Pastor John Wright

I can tell that the end of the semester is quickly coming upon me. The nights are now filled with grading, and the days with assorted other work. I'm also trying to finish a 1600 page book (2 volumes) on Early Christian Mission for a book review I've been assigned. It's amazing how little can be said in so long a book! I find myself a bit fragmented, but trying to press on. I'm not sure if I've had a coherent thought in the past week. I haven't had much to blog on, though I still have the Fallujah rant building within!

The other week I read Scott Peck's "The Road Less Traveled." Many of my congregation have read the book. I wrote some responses to Peck's comments, and thought that I'd post them now to keep the blog moving while I go through this time. I find Peck to be very culturally conservative, though I'm sure this would surprise him. Indeed, it is ironic that many corporations have found that the "road less traveled" can help produce more productive, more subservient employees for the sake of shareholders. My comments, and people I favorably quote, are in bold print. Tell me what you think! Warning, it's a bit long.

Yes and No:
A Dialogue between M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled and John Wright

As a psychiatrist, I feel it is important to mention at the outset two assumptions that underlie this book. One is that I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same. 11

Peck begins by privatizing, internalizing, and individualizing “growth” through equating mind and spirit. He does not articulate what “growth” is from and what its end is. The social, political, and economic context of the therapy is ignored and suppressed.

Is it possible to spiritually evolve to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is at least diminished? The answer is yes and no. The answer is yes, because once suffering is completely accepted, it ceases in a sense to be suffering. It is also yes because the unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. . . . Finally, the answer is yes because the spiritually evolved individual is, as will be elaborated in the next section, an extraordinarily loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.
The answer is no, however, because there is a vacuum of competence in the world which must be filled. . . .Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call. 75

Peck resorts to Darwinian, Spencerian language of evolution of consciousness to explicate his position. The goal of the “evolution of consciousness” is to at least diminish suffering by accepting it and thus achieving a self-mastery – a Stoic moral conception. Then the (post) Christian virtue of love, is appended onto this Stoic self-mastery. The “spiritually-evolved” are able to function well (competently) to sustain the structures of the world.

Christians believe, however, that “friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James). By their redemption in Christ, we are not characterized by “competence in the world” but by living in unity, constancy and peace as members of the body of Christ amidst the fallen world. One engages in the Christian disciplines of the works of mercy and the works of devotion, not for self-mastery to diminish individual suffering, but to know the sufferings of Christ, and thus, to be immersed within the body of Christ for ones sanctification – the removal of evil tempers, replaced by the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love as seen in Jesus Christ. Consciousness is not evolved, but cleansed, re-formed from the desires placed into one by the world that lead to the sufferings of the world to a desire for one’s true end in God – through love of God and neighbor.

I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. 81

Peck defines love anthropocentrically, a definition that is ultimately narcissistic, and made ultimately private and therapeutic, for oneself or for someone else. Love is placed in the will, which is not seen as classically Christians have, with desire for the Good (and thus, God), but rather, seems to be a manner of self-determination – anchored within a medieval voluntaristic notion of the will.

In contrast, Christians confess that “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and gave the Son for us.” Given the sinfulness of the fallen world, one cannot move from the human experience of love, for our loves have been corrupted. Rather, we must understand love Christologically, in the gift of the Son by the Spirit and in the kingdom that he lived, taught, for which he was crucified, and then raised.

The process of extending one’s self is an evolutionary process. When one has successfully extended one’s limits, one has then grown into a larger state of being. Thus the act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else’s growth. It is through reaching toward evolution that we evolve. 82

Peck’s language here is largely pagan, filled with a modernist evolutionary language. Even loving others is for one’s own self growth, and thus done by our own effort out of a will. The end of love is found in oneself, not in participating in the Triune God who is Love.

Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions. On the other hand, whenever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made. 83

Here again is the modern transcendental self, anchored in the will – another remnant of Stoicism. For Christians, love is not a “choice”, but a desire that can find its only true end in God. Created in God’s triune image, we are naturally made for the supernatural, a desire for the love that only finds its completion in God. We cannot separate the will from knowledge, and thus love can only be originated in that which is not in the self, which is other than our selves. It is not that we do not chose to love, but that our loves have been distorted, perverted by the sinfulness of the world around us. Thus, in addition to sin as willful disobedience of God, sin is also inward, needing cleansed by the Spirit and directed towards our true end. One cannot separate love from the social and political context in which we are taught to love. Therefore, love is ultimately lived out as a member of the body of Christ, experienced in the Lord’s Supper.

I define dependency as the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another. 98

No human being can experience “wholeness” without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another. To suggest otherwise is to be embedded in hubris, a sense of self-dependence that takes one away from God and each other.

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. 105

The distinction in love is not whether one is attached or not, but whether one is attached to the Good. The opposite of sinful dependency is not autonomy or non-attachment, but attachment to a something that has its end in God.

The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution. 106

Not only does this misuse evolution, a biological concept, for a therapeutic concept, it shows that Peck never gets beyond his modernist core of a transcendental anthropology. For Christians, again, there is only one true end: God. One finds a certain Augustinian vestige in Peck that becomes idolatrous in its focus on the human self rather than the Triune God.

It is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions. . . . The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity. 139

For Christians, the highest form of love is conformity – conformity to the image of God that has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Free choice is not the ability for self-determination, but the healing of the will to desire what is Good, True, and Beautiful to be conformed to by the Spirit: God.

The final and possibly greatest risk of love is the risk of exercising power with humility. 150

One again finds the voluntaristic notion of love here.

The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved’s path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leadership. 151

With love placed in an autonomous will, false dilemmas such as this arise. For Christians, love is always a context of desire for the Good. Love of neighbor finds its end in love of God. While wisdom may be difficult in particular situations, this is not because of a logical tension.

The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her ‘wisdom’ and the motives behind this need to assume leadership. . . . This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. 151

Again Peck assumes that moral reasoning is an individualistic notion – self-examination is the key. Of course there is always the risk of self-deception – Christians know the depth of sin. Yet within the life of the body of Christ, past, present, and future, such wisdom may be accumulated. Self-scrutiny is not the essence of humility; obedience to the will of God as seen in the kingdom of God lived and proclaimed in Jesus is the essence of humility.

In the arrogance of exercising power without the total self-awareness demanded by love, we are blissfully but destructively ignorant of the face that we are playing God. But those who truly love, and therefore work for the wisdom that love requires, know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full consciousness of the enormity of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this consciousness to loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfill God’s will without mistake. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only out of humility of love can humans dare to be God. 155

Who can have total self-awareness? Whose self is a totality that can be aware? In submission to God’s will we know that we are not God, but only creatures, finite, limited, subject to change. To act as if playing God again is not a virtue, even if done with full consciousness of the enormity of the task. To speak that humans can “dare to be God” shows that Peck’s god is pagan, the projection of the therapeutic self of American culture, not the radically Other, the Triune God who created all that is out of nothing.

World Views and Religion

All human beings grow in discipline and love and life experience, their understanding of the world and their place in it naturally grows apace. Conversely, as people fail to grow in discipline, love and life experience, so does their understanding fail to grow. Consequently, among the members of the human race their exists an extraordinary variability in the breadth and sophistication of our understanding of what life is all about. This is our understanding of religion. Since everyone has some understanding—some world view, no matter how limited or primitive or inaccurate – everyone has a religion. This fact, not widely recognized, is of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion. 185

Peck seems to suggest that each person has their own custom “religion” – an inward disposition that they construct out of the inwardness of their self. Recent historical and theoretical research has shown that such a construct of “religion” arose with the formation of the modern European nation-state and is implicated within the colonial imperial interests that these nation-states pursued. By making the point religion rather than God revealed in Jesus through the Spirit’s power in the life of the church, Peck colonizes the church, effectively making it subordinate to the state’s control of the body while each person constructs their own private spirituality to help them cope with their private struggles without any social, economic, and political change.

