LOST IN THE LAND OF OZ The Search for Identity and Community in American Life<i> by Madonna Kolbenschlag (Harper & Row: $16.95) </i>

The title is intended to imply that Americans are lost, deluded by a need to believe in “patriarchal authority” (symbolized, of course, by the Wizard), but readers are likely to conclude that the author is lost as well, for rather than simply developing her feminist theories, she wanders off the yellow brick road, ruminating discursively on theology, politics, biology and anthropology. On one page, for instance, Madonna Kolbenschlag, an ecumenical fellow at the Washington Cathedral, is the academic discussing “horizontal violence” and “colonized consciousness,” while on the next, she’s the news analyst commenting on airline accidents, the Challenger disaster, the 1987 stock market crash, Contragate and scandals on Wall Street and in the PTL club.

But while the links between Kolbenschlag’s individual ideas sometimes seem tenuous and fragile, her free-spirited inquiry often ends up illuminating subtle and telling social patterns. In discussing the above fiascoes, for instance, she targets a common pathology--the growth of a power elite “infected with individualism and omnipotence”-- that suggests the dark side of the Information Age. She writes of the “heroic” airplane captain who discourages feedback from his flight crew, space program managers lulled by “the myth of the machine that never fails,” cabals of political and business leaders hoarding power. Kolbenschlag believes that to some degree we all share this tendency to be dominating, secretive and exclusive, for it stems from our national myths, which present the American as a New Man and America as a New World. We are largely self-made, Kolbenschlag contends, rather than connected with history and community, tied to bureaucratic roles rather than to each other. “Abandoned by history and cast upon the shore of a wilderness,” Kolbenschlag writes, we are forced to “create a world (and ourselves) in the process. Neither identity nor security is given.”

Kolbenschlag’s concern with these issues is more than academic, for she believes that these damaging myths help explain why she, her friends and her readers, all materially privileged, nevertheless have come to feel like “spiritual orphans,” disenfranchised and powerless over their own fate. She tries to develop an alternative philosophy, consequently, in the book’s final chapters. The appeal of her philosophy is diminished by its Luddite-like scapegoating of technology and by its undercurrent of hostility toward men (the feminine pronoun is used to describe noble traits, while the pathological character is always “he”).

Her Utopian vision is eloquent and inspired, however, drawing from James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis,” which views the Earth as a single organism. She points out that the billions of synapses in the human brain each relate to one another uniquely, for instance, and wonders why human relations must be governed by “crude and primitive systems like patriarchy and technology. Could anyone doubt that we would somehow have to honor and imitate Mother Earth herself--the embodiment of the divine purpose of creation?”