Christopher LaschReseñas

A brilliant analysis of our secular dreams and hoops, our blind spots and foolishness, or to help us all figure out what we believe and where we are headed as the twentieth century comes to an end.

My second Lasch after Culture of Narcissism. Like that book, this one has some hard sentences to swallow for your typical left-leaning bloke. The thing that kept Lasch living in my head for weeks after I finished Narcissism and will after finishing this book too, is that it's difficult to read his books as a person on the left-side of the tracks and not come away with at least a few of your long held suppositions about society shaken to their core. This verve partially comes from the clear satisfaction he takes in being a contrarian, an instinct that I can imagine was forged in too many meetings, demonstrations, and protests where he was surrounded by people that all thought the same way and were proud of it - a condition that is sure to lead to overconfidence, pretension, and hardened notions of what is "right" and "wrong". Sometimes Lasch comes at the "sacred cows" of the leftist program (abortion comes to mind) in a way that can incite a twinge of annoyance - but I think these critiques must be understood as a way of exploring the real implications of political ideologies, rather than relying on rote platitudes that both sides have been telling themselves about what they believe for decades. I think a central theme of this book is the idea that the true motivations of people in a democracy are not always what the people say they are - Lasch, despite his harsh tone, is incredibly empathetic in his instinct to understand what drives people to make the decisions they do, even when considering "less enlightened" opinions, the anti-bussing movement in 1970s Boston for instance. The key thing to remember here whenever you feel like Lasch is leading you down uncomfortable paths, away from the safehouse of liberal doctrine, is this: he is at bottom a true democrat (small d) and anti-capitalist. As such, he sets himself against all elitism and and financial interests, the two classic enemies of left thought - a fact that has tragically been buried by American liberalism of the last 50 years. If you keep an open mind, Lasch will show you how your liberal opinions have actually been infected by these twin cancers, and how no leftist movement can succeed until they are excised.

It's important to recognize that Lasch's definition of "progress" is different than the way it is typically used in popular discourse. I have no doubt that Lasch would include the identity politics that we now identify with progressivism in his critique had he lived to see their development as it stands today. It's safe to say that the liberation of various groups that have been historically oppressed is of course a good thing, and the "progress" we've made in the time since Lasch's book was published is a net good in my opinion, though I'm sure Lasch would do his best to attenuate that opinion if he could. However, the "progress" that Lasch is critiquing here is explicitly defined in the beginning and (especially) the end of the book as bigger than the word as we typically use it. So big, in fact, that it can be difficult for people who grew up in the society as it stands today to even recognize it as a idea that can have any alternative, it is so taken for granted. It is essentially this: having thrown off the strictures of religion and tradition, a huge part of humanity believes that our ability to expand (our knowledge, our economy, our lebensraum) is essentially infinite. Lasch here is gravely warning against this ideology, which by this point has become the unquestioned norm. He is mourning the loss of limits, without which human ambition becomes avaricious, pompous, destructive. In this book, he is documenting what he sees as the spiritual, economic, and (for this he deserves much credit for being ahead of his time) environmental degradation of humanity and the planet. The biggest, baddest manifestation of this loss of limits is the looming, seemingly unstoppable reality of climate change, which has made clear the absurd wastefulness and profligacy of Western life, and highlighted the insidiousness of capitalism's promise that it can spread this standard of living to every person on Earth. What may seem like a generous promise of global prosperity, is instead a base money grab, and struggle for survival for an economic system that needs constant growth and expansion of markets to keep itself alive.

Though he may get lost in the weeds of political theory and history, Lasch is essentially trying to layout a secular version of what almost all religions have taught - human effort is, in the end dwarfed by the machinations of God, and that to try and transgress the limits of existence is to call disaster upon yourself. Though the reality of a higher being seems to have been refuted a long time ago, it is of utmost importance that humanity, especially nonbelievers, recognize the value of such a concept, and which trampling upon and leaving in the dust of history has contributed so much to creating the precipice we now find ourselves looking over the edge of.

This is a well-written and valuable book. Coming from a left-leaning perspective, Lasch’s critiques of what most Americans would consider the foundations of “liberal” politics are novel and cutting, even over 40 years after the publication of this book. For someone who doesn’t consider themselves as allied with either stream of mainline American political thought, it’s amazing how much of the political dogmas you still might absorb. There were dozens of times reading this book where I encountered a perspective on a problem that I simply had never even heard of before, let alone considered. The stock liberal/conservative tropes are so drilled into my brain that I often found my self trying to place Lasch in some kind of paradigm, only to remember that his whole project here is to undermine that kind of thinking. Lasch is definitely acting as contrarian here, and I can’t say I agree with everything he says. His views on Feminism, while interesting and worthwhile, are almost certainly outdated at this point. But as someone who values argument for arguments sake, i found a ton to think about in this book.

