The major biography of Campbell to date, Stephen and Robin Larsen's A Fire in the Mind, states that Campbell was antiZionist but not antiSemitic. 56 One relevant issue about which some misunderstanding seems to have arisen is that of Freud versus Jung in Campbell's work. Brendan Gill, in the New York Review article, claimed that Campbell liked Jung but disliked Freud, and thought this had to do with antiJewish prejudice; but it seems to me that even the original
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premise here can be questioned. One of Campbell's most powerful pieces of writing is a long section on "The Psychology of Myth" in Primitive Mythology, a real tour de force interpretation of myth in highly Freudian terms, from birth trauma to breast to discovery of genital sexuality. The most direct influence there was that very orthodox Freudian anthropologist Géza Róheim, to whose festschrift Campbell also made a significant contribution. 57 Róheim, and behind him Freud, is also prominent in The Hero with a Thousand Faces; we have noted the quote from Freud in the prologue to that work. But Campbell always seemed to accept the common wisdom that Freud is the best guide to the first half of life, Jung for the second. While Campbell appears to have become more Jungian and less Freudian as the years advanced, there is certainly no evidence of nonacademic bias. At the same time, his bias against the Hebrew God, and that deity's manifestations in three religions, is evident repeatedly. In the last year of his life, when he finally got a computer for writing, he named it Jahweh. "A lot of rules and no mercy," he explained. 58
Yet it is not quite true that Judaism was always portrayed negatively. In Hero there are a few neutral or even positive citations. A "tender lyric from the miserable east
European ghettos" is compared favorably to Jonathan Edwards's portrayal of an angry God, at the end of the chapter on atonement. 59 We must also not forget Campbell's close and highly fruitful relations with Heinrich Zimmer and Kurt Wolff, both exiles from Hitler's Germany because of Jewish connections. AntiSemitism was not his only prejudice: his Anglophobia was hardly less entrenched; England, English culture, and English persons also receive little if any favorable notice in Campbell's corpus. (Even his beloved Arthur and the Grail stories are cited mostly in German versions.) At the same time it cannot be denied that Campbell had some sort of recurrent emotional problem with both Jews and Judaism. Like the disturbing inability as late as the 1980s to forgive Thomas Mann for turning antinazi a halfcentury earlier, issues involving Jews were returned to and gnawed on over and over, more and more bitingly as time advanced. One is left with an unpleasant feeling of something very narrow lurking within the broad mind of the worldscanning mythologist.
A similar narrowness of focus is apparent as Campbell turned his capacity for creative mythology to the America he idealized. The mythic model American is clearly the freeenterprise "rugged individualist"
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of a romanticized past, one continuous with the earlier Grail quest, or with Tristan and Isolde's quest for authentic human love. What Campbell admired was somehow not the type of heroic individualism represented in his own day by, say, a Rosa Parks or a draft resister. How Campbell's political worldview was reconciled with his disdain for the JudeoChristian tradition, out of which at least some of Western individualism derives, is not explained.
In the Moyers interviews, reproduced in The Power of Myth, Campbell talked at some length about the American "myth," or rather myths, for he held that the United States in its pluralism has never had a single, unified mythology. The classic American goals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he said, are for the individual—but are buttressed by the cosmic orientation of the Great Seal, reproduced on the dollar bill. Its foursided pyramid represents the earth, and the descending eagle, the bird of Zeus, indicates the "downcoming of the god into the field of time." 60 By now Campbell was clearly well beyond any serious scholarly study of the background of particular myths. He was concerned only to preach his sermon to the world. 61
In the end, Joseph Campbell's political thought can only be considered a collection of unassimilated fragments, some brilliant, some not thoroughly thought through, some frankly based on prejudice. Toward the close of his life he seemed to realize that he was politically out of step with both left and right, and—like, eventually, Jung and Eliade as well—ready to give up on the whole political world. In a late interview he said: I don't know what politics can do. I think it's fair to say that I'm a little bit discouraged by the people who are involved in the political life of this country. I begin to feel it has been betrayed. Its potentialities have been sold for values that are inscrutable to me. 62
This is not the place to psychoanalyze Joseph Campbell, but two features of his character may be noted. First, from childhood, he was possessed by a dream or fantasy of idealized, and individualized, Native American life. Together with this, he had, like some irrepressible young brave, an incorrigibly rebellious side, well articulated in his saying that he was Western in India and Eastern in New York.
Second, one notes his revulsion against the filth of the world, countered by a Germanic passion for order and personal cleanliness.
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This trait was early registered on his collegeage trip to Mexico and Central America, and presumably was expressed also in the longlasting sexual inhibition his biographers mention. The syndrome was recovered on his later trip to India, where his interest in its ancient culture combined with deep distaste for the subcontinent's dirt, beggary, and inefficiency. It all ran together in his mind and left him feeling polluted. Whatever he took from India, or from other cultures, had to be on his own terms and leave him personally unstained. Individualism, standing apart from tribe and sect as an observer of the collective myths of others, and a preacher of those myths in forms that exalted the individual, was what was left.
Politics to Live By
Campbell discussed politics overtly less than did Jung or Eliade in published writings. But he let broadly political views, together with his rebellious individualism and various social and quasipolitical prejudices, permeate his general writing more than did the other two. It was clear he thought societies should have common myths, but they ought primarily to facilitate the selfrealization of the individual, especially in the role of hero. Myth was therefore the wellspring of individual enterprise more than of collectivism. It was clear also that he increasingly thought even accessible collective myths ought not to be those of established religious institutions.
Undoubtedly just for that reason, unlike a thousand institutional preachers, he apparently saw little individualist inspiration in the stories of David or Jesus. He looked instead, no doubt quite intentionally, to such halfunderground alternatives as tales of Camelot and the Grail, stories powerful just because they were unblessed by scripture or pulpit, or the medieval ecclesiastical establishment.
Where did this leave Campbell politically? Maybe with Libertarianism, although participation in a small and disputatious political sect would not have been his style. He even had problems with Republicanism, although he considered himself a "classic" conservative.
But two kinds of conservatives are to be found in modern society. It is a matter of what past one wants to conserve. Tory conservatives yearn primarily for the traditionalist "organic" society, hierarchical, largely rural, religion based, and in many ways quite authoritarian, which they imagine to have obtained in the Middle Ages.