M. Scott Peck, author of perennial bestseller The Road Less Traveled, died on September 25 of cancer. “Life is difficult,” he wrote. It is a series of problems and we gain the wisdom to overcome them by discipline (and also through love, growth, religion, and grace). Who, among the reading classes of a certain age, has not read his book, or known what it was about?
Appearing as it did in 1978, Peck’s book was well-timed to offer a way for the baby-boom generation to sober up after the binge of the Sixties without actually admitting that their dissipations were rather more than harmless adolescent pranks.
But who knew? You wouldn’t know it from the obituary in The New York Times. You’d only get a hint of it in the obituary in The Washington Post. In fact, you’d have to go to the obituary in The Daily Telegraph to learn that Peck was not quite the paragon of wisdom he presented in his book.
On the contrary,
Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chain-smoking neurotic whose life was characterised by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children.
In the end, his wife divorced him and two of his three children wouldn’t speak to him.
Hey, nobody is perfect. But it is still a remarkable thing that in all these years as a bestselling author, lecturer, and celebrity, there was never a scandal about the rather significant gulf between Peck’s philosophy and his life. If he had been a fundamentalist preacher and had written a best-seller on the Christian life, we can be confident our liberal friends would know about his every pecadillo and be able to recite chapter and verse of his misdeeds to us upon request. And also without request.
It’s the great double standard of our age. Conservatives that fall off the wagon are hypocrites and frauds. Liberals that don’t live up to their principles are merely human.
And that’s how it should be, after all.
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