The Power of Dr. Joe

Campbell was somebody I had heard of, but knew very little about. I dismissed him as another New Age crank, somebody whose mission in life was to blur the differences between religions, not to clarify them, and to reassure a spiritually lazy audience that their half-baked, disorganized religious ideas are just as valid as anybody else's. That was the impression I got from articles I read about him when Campbell-mania was at its apogee.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I saw most of one episode during Grovel Week 2002. I thought his critics were a little hard on the old guy (he was in his 80s at the time, and couple of weeks after the filming wrapped, he died). His examinations of the role of myth in the human psyche didn't seem wrong or foolish, and he didn't seem to be denigrating anyone's religious beliefs. I didn't doubt he was a pantheist or whatever, but that didn't disqualify him from speaking about myth qua myth.

This year, I caught another episode, and I saw that the critics were right. As a scholar of the phenomena of myth, Campbell's anthropological observations are fascinating, but as a thinker he is a solipsistic failure.

He says we should "go beyond the image of Christ," but not to recognize that he (Christ) was the son of God. Nope, Campbell is peddling the same line you've heard 10,000 times: all religions present images of one reality, but they're really just images. "This is basic Hinduism, basic Buddhism," the professor chides student Bill, who seems skeptical. That's basic "begging the question" -- asking someone to grant that you're right about a question you're discussing, before you've even discussed it.

The major problem with Campbell -- and his many disciples and like-minded prophets -- is that he strikes a pose of objectivity, looking down at believers as so many little ants in so many different ant colonies, when he's got some religious commitments of his own. He is quick to say that he doesn't adhere to anything like a religion, and that it's impossible to "define God" or however he put it, but then he makes a lot of statements about God and the divine that sound suspiciously like truth-claims. Upon further examination, they are truth-claims. Denying they are truth-claims is just a strategy to keep people from examining them rationally, where they fall apart. I don't want to spend a lot of time dissecting his views, but they rehash very old errors from the Christian and pagan eras.

Not only was the content ersatz, but the resemblance to the infuriatingly pretentious movie My Dinner with Andre was too strong to ignore. Two guys sitting around talking, one guy pontificating, the other nodding his head in wonderment at the Master's eloquence and wisdom.

What is the source of Campbell's enduring popularity? (I'm assuming PBS wouldn't want to showcase an unpopular program, and 17 years is a long shelf life for a talking-head TV show.) I won't pretend to answer that definitively, but part of the answer must be that Campbell comes off as an honest man. Nobody would trust their soul to someone they suspected was a charlatan.

More than that, as I suspected, he tells people what they want to hear. Inclining your soul to the infinite doesn't entail sacrifice, unless you're into that kind of thing. It's all about "peak experiences," things that make you happy and fuzzy-feeling. Campbell says that God has many images, many masks, but the one image that is incompatible with his philosophy is the Crucifixion, and the face that won't quite fit in with his mask collection is the one with the thorn wounds on his forehead; that man didn't say there were many ways to follow God -- he said that he was "the way, the truth and the life," not one of many ways, or truths, or masks, or images, or whatever other words we use to deceive ourselves.

You may have guessed that I did not give any money to PBS this year. Clifford and his friends excepted, the majority of what I see on PBS is self-important and unnecessary. Yet they endlessly pat themselves on the back, like the host of that evening's Grovelfest, a professor with a grey beard and a terminal case of intellectual superiority. "Time and again," Dr. Greybeard said, "We hear from people who say that other networks have shows they think they want, but PBS has the shows they think they need." Just for that comment, I'm not going to give them anything, ever. I may go to PBS's office downtown and steal a couple of their magazines to get my $6.40 back.

Digressions:

1. You can learn more about Prof. Campbell from this foundation started in his honor. You can also read an energetic, slightly intemperate dissection of his views from an Evangelical perspective here. There are plenty of other sources out there on the Web.)

2. I arrived at the $6.40 figure by taking the amount the Feds contribute to PBS every year ($320 million - a third of a billion clams!) and dividing it into the number of Federal-income taxpaying households (about 50 million, since the other 50 million American households pay practically nothing in Federal taxes). The number will be higher depending on where you live, since individual states kick in a total of $300 million. The source for the numbers is three years old, but I've checked other
href="http://answers.org/CultsAndReligions/Campbell.html">here. There are plenty of other sources out there on the Web.)

2. I arrived at the $6.40 figure by taking the amount the Feds contribute to PBS every year ($320 million – a third of a billion clams!) and dividing it into the number of Federal-income taxpaying households (about 50 million, since the other 50 million American households pay practically nothing in Federal taxes). The number will be different depending on where you live, since individual states kick in a total of $300 million.