Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber speak of the human being as radically dependent upon others, as an “I-thou” which can deteriorate into an “I-it.” Marcel describes the being of a human as a being-in-a-situation. Sartre is less optimistic. His human being is le pour-soi, the solitary consciousness existing in a dead world of things, l’en-soi. As for the other, Marcel’s person, Buber’s thou, Peirce’s listener, Sartre says only, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people. Finally, the Dasein, which has undergone a “fall,” a Verfallen into an unauthentic existence, can recover itself, live authentically, become a seeker and wayfarer, what Marcel calls Homo viator.

  The modern psychologist and social scientist cannot, of course, make head or tail of such existentialist traits as “a falling into unauthenticity” or a sentence like this of Marcel’s: “It may be of my essence to be able to be not what I am.” He, the scientist, generally regards such notions as fanciful or novelistic or “existentialist.” But perhaps he, the scientist, lacks an appropriate scientific model. At any rate, it is possible that he, the modern scientist of man, will be obliged to take account of these fanciful notions, not by the existentialists, but by their old hardheaded compatriot, Charles Peirce.

  Here is a prophecy. All humanists, even novelists, are entitled to make prophecies. Here is the prophecy: The behavioral scientist of the future will be able to make sense of the following sort of sentence which presently makes no sense to him whatever: There is a difference between the being-in-the-world of the scientist and the being-in-the-world of the layman.

  And lastly, with this new anthropology in hand, Peirce’s triadic creature with its named world, Heidegger’s Dasein suffering aVerfallen, a fall, Gabriel Marcel’s Homo viator, man as pilgrim, one might even explore its openness to such traditional Judeo-Christian notions as man falling prey to the worldliness of the world, and man as pilgrim seeking his salvation. But that’s a different story.

  Three

  Morality and Religion

  Culture, the Church, and Evangelization

  WHEN ONE CONSIDERS U.S. culture from the perspective of evangelization, certain impediments, as well as opportunities, come immediately to mind. The impediments are more or less obvious and might indeed be attributed to most if not all modern Western industrialized societies. The impediments are worth mentioning because, paradoxically, it is in their very presence and practice, in their very negativity, that there is to be found certain unique opportunities for evangelization in a modern culture. But, first, allow me to state a few obvious things about U.S. culture. It is necessary to do so because, having stated the obvious, I should like to draw your attention to another feature of American culture which, though not unknown, has certain far-reaching and less obvious consequences.

  The obvious features of this culture are, of course, its size and diversity, its tremendous ethnic variegations, its almost boundless religious pluralism. These are a commonplace, true enough, but a commonplace in which we take considerable pride. Yet in the very face of these manifold diversities there is at work a force, extraordinarily powerful but not necessarily beneficent, which makes for a uniformity of sorts. I am speaking, of course, of the mass media, television in particular. Americans, I have read, watch five or six hours of television a day—their children even more—and by and large the same television. There are at present only four major networks.

  Who can calculate the effect of such an extraordinary influence? To my knowledge, no one, no social psychologist, no information theorist, has the slightest notion of the impact upon the human psyche of such a massive input of images and words. We used to read about the cultural revolution wrought by the invention of printing. And revolution it was. But if books, written and read by a few educated people, turned the world upside down, how to calculate the effect of watching images on a small screen six hours a day, day after day, year after year, on the human mind, especially the mind of a growing child? One is familiar with certain obvious and superficial answers: that television does influence the consumer’s behavior in the marketplace, makes some people drink more Coca-Cola, fly TWA, vote Democratic or Republican, and so on. But such answers hardly address what is surely the radical effect on the psyche itself of daily time spent on media and messages approximating the hours devoted to working and sleeping. Surely, there has not occurred in all of man’s history an event of greater moment both for good and for ill, an event whose import is only barely beginning to be understood.

  But we were speaking of the impediments and opportunities in the evangelization of a modern culture for which television has great potentiality as impediment and opportunity. The impediments? They are familiar enough, have been cited by any number of social critics. They include such social pathologies as the breakdown of the family unit, the increase in drug abuse and teenage pregnancies, the alarming rise in the incidence of depression and suicide among the young, and—what is almost a commonplace—an all-pervasive consumerism.

  And one might add, at least from the Christian perspective, the ever-increasing secularization of society, especially of large segments of the more educated members of society. In this matter of secularization, I would insist on a distinction, a distinction which is surely all-important from the point of view of the evangelization of a culture. It is a distinction which must be kept in mind in the use of such terms as “secularization” and “scientific humanism.”

  The distinction which must be kept in mind is that between science and what can only be called “scientism.” It is one thing, in other words, to speak of the magnificent achievements of natural science and the technology derived there from—science, with which, it goes without saying, the Church not only has no quarrel but which it must surely applaud—because the Church is ever on the side of truth and the search for truth, and also because of the obvious benefits conferred on man by science and technology in such areas as the treatment of disease and the improvement of the material standards of life.