To develop a religion or world view that is realistic – that is, conforms to the reality of the cosmos and our role in it, as best we can know that reality – we must constantly revise and extend our understanding to include new knowledge of the larger world. We must constantly enlarge our frame of reference. 191

Ironically, the largest frame of reference, God, depends on God’s revelation of God’s own Being. Peck seems to imply that we can move from the world around us to the nature of God. While we may be able to reason to the existence of God as Creator, God’s nature is utterly unknowable by us except as God has revealed God’s nature. Peck’s god is an ever changing projection, an idol that legitimates our own reference point.

Spiritual growth is a journey out of the microcosm into an ever greater macrocosm. 193

Peck again seeks the Cartesian move from certainty of the cogito to the world. Sanctification by the Spirit is having oneself more and more caught up in the love that is the Triune God.

We must continually expand our realm of knowledge and our field of vision through the thorough digestion and incorporation of new information. . . . . The road of spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction. We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything. 193-4

This is one of the most pernicious quotes from Peck. The “knowledge/faith”, public/private split here is placed in a way to turn the bodies of the students over the experts who provide “objective” knowledge. Therefore the student must submit to the experts, learning uncritical submission to the knowledge elite that manufactures knowledge to keep the world running as it is. “Spiritual growth”, the private realm, comes from disassociating oneself from one’s familial and ecclesial background to find a self within that is not tradition-constituted, and thus, open to experiment with new “markets” of commodities that are given like a smorgasbord for one’s private enjoyment. The path to holiness is not a Cartesian exercise of doubt that allows to arrive at the foundation of the cogito, the transcendent basis of the self, but the path of the works of mercy and devotion within the body of Christ in order to love God and neighbor perfectly, thus reaching the end for which we were created.

In a very real sense, we begin with science. We begin by replacing the religion of our parents with the religion of science. . . . There is no such thing as a good hand-me-down religion. To be vital, to be the best of which we are capable, our religion must be a wholly personal one, forged entirely through the fire of our questioning and doubting in the crucible of our own experience of reality. 194

Ironically, Peck does not see the contradiction that he is handing down a “religion” by positing that one must make a designer “religion” that is “wholly personal.” Peck here legitimates what Bellah called “Sheilaism” in Habits of the Heart. Here is the ultimate cooptation of the life of the church by privatizing and individualizing one’s life in light of God away from the social, institutional, epistemological, and liturgical communities that sustain one’s life in God. Peck thus becomes a means of de-ecclesializing our students. We thereby teach them to pursue their own private “search for meaning” into which, of course, we are socializing them. In the process we hand their bodies over to the state and the market for the control of their lives.

One way of analyzing Kathy’s problem would be to state that while she believed wholeheartedly in God, the commandments and the concept of sin, her religion and understanding of the world was of the hand-me-down variety and badly suited to her needs. She had failed to question, to challenge, to think for herself. Yet Kathy’s church – and this also is typical – made not the slightest effort to assist her in working out a more appropriate and original personal religion. It would appear that churches generally, if anything, favor the hand-me-down variety. 207

Paul has no problem with the Gospel which had been handed down to him: that Christ had died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that God had raised him from the dead three days later and that he appeared to Peter, the twelve, etc (1 Cor. 15). It seems to me that the Church sustains its life through certain truth claims about what really is. Therefore it must hand these down, much like any tradition hands down their claims for additional elucidation and clarification, and even re-statement. It is interesting that Peck believes that therapy can help teach persons to “think for themselves” – without seeing the irony and contradiction of such a claim.

Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmaticism? 222

Or is it false beliefs versus true beliefs? Isn’t it good to remain dogmatic about claims that are true?

There is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is God. This is what Paul Tillich meant when he referred to the ‘god beyond God’ 223

Of course all conceptions of God are inadequate. Christian theology has always operated in speech about God on the basis that is more accurate to speak of what God is not, rather than what God is. Of course, even to speak of what God is not must itself be qualified by recognizing it is still speech of God within creation, and therefore, fundamentally different that God. We can only speak analogically about God moving from God to ourselves in our categorical difference from God because God has become human in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, given the sinfulness of the world, God would be wholly unknowable.

