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FREDERICK C. CREWS
a psychoanalytic one-that he purge himself of theological nuances.
Regardless, therefore, of the personal determinants behind Brown's
eccentric form of Christianity, we might profitably ask what his books
reflect about the culture we share with him.
In the broadest and simplest view we might say that Brown's
appeal rests on
his
anti-intellectualism; perhaps no one has ever
marshalled such a show of learning in behalf of an end to rational
knowledge. The contradictions and non sequiturs in his argument
seem unimportant to many readers, so anxious are they to believe
what Brown is telling them.
As
men begin to articulate their feeling
of slavery to the tools and the inorganic surroundings they cannot
stop creating, reason itself is chosen as their scapegoat. Dispassionately
considered, Brown's works ought not to strengthen this prejudice; one
of
his
cardinal points, after
all,
is that unreason lies at the base of
our money and production systems. Heinz Hartmann wrote in 1937
that no society has ever labored under a surfeit of intelligence; the
point remains true. But in fact Brown is as anxious as anyone to
indict reason along with the compulsions that act in reason's name.
If
few of
his
adherents show any skepticism toward "The Psycho–
analytical Meaning of History," it is not because his vacant laws of
recurrence are pondered and believed, but on the contrary because
he insinuates that we needn't believe in history at all.
As
Hayden V.
White has recently argued,
Life Against Death
is anti-history, a
downgrading of the whole idea of bothering about the past. In this
sense it matches the antagonism toward impersonal, chronological his–
tory shown by virtually every significant modern writer. White finds
this antagonism refreshing because it opposes stale conventions of his–
tory-writing, but surely this is trivial next to the shattering thought
that the Western world may be losing faith in the meaningfulness of
its past. The vogue of Norman O. Brown appears to coincide with
a suspicion among many literate people that man's cultural ideals have
always been illusory, and hence that the accumulated bloodshed of
history has been a farcical waste.
This suspicion is understandable, but it is less clear why Brown's
humorless utopianism should seem different in kind from the vanities
of the past. The utopias that Marx ridiculed and the one he finally
advocated were less of an affront to the best knowledge of their time
than is Brown's reign of body narcissism. But Brown's appeal is
precisely to those whose one intellectual conviction is that they have