  Scientism is something else altogether. It needs to be mentioned in this context because it can be considered only as an ideology, a kind of quasi-religion—not as a valid method of investigation and theorizing which comprises science proper—a cast of mind all the more pervasive for not being recognized as such and, accordingly, one of the most potent forces which inform, almost automatically and unconsciously, the minds of most denizens of modern industrial societies like the United States.

  Science, natural science, let us agree, is primarily a method, a method of arriving at truths of a certain order about natural phenomena. Neither it nor its practitioners ever claimed anything more for it. Scientism, however, is a certain cast of mind characteristic of laymen and consumers of popular science and scientific technology, laymen who may be educated but who are at a remove from the method and practice of science. Scientism is characterized less by the practice of a method of discovery and knowing than by what can only be called a surrender of sovereignty and a willingness to believe almost as a matter of course that the scientific method by virtue of its spectacular triumphs and the near magic of its technology can be extrapolated to a quasi-religious all-construing worldview.

  To state the matter plainly: To the layman, the ordinary denizen of a modern technological society, it seems only natural that, in the face of the mysteries of life which confront him, the mysteries of nature, his own health, indeed of his very self and his existence, and the secret of his being—nothing seems more natural to him than that they know the answers. They, of course, are the scientists, the experts, the professors, the technologists of whatever field. And their fields of expertise are taken to include one’s very self.

  The impediments, then, to the evangelization of a modern secular society seem clear enough. They comprise mainly the secularization of the educated class and the loss of sovereignty by the layman to those whom he perceives an entire assemblage of experts privy to knowledge of every sector of reality—including himself.

  The ongoing secularizatio
n of the universities—not necessarily a bad thing—often falls prey to a scientism, a misreading of and extrapolation from the scientific method, of a very different sort. It is of the order of what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once called the “misplacement of reality.” Which is to say that, as a consequence mainly of the dazzling credentials of scientific theory, there is a temptation to assign a greater significance, even a “higher” reality, to statements of general theory rather than the statements of the particular events from which the theory was drawn. Thus, a sentence reporting an anomaly in an orbit of Mercury is quite naturally assigned to a “lower” order of significance than is Einstein’s Special Theory, of which it is, let us say, an instance.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that the evangel, the Gospel report of a single historical event—even though this event may be read by Christians as the single most important occurrence, the very watershed, of all history—should be seen by a certain set of the academic mind as exemplary; that is, as an instance of such-and-such recurring human proclivity for attributing divine manifestations to particular historical events.

  It is indeed difficult to imagine a less hospitable environment for the Christian evangel than this very set of the academic mind, whether scientific, literary, or historical, to whom it comes as second nature, and no doubt with good cause, to see all singulars, whether the appearances of Halley’s comet, or this novel or that play, or such-and-such a political revolution, as exemplary—that is, as examples of this cyclical movement of history or that expression of certain cultural influences which comprised the Elizabeth an literary renascence—or as an excellent demonstration of Newton’s classical gravitational theory.

  Thus, while it is all very well to speak of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ, and of the Church as a sign and a contradiction, a scandal and a stumbling block to the wise—and no doubt it is that—there is no need to make matters worse by countenancing a bad epistemology; that is, a theory of sentences which awards degrees of significance and value in direct proportion to the level of abstraction.

  The opportunities for evangelization arise, paradoxically enough, from those very cultural traits which seem to oppose the evangel—the secularism, if you will, of modern societies, especially American—the consumerism, the scientism, the so-called secular humanism. No, not precisely from the secularization itself, but from its having run its course, from its exhaustion. To paraphrase David Riesman and José Ortega y Gasset, there is no lonelier crowd than the mass man, the anonymous consumer who has exhausted the roster of “need-satisfactions,” as the expression goes, whether the latter be the consumption of the manifold goods of a sophisticated consumer society or the services of the four hundred or so different schools of psychotherapy.

  But there is this to be said for “secular humanism”—it is not neutral.

  Blow hot or blow cold, as the Gospel puts it, because we know what happens to those who blow lukewarm. In the present context, this injunction might, I think, be translated into the following cultural terms: Given two societies—one which is nominally and perhaps superficially Christian, say that of Victorian England or nineteenth-century Austria; another, a thoroughly secularized United States in the year 2000, when, let us suppose, the gurus of the psyche and the hucksters of the marketplace have had it their way, the Bible and prayers eliminated from all schools and universities, the Church ignored in the media save for an occasional rerun of a sentimental priest-movie like Bing Crosby’s Going My Way—given these two cultures, I should judge that the latter, not the former, would be the more receptive to a serious Catholic evangelization and renewal.

  It goes without saying, of course, that certain elementary human rights and political freedoms must be presupposed. The spiritual ground in the Soviet Union may be fertile indeed for evangelization, but not as long as the wall is still up, the air waves jammed, the presses closed, the gates locked. The news, after all, requires a news-bearer.

