M. Scott Peck:
The Author of A Road Less Traveled Moves Into Fiction
By Cat Saunders
In the late 1970s, a book call The Road Less Traveled hit the market and went on to become a bestseller. Because the book helped me a lot back then, I jumped at the chance to interview its author, Dr. M. Scott Peck, when he was in town to promote his novel, A Bed by the Window. However, I hadn't kept up with Peck's work since The Road Less Traveled, and I didn't realize until receiving the promotional materials that he had become a Christian.
Rather than turn tail and run when I found this out, I decided to open my mind and my heart to see what I could learn, and to discover the common ground between us. In interviewing Dr. Peck, or "Scotty" as he calls himself, I tried to listen to what he was saying behind the words of his Christian terminology. I was not disappointed. Scotty's mind is luminous, his compassionate deep, and his devotion to social justice and community is truly inspiring.
Cat: If you had to sum up your message in one sentence, what would you say?
Scotty: Well, I think I've got a number of messages. Complicated messages. I do have a sort of subministry as I go around the country, trying to combat simplistic, one-dimensional thinking. I'm amazed at how simplistic Americans think, so that even Harvard-educated physicians with IQs of 160 can say to me routinely that some illness is obviously psychosomatic, and then they ask, "So is that psychological or is it physical?" They act as if it's beyond the capacity of their cerebral cortex to comprehend that a disease, like the trunk of a tree, might have more than one root at the same time! Actually most diseases, such as alcoholism, are psycho-socio-spiritual-somatic disorders. So part of my message is that there are no easy answers and that there are multiple dimensions to things. There's lots of mystery! It's a very exciting kind of world. Cat: Since you're a Christian, you must have some very interesting ideas about the New Age Movement. Would you talk some about that?
Scotty: There's a talk that I give, Cat, my newest talk, entitled, "The New Age Movement: What in God's or Satan's Name Is It?" By that title I signify that I think that the New Age Movement is potentially a very Godly movement, but also it's a movement that has some real pitfalls. Basically I see it as a movement of reaction against the sins of Western religion, primarily Christian religion, and a reaction against the sins of science and how science has been translated into technology. Now I think that the sins of the technology and the sins of the Church are very real. And it's very appropriate and holy that we should react against them, and that we should be open to new ways of seeing things and doing things. I would say in that respect the New Age Movement is potentially very Godly. The problem with the movement is the problem with what we psychiatrists call "reaction formation," which is where, in reacting against something, we go to the other extreme and we get in just as much trouble. In reacting against the Christian Church and throwing out Christian theology, the New Age Movement tends to throw out the baby with the bath water. Because the problem, you see, with Christianity, is not Christian theology. As G.K. Chesterson put it, "The problem with Christianity is not that it's been tried and found wanting, but that it's hardly been tried at all." As a child, I used to look at Christians and as far as I could see, they were mostly phonies and hypocrites. And I thought, "Geez, this must be a bad religion!" But actually there's a great deal of good in Christian theology. The first time I gave my talk on the New Age, the person who was putting it on asked me if I would change the title and leave out the Satan because it smacked too much of negativity, with sin and guild. As a matter of fact, that reminds me of the only New Age joke that I know, given to me properly by a New Ager. Have you heard about the three ministers who were down in hell? Well, there was a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi and a New Age minister. They started talking about what they were doing down there. And the Catholic priest said, "Well, I was a whiskey priest, I just loved my booze too much. And that's why I'm here in hell. How about you, Rabbi?" and the rabbi said, "Well, I gotta admit that I had this thing for ham sandwiches. I just couldn't leave them alone." Then they finally turned to the New Age minister and said, "Now how about you? What are you doing in hell?" And he said, "This isn't hell and I'm not the least bit warm!" Cat: That's great!
Scotty: The Christian doctrine, to me, approaches reality and the reality of sin and guilt and evil and what not, more closely than the other religions do. Again, I use this word "approach" because that's part of my trouble with the sins of Christianity.
