There we could let the subject rest, if it weren't for a sting in the tale. A shocking piece of correspondence between Campbell and the German novelist Thomas Mann from 1941 — just as the former was beginning to write The Hero With A Thousand Faces — reveals how easily mythic equivalence becomes moral equivalence. Responding to a talk Campbell gave entitled "Permanent Human Values", Mann wrote angrily: "It is strange: you are a friend of my books, which therefore in your opinion probably have something to do with Permanent Human Values. Well, these books are banned in Germany and in all countries where Germany rules today. And whoever reads them, whoever sells them, whoever would even publicly praise my name, would end up in a concentration camp, and his teeth would be beaten in and his kidneys smashed." 

Why was Mann so incensed? In Campbell's talk we find this: "We are all groping in a valley of tears, and if a Mr Hitler collides with a Mr Churchill, we are not in conscience bound to believe that a devil collides with a saint." That's sickening enough. But worse, Campbell refused to be corrected. In his diary he sneered that Mann's letter "exhibited a finally temporal-political orientation, and not only that, but a fairly trivial and personal view of even the temporal-political". 

Trivial? What a fool. What could be more important than to draw a clear and emphatic distinction between democracy and fascism? Campbell, it seems, was on the path to the New Age fallacy that we can turn all belief systems into equally delightful fairy tales, mix them together, and somehow be left with any values whatsoever. If we "follow our bliss" at the expense of truth, if we replace facts with feelings, if we ditch morality in search of experience, then we may find ourselves on a slippery slope from the courage of our common sense convictions to mere relativism. At the nadir lies a hippy-dippy indifference to the absolute horror of the Holocaust and the dying embers of civilisation.