Most relevant to my life, and I would expect for most people in their late 20s early 30s, are Lasch’s views on education, sexuality, and the idea of societal progress. I had taken it for granted my whole life without really being conscious of it that public, state-run education systems were a flawed but commendable ideal - Lasch in just a few pages demonstrates the obvious problems with this ideal; the homogenized standards that hold everyone, regardless of ability, interest, or personality to the same bureaucratic standard; the degradation of educational standards that comes from pushing so many different people through the system; the idea that the school is now the fulcrum of a child’s entire life and that it’s held responsible not just for their academic education but also for their physical fitness, mental health, even practical skills like keeping house, cooking, repairing things etc.
In the chapter on sexuality, Lasch trots out some of the Freudian mumbo jumbo that sometimes sneaks into the book that I don’t care enough about to truly understand - at best these segments were a kind of surrealistic intermission from the rest of the book with nightmarish descriptions of vaginas with teeth and women with man-crushing legs. But I do think Lasch’s insight into the emptiness of the sexual environment is still pertinent. So many people of my generation, myself included, have been hardened and disheartened by modern dating, bulwarked as it is by dating apps, social networks, face-tuned photos, and ghosting. In many ways this situation couldn’t have been better designed to suit the narcissistic zeitgeist that Lasch is critiquing. For a while I’ve had the intimation that the economic and environment past and prognosis under which we grew up has scarred us in a way that pushed our generation into fickleness and unreliability, cultivating a “zen” feeling towards the temporary nature of relationships and external conditions, only as a coping mechanism against the ever-rising sensation of danger and instability.
All of this ties into Lasch’s main point which is that the left has too long been associated with, and drawn it’s inspiration from, an unbridled tendency towards “progress”, and that this progress, in the process of changing some truly outdated and disgusting societal problems, has also destroyed the things that have moored humanity since time immemorial. I came of age during the first Obama campaign and victory and found it super inspiring. I remember at that time the general tenor among the liberal adults around me was that the progressive ideal was coming to fruition. Of course that wasn’t true, both in the actions of the Obama administration once in office, and the shocking rebuke of this ideal when Trump was elected. I’m sure there are million things written about Trump as the manifestation of Lasch’s idea of narcissism, so I won’t wade into those deep waters. But left leaning folks have been been in the ideological wilderness for a while now, and I think letting go of this oppressive idea of “progress” could be a way out. One thing Lasch makes clear is, the “progress” we’ve talked about for so long is not that of the average person - it is instead that of cynical, exploitative capitalism, one of which’s most striking features is its ability to absorb any criticism and opposition into itself and use it against its dissidents.

What keeps Lasch relevant for me, is that despite his seemingly conservative views or retrograde inclinations, he is always clear about what the problem is here: capitalism and bureaucracy run rampant. If anything can draw the two sides of the political spectrum in America together, it’s this common enemy.

As a side note, it feels extremely timely reading this book after getting into Norm MacDonald over the last few months, mostly thru YouTube videos, and then after the comedians recent death. Through what I learned about him in interviews and such, MacDonald wouldn’t have called himself an anti-capitalist or leftist by any stretch, but I feel like he had a Laschian streak for sure; never following any party line, politically undefinable, aggressively down to earth and plain spoken, never afraid to touch the third rail of any issue. Despite differences of opinion or background I will always have an appreciation for brilliant, principled people. Lasch and Macdonald were both most certainly that.

too good to lose half a star for this, but too much freud

A couple times I almost tossed this aside, but then I rather liked it in the end.

At times it seemed ranty and overly focused on the 70s. At others, and sometimes simultaneously, it seemed like it could've been written last year and was a cogent criticism of modern society--in some ways worse in the exact ways the author criticized forty years ago.

Lasch deploys liberal and conservative criticism alike -- sounding almost Marxian in his criticisms of capitalism at times and Reaganesque in his comments about the family at others -- but not incoherently.

I went in to this book unaware of the book's details but with a vague notion that it was from a conservative point of view. So, while disorienting at first, I appreciated Lasch's ecumenical approach -- I don't think either side has all the answers and there are surely things to criticize American capitalism for as well as to praise the American family for.