There are within theology two lengthy and opposing traditions in this regard: one, the doctrine of Emanance, which holds that grace emanates down from an external God to men; the other, out from the God within the center of man’s being. 261

This is a crucial point. Since God creates from nothing, God’s otherness from creation is so great that the distinction between immanence and transcendence collapses. God is so transcendent to creation that God is immanent to it. There is not one realm of being into which God and creation are subcategories – this is what Heidegger called the “onto-theo-logic” in which one moves from present interpretation of humanity to ground these interests in transcendental claims about God – Peck is extremely guilty of this error. It is this that deconstruction with its critique of logo-centrality has criticized – and mistakenly inverted modernity to lead to a certain nihilism. Yet the Christian doctrine of God before Duns Scotus never made this error; it arose out of medieval nominalism and voluntarism. Rather, orthodoxy has affirmed that God’s Being is wholly different from the being of beings. Thus one cannot move from appearances to God as a transcendental basis for the appearances. Rather in God’s revelation of God’s own Triunity, we see that difference is not subsumed by totality, but can only be maintained in the unity-in-differentiation that is God.

The spiritual evolution of humanity can be similarly diagrammed: . . . This diagram of the process of spiritual evolution can apply to the existence of a single individual. . . . The diagram also applies to humanity as a whole. 266-7

True human nature is seen in the existence of a single human – Jesus Christ. This reality is therefore in the future for us: “When we see Him, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as he is.” Peck provides a parody of Christian convictions, correctly moving from the single individual to humanity as a whole, but not identifying the “single individual” with Jesus Christ.

Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in mankind as human love. 268

This remark is fundamentally nonsensical – blatantly false. Bacteria are alive – do they love? Love as the act of evolution? Does he mean survival of the fittest as love? Do amebas have selves to extend? What does human love as the manifestation of “evolutionary force” mean? Does this mean that the social Darwinism of Adam Smith in the “silent hand” is found engrained in the self-interested, autonomous human nature that legitimates the contemporary liberal political and economic order? This is onto-theo-logic at its worst – using “scientific language” to naturalize a transcendental human nature that anchors hegemonic powers in a “transcendental reality.”

Whence comes this ‘powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings ’? . . . . To explain the miracles of grace and evolution we hypothesize the existence of a God who wants us to grow – a God who loves us. 269

The direction of Peck’s argument is very telling. One moves from human experience to a transcendental ground in God – and then projects the character of the human experience onto the transcendental reality.

God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination. 270

Peck here again parodies Christian convictions. Indeed, Christians confess that God is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. All things come from God and will return to God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Yet one sees that Peck has only one order of Being: God is a Being among other beings like us that we can become through ascending a certain psycho-therapeutic order. This is very much a neo-Platonic system, reminiscent of Plotinus. Our being is fallen in its existence; we can transcend our material bodies (spiritually evolve) so as to become God. The distinction between creature and Creator is only one of power of Being. By achieving inward power, we surmount the material conditions of our lives to achieve divinity.

This is pure Gnostic mythology, promoted by upperwardly mobile early Christians who wanted to be Christian but avoid the political ostracism that came from not agreeing in the ontology, moral, and worship that upheld the surrounding Roman society. It was condemned even within the Apostolic writings, in Irenaeus, and in the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds. I am convinced the Christian Scriptures were collected and read to prevent the church from slipping into this error that undercuts the on-going witness of the church to God’s redemption of all humanity in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit.

What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always will be. 281

Peck’s neo-pagan idolatry becomes clear in equating God with the unconscious. God is equated with creation. This does not fit at all the empirical results of the best psychology today: does he mean that God is the neuro-chemical electronic impulses within areas of our brain not controlled by the cerebrum? Is God the chemicals within Prozac? But more importantly, the pure immanentism of Peck’s one order of being shows that by violating the Christian understanding of creation from nothing, one cannot speak of redemption except as a human accomplishment of becoming like God, and thus losing the distinction between God and creature.

