the next sentence, he speaks of the conscious person as "God's agent, his arm, so to speak, and therefore part of Him," thereby distinguishing A from B. Here we are merely sub-aspects, not "totally wholly God." We can become "agents of God's grace" precisely because the conscious ego knows that it is not God, but can be the bearer of God to others.⁹

I suspect that Peck has had to battle a streak of megalomania as a result of his enormous success. When we spent an afternoon together six years ago, he was considering a run for the presidency-that's right, of the United States. His penchant for totalizing everything is reflected in statements like these: "For when we truly know what we are doing, we are participating in the omniscience of God. With total awareness of the nature of a situation, of our motives for acting upon it, and of the results and ramifications of our action, we have attained that level of awareness that we normally expect only of God."¹⁰ But who ever knows truly what he or she is doing? Or one's motives for doing them? And one cannot, in principle, know the results and ramifications of any action in advance, because other free agents are always involved, making their own free and unpredictable decisions as well. "Godlike power is the power to make decisions with total awareness," he says,¹¹ and that is the best argument against our ever being able to become God.

In Road, Peck clearly sees himself among a tiny and select group of saints who, by participating in God's omniscience, also "share His agony," and who walk ahead, utterly alone. "As we outdistance our

⁶Ibid., p. 283.

⁷Ibid., italics added.

⁸Ibid.

⁹Ibid., pp. 283-284.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 286,

¹¹Ibid., p. 287.

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fellow humans our relationship to God inevitably becomes correspondingly closer."¹² This is a curiously elitist view of mystical development, and it is sharply at odds with his understanding of community in Drum. He has apparently learned, in the intervening years, that spiritual development means not isolation, but the capacity for community.

True, the Fourth Evangelist has Jesus say, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'?" (John 10:34). Psalm 82:6, the source of this quote, is not, however, in "the law," nor does it refer to human beings, but rather to the bene elohim, the sons of gods in the heavenly council. If John wants to stretch that to include us, he is free to do so, but then I am also free to call it lousy exegesis. On the other hand, divinization has a deep and proper place in the history of theology. Peck is not to be faulted for drawing on it, but rather, for his imprecision of terms, compounded perhaps by his own delusions of grandeur. It is significant that all this talk of godhood disappears entirely from his later books. To his great credit, this is a man who learns from his mistakes.

II

People of the Lie is Peck's most profound book. Only five years separate it from Road, but the voice that speaks here has been sobered by additional encounters with radical evil and a salutary discovery of limits. No longer do we hear naively optimistic statements like this one from Road "With total discipline we can solve all problems."¹³ Peck has participated in several exorcisms, about which I spoke with him at length in 1985. Both patients improved dramatically, but continued to be plagued with difficulty. The demonic was more intractable than he had thought. Evil people may even be impervious to change.

"Evil people"-a phrase that appears only once in Road-now, becomes the theme of People. And, immediately, that is my problem with this book. Do we really want to speak of "evil people," as if they are evil without remainder? What has become of the image of God? Do we not have to believe, in principle, that no one is beyond the pale of redemption, that everyone can repent, that God's grace can reach to the innermost darkness and bring it light? And can we separate humanity into good and evil so grossly? Are we not all involved in evil? Are we not in collusion with a system of domination that deceives people about the nature of reality? Are we not all "people of the lie"?

In rereading Peck now for a third time some six years later, I am not so sure that my critique is as devastating as I once thought. It is true that Peck asserts of one of his client's parents, "Bobby's parents were evil."¹⁴ They had given him the same gun that his brother had used to commit suicide, the message being virtually: Here, now it's your turn. Might one interpret their gift differently? And even if the act were evil, must we identify the actors with the act? Even granting that Bobby's

¹²Ibid., pp. 288-289.

¹³Ibid., p. 16.

¹⁴Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 68.

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parents were evil, did they not also have parents, and their parents, parents?