Lasch ties these disparate critical threads together in a persuasive criticism of a decade that is, for all its seeming differences, it similar to our own. In some ways, this was the most sobering realization for me -- that many of the legitimate criticisms he makes are still extant and arguably worse in more than a few cases today.

I read this a long time ago and don't remember a lot, but it is true most people are too self-involved.

I really tried to stick this out. My reasons for being attracted to it, are that many of my jobs had narcissistic humans that I was involved with out of necessity, and, being able to see through them right away, and being puzzled that others weren't, I wished to try to understand them more. Well, this was not the book to help me do it. For one, it's just too dated; while it may have basically relevant truths about narcissists, they just didn't mesh with the reality of 2019. For two, it's written in a dry fashion, and is just not user-friendly.

Chock full of trenchant insights about what forms and constitutes our cultural narcissism. A tad too much Freud and Marx for my taste, but even those frameworks are utilized deftly.

A useful look at where Lasch feels industrialization, technocracy and mass media have led the American family and what that’s done to generations of its kids, some of whom make for insufferable bosses today.

Somewhat underwhelming, seeming to stop on a dime without a overarching argument tying the essays together. But, posthumous, so maybe that’s on me.

This book is amazingly prophetic and a great analysis of the world as it is today, but was written in the early 1990s. Essentially, the argument is the same as Charles Murray and many others have made -- assortative mating, changes in economics and ideals, etc. have split the "elites" (basically, professionals and anyone involved in information work or "scalable work") from everyone else, and has only gotten more obviously true post-2000 and post-2008.

The book is split into 3 parts. First is the (almost obvious, today) argument about the elite/common split. Second is about historical academia and almost Marxist or at least socialist issues. Lots of arguments against academia, arguments against Diversity/etc. as racism of low expectations, and that it essentially reinforces the rich vs. poor, etc. Third continues this but primarily from a political and academic basis.

It's interesting that these arguments were made very well and yet everything still happened and seemed to be a surprise to everyone as they happened. Oh well.

This would have been 5/5 if split into 3 parts -- the then getting rid of everything but the beginning. The weird academic arguments against academia got tedious and seemed to not really ultimately be about anything meaningful, unlike the simple argument of the schism in society.

Part of the reason the book is a bit jumbled together of various parts is that it was published posthumously and probably consisted of a range of stuff which otherwise would have been in separate books.

L'essai de l'historien américain Christopher Lasch -dont la première édition date de 1979- est assez exceptionnel par la densité et le spectre de son analyse, la qualité de pensée de son auteur restituée dans une écriture particulièrement claire et fluide (superbe traduction française de Michel L. Landa).
Avec beaucoup de lucidité et de hauteur, Christopher Lasch scrute et inspecte "l'homme psychologique de notre temps" à travers le prisme d'un développement fulgurant du narcissisme, que ce soit à travers la politique, l'éducation, le travail, le sport, la technologie, la santé et bien sûr la vie personnelle. Il dénonce ainsi de manière assez magistrale l'épuisement du sens de la vie qu'engendre la société de masse et de contrôle et l'illusion d'une contestation permanente des valeurs bourgeoises qui s'adosse en réalité à un nouvel esprit capitaliste.
Bien que la révolution numérique n'avait pas encore sonné à l'heure où Christopher Lasch a écrit son livre, ce dernier n'a rien perdu de sa pertinence et de son actualité à bien des égards, grâce à son intelligence intrinsèque.
De nombreuses phrases claquent et interpellent tout au long de ce livre, notamment dans sa première moitié dédiée à l'invasion de la société par le moi, la réussite sociale et le théâtralisme de la politique.
Le ton est donné dans la préface, dans laquelle on trouve les propos suivants :
"Partout, la société bourgeoise semble avoir épuisé sa réserve d'idées créatrices. Elle a perdu le pouvoir et la volonté de faire face aux difficultés qui menacent de l'engloutir. La crise politique du capitalisme reflète une crise générale de la culture occidentale, se révèle impuissante à comprendre le cours de l'histoire moderne ou à le soumettre à une direction rationnelle. [...] En faillite sur le plan politique, le libéralisme l'est tout autant sur le plan intellectuel."
"... la dépréciation du passé est devenue l'un des symptômes les plus significatifs de la crise cultuelle à laquelle ce livre est consacré. [...] Le refus du passé, attitude superficiellement progressiste et optimiste, se révèle, à l'analyse, la manifestation du désespoir d'une société incapable de faire face à l'avenir."
Sa postface, dans laquelle il décrit les traits de personnalité de l'homme narcissique d'aujourd'hui, est édifiante : "la crainte d'engagements astreignants, l'empressement à oublier ses racines, le désir de garder toutes les options ouvertes, une aversion au fait de dépendre de quelqu'un, l'incapacité à se montrer loyal ou reconnaissant. [...] Les Narcisse contemporains souffrent d'un sentiment d'inauthenticité et de vide intérieur. Ils ont du mal à se connecter au monde."
Qu'aurait-il écrit de notre société hyperconnectée paradoxalement en perte de liens?
Avec ténacité et intelligence, Christopher Lasch fouaille, désosse et autopsie la conscience de l'homme contemporain pour livrer au lecteur des réflexions très stimulantes et de grande qualité.½

