Wanted: Dream Man

A NEW IMAGE OF MAN (260 pp.)--Ardis Whitman -- Appleton -Century -Crofts ($3.50).

"Boy, what a stinker you're going to be next year!" gloats the little boy in the cartoon, as he looks himself up in the child-care book. This is no joke to Author Whitman, who feels that, in living too much by the book and trying to fit himself into patterns, modern man has become a pretty frightening character.

Even before Johnny is in kindergarten, his parents anxiously tick off each signpost of normality, and once he is in school, his teachers want him above all to integrate, to be as well-rounded and easy-to-handle as an apple. As he grows older, the boy can be measured scientifically so he will continue to be a round peg in a round hole. For example, a test will undertake to show not only how good a scientist he might become, but also how likely he is to betray his country. If he wants to be a journalist, he can read a book on writing for "people who are just about average." He can rate his happiness on a Euphorimeter and check up on his psychological health by answering questions: "Are you plastic? Are you always able to fit in?" Author Whitman is a Nova Scotia-born magazine writer, wife of a teacher and mother of two grown children. On lecture tours, she has long attacked this slowly hardening concept of man as "a million divided by a million." Even a belief in the existence of the "common man" can be dangerous, for men are apt to behave as they are expected to, and the common man may become deadly common -- conformist putty in the hands of science and society. He does not want to stick his neck out or get his feelings "mixed up" in things. He knows that strong feelings are as dangerous as disease, having read articles like "Emotion Can Give You a Running Nose." He is a pragmatist, a materialist, a "healthy sceptic," a "tough realist" --and Author Whitman warns--he is "as inadequate to our time as a bow-and-arrow on a 20th century battlefield."

Her dream man is the common man's opposite number, a lively, unpredictable fellow, unashamed to be crotchety, who keeps himself as free to judge society as society is free to judge him. He is guided by intuition and feelings as well as custom and intellect, is as concerned with the mysteries of religion and the unconscious as with the certainties of science. He might even become telepathic--there's no telling what he might do. Although he is clearly the product of a feminine imagination--in fact, he has everything but a dimple in the chin--this New Man would be an eminently desirable citizen.

Readers of Social Scientist David Riesman (TIME. Sept. 27) will be familiar with many of Author Whitman's ideas and characters; her common man is first cousin to Riesman's other-directed individual, her ideal new man a reflection of his inner-directed person. But where earnest Author Riesman deals at length with economic and political behavior, romantic Author Whitman deals, no less earnestly, with man's inner life, the role of the mystic and of the church, the possibility of rebirth or of what Jung calls individuation. Riesman writes as a social scientist, describing and classifying. Author Whitman comes close to being a preacher. She aims to persuade, and she often does. Many of her readers will reach the happy conclusion that the future of the race lies with all the little stinkers who refuse to eat their Jello. stick their tongue out at Grandma and at fate, and tear up all behavior books within reach.

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