Peck is not without compassion for Bobby's parents, however. Even though he admits to a pronounced revulsion toward them, he regards their evil as ill and pitiable, and could contemplate working with a careful compassion for their healing. Peck comments, "I doubt that Bobby's parents deliberately wanted to kill Stuart or him. I suspect if I had gotten to know them well enough, I would have found their murderous behavior totally dictated by an extreme form of selfprotectiveness which invariably sacrificed others rather than themselves."¹⁵

The problem is that the "people of the lie" seldom seek healing. They are characterized by a pathological refusal to tolerate a sense of their own sinfulness. They cannot and will not suffer the pain of self-reproach. They hate the light. Consequently they are the last people to seek psychotherapy. So my assertion that we are all people of the lie is only relatively true. Many of us are trying to change, to become truthful from the heart, to come to consciousness and self-awareness. Not so those whom Peck calls people of the lie. In fact, one reason we know so little about such people is that the evil are so extremely reluctant to be studied.

Nevertheless, Peck does find it easier to regard someone as totally evil than totally good. In Road he speaks of a few people who "will manifest almost pure love, and a few at the other extreme [who manifest] pure entropy or evil."¹⁶ Why does he not qualify the purity of their evil, as he does the goodness of the good? So often when I have considered people "evil" it is because they oppose my plans or objectives. How can I know this person is really evil? Peck does not give enough data in his cases and comments to decide. He mentions that only two "evil" people out of roughly five thousand with whom he has done workshops could not be successfully incorporated into the community-building process. "The reality is that human beings are sufficiently good that, if properly guided, all but a tiny fraction of them can participate creatively in that process."¹⁷ But what if those two people were not really evil but had merely interpreted that "guiding" as manipulative, or because of life-experiences were particularly touchy about group-think or group pressure? After all, Peck does confess to a tendency to be super-controlling. One need not label such people evil to exclude them from the group or to make some other decisive intervention. And that exclusion may in fact confirm that person's deepest fears and prove the group is manipulative, insofar as it has made developing community so high a goal that participants may be sacrificed for it.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 75.

¹⁶Peck, The Road Less Traveled, p. 279 (italics added).

¹⁷Peck, The Different Drum (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 124-125 (italics added).

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Do not misunderstand me. My wife, June, and I do similar work, and we occasionally run into people who seem intent on destroying the group. Perhaps they will voluntarily leave. But if they stay, we have decided to take that as a sign from the Holy Spirit that we have something to learn from this person, or that this person is capable of whatever transformation God wills for their lives. And thus far, God has not disappointed us.

I have certainly met people I thought were evil. But I do not believe we are permitted to "play God" and pass judgment on each other. That kind of judgment is reserved for God alone, at the end of history-which may reveal my works as "straw" and my enemy's as "brick" (1 Cor. 3:10-15). Paul is adamant about this. "With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore I do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart" (1 Cor. 4:3-5).

So where does all this come out? Peck himself warns that a psychology of evil can create scapegoats. We often generate more evil trying to extirpate evil than the evil itself could ever achieve. I cannot bring myself to speak of evil people, as if that phrase characterized them without remainder. On the other hand, the idea that there are people who have given themselves over to evil, to the lie, may have value as a heuristic category. Peck is challenging us to explore an area almost totally neglected in modern times, and his own sorties into this uncharted territory provide us far too much information to balk at such inquiry simply because we object to his terms. Who knows? He may yet be vindicated.

III

Despite the excellent treatment of collective evil in the concluding chapter on Vietnam in People, Peck nevertheless falls back on the tired refrain about social change only coming about as a result of individual change. He leaves us with no clue as to how to redeem the monolithic, faceless institutions that bestride our world. Nor does he suggest how the church might help to make a difference, systemically. While the ink was still wet on People, however, Peck was already in search of an answer. Leaving his private practice behind, he hit the road, leading workshops all over the place on the creation of community. What he learned is the burden of The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace.