Chapter on degradation of sports is excellent

Lasch, on the evidence of this book, is the American Adorno. He writes in a similar style; each sentence is perfectly formed, but often not so well connected to the preceding and following sentences. He has no patience for the conservative/progressive distinction, and would rather discuss the effects of an idea or practice rather than immediately laud or damn it (so, for instance, 'feminism' isn't abruptly praised or scornfully ignored; rather, the difficulties of putting feminist doctrine into effect, and the inadequacy of feminism as a theory of society, are outlined... without concluding that women are inferior to men). Finally, this is Major Theory. He is not 'making a space for conversation' or 'analyzing discourses' or adding one brick to the great Academic Wall. He has a theory that late twentieth century life is really messed up, he traces out how we got to be like we are and speculates about how we could stop being that way. And his theory does seem to explain an awful lot.

In short, the conjunction of progressive liberalism and capitalism destroys traditional forms of life without providing any satisfactory replacement. Since people can no longer rely on those traditional forms, we feel a) at a loss, homeless, as if the world is out to crush us, but also, b) we're completely and increasingly dependent on the world. Our psychological defense against this is to become 'narcissistic,' reliant upon others for praise to boost our self-esteem. That praise needn't be genuine, in fact, it's usually better if it's not, since then there's no danger of our becoming dependent upon anyone. Relationships seem to require co-dependence, rather than friendship or love. It's increasingly difficult for us to become mature adults. Nonetheless, Lasch doesn't seem to be advocating a return to feudalism or anything. Socialism - not bureaucracy, but the human control of the economy, state and society - is his chosen solution to these problems.

The big problem with the book is that it's all a little Freudy. If you're allergic to Freud, as many people seem to be, you'll find that pretty off-putting. But there's not a whole lot of the really whacky Oedipus stuff. Lasch relies on the later Freud's theory of the id/ego/super-ego, to suggest that the revolt against authority makes it impossible for us to form an effective ego. Instead, it's all id (uncontrolled instinct) and terrifying super-ego (crushing guilt and self-loathing). You can and should cherry-pick chapters, even if you don't like Freud.

The second problem is that this is not a book for people who don't know about sociology and psychology as traditions of thought. In that way he's like Adorno too- this isn't popular non-fiction, whatever else it is. How it became a best-seller I'll never know. I do think that someone who's done a good job with a core undergraduate education should be able to muddle through and get the point; but how many people have done that? This is frustrating, because I want to recommend it to everyone I know. And if I do that, half of my friends will think I've become a knee-jerk conservative, one quarter will say 'oh Justin, up to his commie tricks again,' and the other quarter will roll their eyes and wish I wasn't such an elitist. Well suck it up, friends- I'm a conservative, socialist, elitist. Maybe I just like this book because I already agreed with it.

A withering critique of contemporary society, probably more relevant (and frightening) read today than back in '79. He leans heavily on Freud and mixes in Marxist/Frankfurt school style criticism. More or less his thesis reinforces everything a pessimistic cultural critic already sees/feels in 'late capitalist' society, but here, he persuasively argues that the reader is more than likely a narcissist and probably has never been aware of his condition (which, as Lasch defines, is the new psychological nerusosis of our time: the implication that a narcissist is a narcissist without knowing it). Who, me?

Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” was originally published in 1979, and has been a major cynosure of cultural and social criticism ever since. English literary critic Frank Kermode called it, not inaccurately, a “hellfire sermon.” It is a wholesale indictment of contemporary American culture. It also happens to fall into a group of other books which share the same body of concerns that I have been working my way through, or around, in recent months: Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle,” Philip Rieff’s entire corpus (especially “Charisma,” but also his earlier work on Freud), and even the book I’m currently reading, Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land.”