If the reader is horrified by the notion that our unconscious is God, he or she should recall that it is hardly a heretical concept, being in essence the same as the Christian concept of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit which resides in us all. 281

Peck’s translation of the Christian doctrine of the Spirit into Jungian psychology is as disingenuous as it is plain wrong. For Christians, the Spirit is the gift of God’s very Being given to believers following baptism that adopts us a God’s children through Jesus Christ. The Spirit is not an immanent divine force filling some interior of all creation. As God, of course all creation resides in the Spirit. But the Spirit is the Love that binds the Father and Son together, one God: the Lover, the Beloved, and Love.

In my vision the collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them. Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God’s will and the will of the individual. 282

Here is the means of redemption for Peck: the personal unconscious. Rather than Jesus, fully divine, fully human in one person, mediating God to creation by taking on creation, each human individual becomes a locus of redemption. The Garden of Gethsame (“Not my will but thine be done”) is lived out within every human being in this interface between the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. Of course, it should be noted that the psychotherapist plays a crucial role within the redemptive process (if the client can pay sufficiently for his/her services). One notices that in Peck’s system, the psychotherapist, like a shaman of old, mediates the interface between the divine and the human so that the human may become divine. And only for $60 per hour!!

I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. . . . The point is to become God while preserving consciousness. . . . We are born that we might become, as conscious individual, a new life form of God. 283

A new life form of God – God is not complete in God’s own Being, but needs creation to extend and complete God. God therefore is a self-directed, therapeutic individual just like the late capitalist self that we can help even as we help ourselves.
For Peck there really is not ultimate ontological distinction between humanity and his god – like the Roman system based upon Stoicism, it is a fluid level that one can move up and down within according to one’s accomplishments.

If as adults, walking around on two legs, capable of making independent choices that influence the world, we can identify our mature free will with that of God, then God will have assumed through our conscious ego a new and potent life form. We will have become God’s agent, his arm, so to speak, and therefore part of Him. And insofar as we might then through our conscious decisions be able to influence the world according to His will our lives themselves will become the agents of God’s grace. We ourselves will then have become one form of the grace of God, working on His behalf among mankind, creating love where love did not exist before, pulling our fellow creatures up to our own level of awareness, pushing the plane of human evolution forward. 283-4

Humanity can help Peck’s god out, by creating love that God was deficient in creating. Salvation is awareness, a state of consciousness of our true being amidst the Being that is God. For Christians, however, God, in God’s Triunity, is the overflowing excess of love through which God brought us into being. No love exists that does not first begin with God; God in no way needs our love to complete God, for God already is the overflowing of Love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. Humanity does not progress through a “spiritual evolution,” but is redeemed by the God-human, Jesus Christ, who revealed God’s very self to us as he revealed true humanity to us as well.

There are two kinds of power – political and spiritual. Religious mythology takes pains to draw the distinction between the two. 284

Peck again transcendentalizes the distinction between the public and the private, confining the “spiritual” to inward experience that are expressed through “religious mythology”. Therefore communities of theological convictions are de-politicized and cannot challenge the status quo through their existence. They have no political standing in and of themselves.

Political power is the capacity to coerce others, overtly or covertly, to do one’s will. . . . Spiritual power, however, resides entirely within the individual and has nothing to do with the capacity to coerce others. . . . It is the capacity to make decisions with maximum awareness. It is consciousness. 284-5

Here is the ideology of liberalism in its truest form. The body is handed over to the state for discipline; the individual has a private form to help them with their own awareness. Ironically, this call for awareness depends on the political and economic ideology of liberalism remaining concealed by distinguishing between political coercion and private awareness.

The closer one comes to godhood, the more one feels sympathy for God. To participate in God’s omniscience is also to share His agony. 287

Again Peck’s neo-pagan ontology arises. Humans do not become “closer” to godhood, as if divinity is a state that humans can achieve by their own efforts. To suggest that humans share in God’s omniscience is the utmost of human hubris. We can share in the divine Wisdom, because God has revealed that Wisdom to us in Jesus, the Wisdom of God. We can participate in God, because God has created us in God’s image. But to participate in God is not to become God, but to become fully creature – to know that we are not God, and thus to take our place in submission to God’s will in God’s kingdom lived and proclaimed by Jesus on earth.