Reality, like God, is not ours to possess, but we are God's to be possessed by. The number one sin of the Church is a particular kind of grand and Christian arrogance and narcissism that says they've got God all sewn up and that they've got the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Cat: Would you talk about what you mean exactly by "devil" and "evil"? Scotty: Well, the devil is kind of a red herring in many ways. I had to deal with the issue when I was writing People of the Lie, because I encountered a couple cases of possession doing my research for that book. I was converted to including the Devil, but I don't know much about the Devil. Nor do I know that the Devil is terribly important. What roles the demonic plays, other than occasional rare cases of possession, I really don't know. I think you can talk about sin and guilt and evil without ever talking about the Devil. Regardless of whether there is or isn't a Devil, the fact of the matter is that we human beings have the capacity to learn and grow or to refuse to learn and grow. I mean, that's our basic big choice.
Most of us, if there is evidence around us that would point to our sin or imperfection or inadequacy or psychopathology—whatever words you want to use—will respond to that evidence by making some sort of self-correction. Often we have to be backed up against the wall before we're willing to say, "Wow, I guess I need to make a change!"
Those people whom I label "evil" have as their primary motive the need to maintain their self-esteem at all costs. They're not willing to bear any guilt or contrition or remorse.
When there's evidence that points to their sin or imperfection, rather than using it to make some kind of self-correction, they will often, at great effort, set about trying to exterminate the evidence. So if their children are part of the evidence that points to their sin and imperfection, rather than using them and saying, "Well, gee, I'm not the greatest parent, I need to make some corrections," instead they'll beat their children into submission, physically or psychologically.
There are many things, Cat, that are too large to submit to any single adequate definition, like God, love, goodness, evil, prayer, community. But what, you ask, is evil?
While there's no single definition, one of the better brief ones is that evil was once defined as "militant ignorance," as when people go way out of their way to remain ignorant or to remain unconscious of their own sin or guilt or evil. In People of the Lie, I define Satan as a real spirit of unreality. So evil has a lot to do with unreality, with lies. But if you believe that it isn't real, you can get in trouble.
Cat: In your new book, A Bed by the Window, you've stepped into the world of fiction. I don't usually find novels that grip me, because most of them lack substance. But yours was different. It was hard to put down. Would you talk about that? Scotty: Well, it's a murder mystery set in a nursing home, with lots of sex in it. Sex is a very mysterious subject! I don't think you can write much about life without having some sex in it. It's there. The book had its genesis in several ways. First of all, back ten or 20 years ago, as a country psychiatrist, I had a lot of experience, one way or another, with nursing homes, including putting my own mother-in-law into one. In the process, I lost my stereotypes about nursing homes. I used to consider nursing homes to be dumping grounds for the dead, nothing more. Mind you, they can be that, but not all the patients in nursing homes are the living dead. I learned gradually that there is a lot of humor, a lot of pathos, a lot of action. I learned that nursing homes had a very rich, exciting culture. So at least ten years ago, I said to myself, if I was ever going to write a novel, it would be about a nursing home. The other route to this novel came round about New Year's in 1977-78, when we had our once-a-year dinner with Madeleine L'Engle. She suggested that I might be so frivolous as to read some murder mysteries. This, incidentally, came after writing The Different Drum, and it was the first time in years that I didn't feel "called" to write anything. But I took these murder mysteries and went on vacation to Jamaica in January. I played golf like crazy down there, even though I kept getting messages from my back that I was overdoing it. The sixth night down there, I finished reading one of these murder mysteries and I thought, "Gee, it would be kind of fun to write a murder mystery," and then I went off to sleep.
The next day, being Sabbath of course, I threw my back out. So I was flat on my back in Jamaica, with absolutely nothing to do. I couldn't eve read, because I couldn't hold the book up. Nothing to amuse me but a Dictaphone.
So I thought, "My God, what am I going to do here for the next two weeks?" I thought about the preceding night, when I'd been thinking about writing a murder mystery. And I knew I'd always wanted to write a novel about a nursing home.
Suddenly I said, "Hey, how about a murder mystery set in a nursing home?" And suddenly, these characters that had been bobbing around in my mind for about a decade or so had what they needed—a murder, a plot, a setting. It all began to fall into place.
I guess I had two things I wanted to get across in A Bed by the Window. One would be for people to get a more realistic attitude toward nursing homes. The other thing is that I have some hope that people will get another of my messages, which is to become more conscious of themselves. Nothing new.
Plato said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." So I hope to get people to examine their lives, to learn from life.
This interview was originally published by The New Times (November 1990). To learn more about M. Scott Peck, please visit www.mscottpeck.com.
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