  The openness of a modern society to evangelization and the omnipresence of television as the dominant medium raise both interesting possibilities and some cautionary questions in the matter of the relationship of the Church and culture. Clearly, if the average American and, for all I know, the average European watches six hours of television daily, what better medium can be imagined for the Church than television, which can transmit not only the words of the evangel but the entire panoply of the liturgy of the Church in all the splendor of its imagery, music, and rites?

  Yet certain reservations come immediately to mind—and I am not speaking of the obvious unacceptability of viewing Mass on television as a substitute for assisting at Mass. I speak rather of certain special circumstances which obtain in the present-day culture of the media, at least in the United States, and especially in radio and television. Indeed, it is not too much to say that television and radio as religious media have been all but appropriated by a certain sort of preacher—not, by and large, ministers of the mainline Protestant churches, but rather various individuals, “TV personalities,” who put themselves forward as evangelists, preachers of the Gospel, ministers of the Holy Spirit, and so on. Some dozen or so of these TV evangelists have achieved a species of stardom, acquired a great many followers, and have enjoyed great success in combining both a fundamentalist evangelical message and an appeal for money.

  Some of these media evangelists have, unfortunately, been overtaken by public scandal of one sort and another. And though others are undoubtedly persons of good character, the general tone of the “religious program” has come to be perceived as comprising elements of showmanship, emotionalism, fundamentalism, and commercialism in such degree as to render them suspect to many, no doubt most, educated people.

  I mention this well-known state of affairs only to raise an intriguing question, the question, in a word, of the place of the Catholic Church in a society which seems to be increasingly polarized between a more or less educated class, certainly numbered in the millions, who are more or less informed by secular and scientistic values, and a clearly less educated class, at least as large, who might well express themselves as opposed not only to what they perceive as “atheistic science” and the “godless universities” but also, and quite as strongly, to the “rites and superstitions” of older Christian churches, and most specifically the Catholic Church.

  Given the fact that the Catholic Church is the largest single religious body in the United States, some forty or fifty million communicants, and given the fact that it is now thoroughly “Americanized” (if that is the word)—that is to say, that it is no longer the immigrant Church of years ago, a composite, that is, of ethnic minorities—it is surely a matter of no little concern to identify the role of the Church in the rather singular mix which comprises U.S. culture today. To put it bluntly, what is the role of the Church in a society increasingly polarized, as described above, by the powerful forces of secularism, scientism, and consumerism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gathering reaction to the fundamentalist sects so prominent in the media? More specifically, given the Church’s love of and respect for the truth, including the truths of natural science, how does it proceed in such a society to discharge its commission from the Lord to carry the good news of the Gospel to the ends of the earth? In a word, to evangelize the pluralistic culture in which it finds itself? Surely the Church does not discharge this commission by adopting a fortress mentality, as it did earlier, and no doubt understandably, what with the dominant and hostile Protestant culture in which it found itself, and, as it might be tempted to do now, to erect barricades against what well might be perceived as an increasingly disordered if not pagan society.

  To return to the impediments and the opportunities: the latter were never greater. It is, paradoxically, the very all-pervasiveness of the secularist-scientistic ethic which creates its own opportunity. As Kierkegaard said of the science of his day, mostly Hegelianism, and given the impulse to extrapolate from a method of investigating a certain order of truth to an all-cons
truing quasi-religious worldview—this scientism, said Kierkegaard, explains everything under the sun except what it is to be a man, to live, and to die. Nor do the manifold delights of consumerism and six hours of TV a day change this state of affairs. Indeed, it is in the very face of this massive consumption of goods and this diversion by entertainment, either despite it or because of it, that psychiatrists, not priests but psychiatrists, have remarked the ominous increase in the incidence of depression and suicide—to say nothing of the recourse to drugs. In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

  I shall not presume to say more about the impediments and opportunities for the evangelization of a modern culture, except a final word about the special and indeed unique case of television. By the very virtue of its technique, its instant transmission of word and image, its near-total access to the entire population of a modern society, it would be difficult surely to imagine a more perfect instrument through which the Church can teach, inform, indeed evangelize.

  Yet, by and large, at least in the United States, the Church does not. I am not prepared to say whether it should or should not, what with the bad odor of TV evangelism in general, as mentioned earlier.

  What I cannot help but remember, however, is the effectiveness of a Catholic pioneer in TV evangelism. I am thinking of the telecasts of Monsignor Fulton Sheen some thirty or so years ago, a program which had an extraordinary following, both among Catholic and among non-Catholic viewers, and an extraordinary influence, I happen to know, upon the latter. Whether such use of this medium is advisable today—and whether such a communicator is available—is not for me to say. It is enough for now to call attention to this extraordinary medium—its inestimable influence on the lives of 250 million Americans—and the Church’s neglect of it.