God is perfectly sufficient in the love that God shares as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore God does not feel “agony”, for that would be a lack in God. Suffering comes from lack, but God as God has revealed Godself to us is the abundant, overflowing harmonious Love. Humans cannot “feel” for God, for God is not humanity writ large, but incomprehensible fullness of Being.

This kind of aloneness is ‘shared’ by all who travel the farthest on the journey of spiritual growth. It is such a burden that it simply could not be borne were it not for the fact that as we outdistance our fellow humans our relationship to God inevitably becomes correspondingly closer. In the communion of growing consciousness, of knowing God, there is enough joy to sustain us. 288-9

Maybe a quote from Harold Bloom’s American Religion, would be helpful here:

“We think we are Christian, but we are not. The issue is not religion in America but rather what I call the American Religion. . . . There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life.”

“The American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude. . . . Salvation, for the American, cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one confrontation.” p. 32

In sum, Peck presents in a Road Less Traveled what Bloom calls a post-Christian, privatized gnosticism, that is, the American Religion. At best the book parodies the Christian faith; at worst, promotes a neo-pagan ontology that undercuts Christological convictions and replaces the life of the church with the redemption of individuals through the assistance of psychotherapists. In the book’s advocacy of assimilation to the social, political, and economic orders of the liberal society in which we live, we move our students from the life of the church to the life of “self-conscious, independent, loving individuals” who exercise their love for individual growth through their own free will. In other words, we turn them into selves that are fundamentally consumers within a neoliberal economic order.

Finally, I’d like to append quotes from a new book by two Eastern “religion” experts from Great Britain that comment on Peck. To conclude, then, are quotes from Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005):

Whether intentional or not, M. Scott Peck’s work insulated itself from the wider political problems of a ‘difficult life’ and addressed instead the narrower issues of personal development and well-being. His strategy is to draw on the resources of ancient traditions and offer the contours of an inner psychological journey. But while many were being nourished on this appetite of self-awareness it is hard to imagine that the twentieth-century of psychotherapeutic reconstruction of ancient insights was – perhaps unwittingly – imposing the language of privatization. For all its success, M. Scott Peck was part of a North American psychologised world that ignored or at least downplayed the social and political aspects of life. 54

“He argued that everyone has a religion whether they belong to a faith community or not. Religion is, in this sense, a personal ‘worldview’, often opposed to the ‘dogmatic’ traditions on one’s parents. This reflects a significant trend in Anglo-American culture in the late twentieth-century that has been crucial in the unhinging of the notion of ‘spirituality’ from ‘the religions’, namely, the notion that an individual can have their own private religion (or, as it is increasingly put, have their own ‘spirituality’). 55

Rather than locate such thinking in the wider concerns of any specific tradition, we find a refashioning of Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism in terms of the individual self. . . . What is never raised is the possibility that the ‘difficult life’ is itself a result of the modern psychological understanding of the self in western consumer societies. 55-56

Peck’s book is part of the challenges of life that play into the hands of modern capitalism. Indeed, psychology as a m odern discipline of the self is a political apparatus of modern society to develop and sustain consumers. . . . .Psychology is a mechanism of a wider ideology of privatization and individualization. This process of psychologisation is not created by a few individuals and then implemented, but rather evolves through a set of institutional demands and historical forces. In post-war western society, social control is established through the legal, political and educational reinforcement of a private (consuming) self. In this sense, mass control and collectivism are not just features of fascist and communist societies. Rather they are configured and hidden behind the capitalist doctrines of individual liberty and free choice. These different political regimes are certainly not oppressive in the same way or degree, but all socially control the individual for ideological reasons. Psychological individualism is a new form of mass control within late capitalist society, creating a form of subjectivity built on ideals of consumer freedom. It provides a part of the philosophical infrastructure and rationale through which economic and political systems operate. This is not a conspiracy theory of government control, but rather a network of processes determined by the dominance of corporate ideology (Rose 1990: 261-2). In this sense, the message of ‘democratic freedom’ and ‘individualism’ can hid the oppressive and abusive mechanisms of global corporate power. 56-7

Spirituality in its privatized psychological formation is not a cure for our sense of social isolation and disconnectedness, but is, in fact, part of the problem. 58