The opening line of the introduction sets the tone: "In and through community lies the salvation of the world."¹⁸ We are called, he says, to both individuation and interdependence. Genuine human community alone can heal the isolation and estrangement people feel in society.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 17.

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And community need not be hit or miss; it can actually be fostered. With training, large numbers of people can begin creating community wherever they are.

Communities, he has found, pass through four stages: pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community. In only two days, he can take a group through all four steps. But there are many ways to foster community, and some of them seem able to bypass the stages of chaos and emptiness. One reason Peck encounters these stages is that his workshops have no goal other than the creation of community. Most other groups, however, meet for other purposes, and community is merely a by-product of the process, not an end in itself. In our workshops, for example, community arises out of the joint effort to hear God speak to us through Scripture. There is no chaos or emptiness because these reactions are caused, in Peck's groups, by participants' fear that they may be wasting their time doing nothing.

Ideally, participants in Peck's workshops return home and act as midwives to create similar, but long-term, communities where they live. But there is a new problem here. Peck sees community as incompatible with organization. An organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure. Organization, he states, is never community, because no organization can tolerate the chaos and emptiness necessary to pass beyond group power plays to real mutuality. But this means, in effect, that real communities can only exist as ends in themselves, not as means to some other end. Alcoholics Anonymous is his model; it has virtually no organization, budgets, buildings, or leaders. Many Quaker meetings are similarly high on the community scale and low on the organizational. Is this then to be the model for churches of the future, as more and more parishes close their doors? The prospect is intriguing, and one I would welcome. But what about all the other organizations in which we find ourselves, especially the ones where we work?

There is no need, he insists, to distinguish between short-term and long-term communities. But where is one to find the latter? He lists "church parish, Hebrew school, or a business corporation."¹⁹ But these are highly organized groups, and Peck himself claims that community and organization are incompatible. The examples he gives of long-term communities are not churches or corporations, but a holy order and an intentional support group. Does he believe parishes and corporations can develop at least higher degrees of community? Indeed, he does (parts 2 and 3 of Drum). But this is the weakest of all his writing. There is simply no indication of how to move from groups that have excluded all other concerns but community to organizations that exist to produce a product or run a school or manage a government. It appears that we are still stuck where we were at the end of People: Individuals

¹⁹Ibid., p. 136.

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can escape the loneliness of modern society by joining a support group; individuals can find salvation from the anonymity of urban culture; but as to the real transformation of actual institutions, we hear virtually nothing.

Have we, then, just unearthed the agenda for Peck's next book?

IV

In an opus so richly provocative, scores of lesser issues could be pursued. Would he still be as enthusiastic about open marriage as he was in 1978?²⁰ Does he regret the misunderstandings he must have provoked when he said that he would have sex with a patient if it would substantially further her spiritual growth?²¹ It does not matter that he qualifies this statement so thoroughly that such an act would be virtually impossible. The fact is, all too many therapists and clergy are persuaded that just such occasions confront them, and they plunge ahead.

I found his delineation of four stages of spiritual development helpful (chaotic/ antisocial, formal/ institutional, skeptic/individual, mystic/communal)."²² I did find myself wondering, however, if they are not simply stages specific to the unique culture we currently occupy. What if children were taught to ask questions from the earliest age, especially of the Bible? Then a healthy skepticism would grow up alongside faith, rather than being the destroyer of an inadequate stage two faith. Thus, people would not tend to stay caught in stage three skepticism so long, sometimes unable to pass to mature faith (stage four).

Finally, I thought his only foray into traditional theological explication terrible. I refer to his treatment of the two natures of Christ. If Jesus had "two parts to his mind: a divine part and a human part," and the divine part knew all about his crucifixion and resurrection, but his human part was kept wholly in the dark about all this,²³ then Jesus is of all men most to be pitied. And he is certainly not one of us. How a thinker as subtle as Peck could repeat this old canard unreflectively is beyond me.

