At the same time, Campbell followed Mann's political (or "unpolitical") thinking up to a point, for he believed it was precisely Mann's unpolitical nature that made possible the deep humanism, the universal understanding behind these remarkable words. It was that transcendent care for the lovable uniqueness in every imperfect human that Campbell persuaded himself Mann had abandoned as he took a "partisan" antinazi stand in the thirties. In the twenties Campbell, as we have seen, had been deeply influenced by Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), a pessimistic endofthewar piece that defended the traditional state against democracy, and creative irrationalism against "flat" reason. Mann then called for moderns to develop per
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sonal internal culture despite the shallow values of civilization. In his journals Campbell wrote of that work: Mann spoke . . . however, against the onesidedness of every political achievement, and celebrated the twoeyed, ironic powers of the artist. The strictly balanced deed of the artist's pen or brush represented a heroic clearsightedness, and a salubrious affirmation of the balanced truth against every possible tendentious politicization. 48
However, as Mann changed his ideas on politics and society in opposition to Nazism, Campbell withdrew into a moral equivocalism that tended to say only that faults obtain on both sides in the great ideological battles of the day. The true artist ought to observe the human scene from a transcendent perspective rather than choose sides. This view was expressed, of course, in the 1940 talk "Permanent Human Values." As time went on, Campbell became only more contrarian about the matter.
He refused to let it die even in the different world of the decades after the war, except when he took sides against communism.
In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, at the end of his life, he defiantly went out of his way to cite Mann's Reflections once again, long after the tract's author had himself left its stance far behind. This time the World War I essay was quoted to the effect that economic and military imperialism, conjoined with "hypocritical democracy," were more the legacy of Great Britain and the United States than of Germany. One can sense Campbell's Irish blood rising as he records Mann saying in 1918 that "To my soul's satisfaction, I find nothing in German history to compare with England's treatment of Ireland." It is with obvious disappointment that the American must also note that during World War II, as England stood almost alone against the Nazi menace, Mann had considerably changed his tune, now going so far as to say, "Can it be denied, that the world, in so far as it is English, finds itself in right good hands?"
Campbell then cites two other writers in support of Mann's 1918 views, men who remained faithful to the spirit of those views even amid the flames of World War II: the American expatriate poet and admirer of Mussolini Ezra Pound, who "was at that time in Italy, broadcasting condemnations of the Western Alliance that were very much like those of Mann's World War I Betrachtungen," and the also controversial T. S. Eliot. Campbell then returns to the question of eyes,
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quoting Strindberg to the effect that "politicians are oneeyed cats." But according to the mythologist, the artist sees with two eyes, "and alone to him is the center revealed: that still point, as Eliot saw, where the dance is. 'And there is only the dance.'" 49
On the same theme, in Creative Mythology Campbell had cited a radio address Mann had addressed to the German people in December of 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor as it turned out. Campbell reproduced intact the lengthy catalogue of Nazi atrocities to date about which the novelist had informed any of his countrymen courageous enough to listen to him. Then, explaining his own role, Mann had remarked that the artist lives and works not for the glory of his country but out of individual "immanent need." Those last words Campbell italicized.
Campbell then went on to comment that Hitler's "monstrous empire" had now been replaced by "Stalin's no less monstrous slave state," to which was added "another Asian monster," the Chinese, and with it "a scientifically enforced Asiatization of world affairs." What does that mean? ''This is the old Bronze age world image of an absolutely inexorable, mathematical cosmology of which the social order is but an aspect . . . both Indian and Chinese." To this is now added the "equally inexorable Marxian notion of the logic of history." The leading challenge to these monstrous but outdated social machines was, not unexpectedly, "the politics of the free individual." 50 One thinks of the small but heroic and individualist rebel alliance in Star Wars confronting the vast machines and faceless storm troopers of the evil empire.
Now we must confront directly the issue of antiSemitism in Campbell's life and work. Robert A. Segal, in an article "Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism," has assembled a full collection of evidence to the effect that Campbell disliked both Jews and Judaism. 51 There are accounts of verbal diatribes on the subject from students and colleagues at Sarah Lawrence, and many illustrations from his books of the roundhouse condemnations of ancient Israel's violence and exclusivity of which Campbell was capable. "Campbell's wouldbe scholarly characterizations of Judaism evince all the stock antiSemitic epithets." Judaism is said to be chauvinistic, fossilized, nationalistic, sexist, patriarchal, and antimystical. Even primal peoples, such as Campbell's beloved Native Americans, are said to "possess a broader vision than Jews." And these attitudes, Segal noted, became only more pronounced in the author's latest books.
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As he became more interested in, and positive toward, feminine values in myth, Campbell spoke of the ancient Hebrew conquest of Canaan as a truly egregious example of pastoral fighting people subjugating the feminine and promoting warlike attitudes. In The Power of Myth, explaining the origins of the dolorous patriarchal monotheism that has long afflicted Western culture, Campbell declared that "The Yahweh cult was a specific movement in the Hebrew community, which finally won.
This was a pushing through of a certain templebound god against the nature cult, which was celebrated all over the place. And this imperialistic thrust of a certain ingroup culture is continued in the West." 52 In the "Secularization of the Sacred" essay, as we have seen, modern secularization is presented as an affirmation of values found in early CelticGermanic and GrecoRoman culture, which were later weakened by Christianity with its "Semitic" absolutizing of the particular sacred and its subsequent dualism. 53 In a significant article, Maurice Friedman touched on some of the same material as Segal, including Campbell's notorious encounter with Martin Buber, and also noted the mythologist's lack of attention to the Jewish holocaust—surely a deed whose blackness was of mythological dimensions, and which has shaped subsequent consciousness as certainly as has the bright mythologies of heroes and outer space. 54
Yet there are other perspectives in Campbell's work. In the introduction to The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Campbell had referred to the destructive power of mythological racism and Aryanism in such writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century as Gobineau and Chamberlain, and he drew from them the moral that "mythology is no toy for children," but can have explosive power in our own as well as any other age. 55 On the same page he wrote: "And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent could still talk."