But enough. I have merely engaged Peck where he generated reactions in me. I have made no attempt to itemize the great number of insights to be gleaned from these engaging works. None of the criticisms I have made constitutes a refutation. They are, rather, conversation provoked by a stimulating partner.

We should be grateful to God for Scott Peck. Whatever his failings (and he himself is often the first to note them), he has found an enormous audience ready to listen to serious talk about spiritual growth. How fortunate that, in an increasingly secular society in which

²⁰Peck, The Road Less Traveled, p. 93.

²¹Ibid., p. 176.

²²Peck, The Different Drum, p. 188.

²³Ibid., p. 218.

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churches seem to exhibit less and less influence, someone is able to write in a way that goes straight to the hearts of millions of people. Peck is no popularizer. He thinks for himself. It is only regrettable that so few professional theologians can think and write so clearly.

A Response by M. Scott Peck.

Dear Walter:

Thank you very much for your kindness in sending me the copy of your article on my works. You did not have to do it. I also have no reason to quarrel with your article.

My work represents an evolution. Each particular work is a slice of my mind in the process of evolution, and hence each is highly imperfect. Had I the time and energy, I would do some significant rewriting, but instead I seem to be far more called in the direction of proceeding ahead with publishing evermore recent slices of my evolution.

Probably nothing has given readers more theological indigestion in The Road Less Traveled than the notion that we humans are called to become God (didn't Satan set himself up as God?). Even so, it is not necessarily a heresy, being standard doctrine in the Orthodox church, known as the doctrine of the "deification of man." You seem to make an allusion to it. Were I to rewrite the Road, I would not drop the doctrine, but I would add something like: "But there is a paradox here, and that is that we, ourselves, cannot become God except by bumping ourselves off. The process is one that real theologians refer to as kenosis-the process of self-emptying. The goal is imaged by that of the empty vessel, in which there is still enough ego left to comprise the walls of the vessel, but which is otherwise sufficiently empty to be able to become spirit-filled. Thus, it is possible for others to rejoice along with Paul, "I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ Jesus living in me."

I would also generally dis-identify God with the collective unconscious and would talk more in terms of the Holy Spirit, although that wouldn't clear up the mystery very much. Indeed, it would just add some, but that's fine with me. I am big on mystery for many reasons.

I would, of course, delete the section about having sex with patients, because it has been so misunderstood, and in footnoting the book Open Marriage, I would point out that at least ninety-five percent of that book is about communication, and very little about infidelity.

Finally, in regard to the statement, "With total discipline we can solve all problems," I would at least elaborate that sometimes the solution is that of recognizing that there is no solution, as in the serenity prayer of "accepting those things we cannot change."

In regard to People of the Lie, I really have nothing to add. I did my darndest to make it clear that I was treading on dangerous ground quite consciously. I am disheartened by the fact that we receive an

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occasional letter to the effect that, "Now I know that my wife is evil and my father is evil and my employer is evil, etc., etc." You may, however, be interested to know that far and away the most predominant response we receive reads, "Thank you, Dr. Peck. Now that I know my father is evil, I can forgive him." Until that time, the reader was so bound up in a mixture of anger, confusion, and guilt that she or he could not do the work of forgiveness.

In regard to your criticism of The Different Drum, I am totally engaged in taking care of it. For the past six and a half years, the entire cutting edge of my life has been working with others in the development of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, and through the work of the Foundation, I now have a whole wealth of knowledge about the relationship of community and organizations which I simply did not have when I wrote The Different Drum. Consequently, it is no accident that my sixth book, which I expect to be published by Bantam in very late 1992 or, more likely, early 1993, is about organizational behavior. It is currently entitled Civility, which I define as "consciously motivated organizational behavior which is ethical in submission to a Higher Power".

Finally, let me thank you for your tenderness. And your consciousness. Your describing yourself as "reeking with envy" is both vulnerable and holy. Thank you for being so balanced.

Gratefully,
Scotty
M. Scott Peck, M.D.