All of these books discuss some aspect of social anomie, loss of community, and subsequent feelings of dissolution. This isn’t by any means a new debate; in the field of sociology, it dates at least as far back as Ferdinand Tonnies’ distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, a distinction that was almost a prerequisite for the invention of modernism.

First, a note on the word “narcissism.” It was formerly a clinical term to diagnose the individual, but has “gone global” - or at least national. Lasch doesn’t really mean for the term to be a diagnosis in the clinical sense, but rather a “metaphor for the human condition” in contemporary times. In his argot, the word means much more than just lack of empathy, a tendency toward manipulative actions and pretentious behavior. “People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security” (p. 7). Lasch is more interested in the dissolution of communities and relationships that makes us feel as if we live highly individualized, atomized lives detached from the concerns of others. The book spells out the ways in which these patterns are positively correlated with the rise of materialism, technologism, “personal liberation” (those bywords of sixties radicalism) and nominal egalitarianism.

His few words on contemporary corporate America will strike anyone who has ever worked in one of these organizational hellscapes: he states that corporate bureaucracies “put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

A la Debord, the politics of narcissism become more about “managing impressions” and “human relations” more than actually solving problems, citing Kennedy’s disaster at the Bay of Pigs as an example. To steal from the language of yet another late French thinker, it’s all about the simulacra. In a chapter called “The Degradation of Sport,” he notes that enormous amounts of corporate money have turned athletes into mere entertainers to be sold to the most prestigious sports syndicate. The central concept of the sporting even – the agon, the contest – has been displaced in order to sell products and personalities who will invariably be with the team for only a short time.

Lasch’s political affiliations are sometimes interestingly and tellingly misconstrued. Though often criticized for being a reactionary conservative simply because he points to the radicalism of the sixties as one of the desiderata under consideration, Lasch’s analysis is self-consciously informed by both Marx and Freud, two figures hardly recognized for being popularly co-opted by various brands of twentieth-century conservatism. Those who believe that Lasch is a blind ideologue on other side of the spectrum need to read him again: he explicitly faults both the right for their veneration of the market’s “invisible hand” and the left for their cultural progressivism. Lasch is in politics, above all else, a democratic humanist.

He writes in the Afterword, “The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted … that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.” It might not sound like a prognosis abounding in optimism, but it drips with the sincerity of an honest, heartfelt critic of American culture.

Essai très court sur la critique du fait que la culture de masse serait source de la démocratie, dans le sens où elle permettrait aux gens de devenir "éclairer". Ce texte a été pour s'opposer aux thèses de Herbert Gans.

Fairly heavy reading on the history of the idea of progress, especially in the US. Useful for those interested in the history of ideas, American history, and the question of other paths our civilization could have taken.

http://ritasreviewsandruminations.blogspot.com/

It was galling to read this book when it first emerged in 1979, and I struggled against accepting its thesis, even as I realized that my struggle was symptomatic of my narcissistic pathology. Now, some 30 years on, I have grown weary of the struggle; I surrender to my narcissism with a humble, even cheerful, good grace. The beginning of wisdom? This unrepentant narcissist would like to believe so.½

This section from Lasch's book serves as an excellent historiographical orientation, though with a very obvious bent of its own. The general project of the book is, according to Benjamin DeMott, "the reclamation of class." Yet it seems that is not "class" as a category of analysis which is contested in the case of the Populists, but rather a very specific understanding of class. In the section we read, it is obvious that Lasch draws specifically on Goodwyn in his search for a usable "Populist" past. The problem remains as to how this class of agricultural workers at the turn of the century can serve as a model for our own "critique of progress."*

Lasch casts Populism as the "producer's last stand." In this he draws upon Goodwyn to critique Hofstadter. The beauty of Goodwyn's analysis, so far as Lasch is concerned is that he neither casts the Populists as proto-Progressives ( a la Hicks and Destler) nor as backward-looking (read proto-fascist) and wrong-headed cranks, a la Hofstadter. Lasch wants us to look seriously at the Populist critique of progress because they groped with the same problems that we do today. On p. 224, he comes very close to saying that the Populists were trying to redefine the moral personality, which is our task today as well. After the death of Populism, people still sought "a moral and social equivalent of the widespread property ownership which was once considered indispensable to the success of democracy." We should approach the Populists, therefore, with a little more humility than that which dismisses them as mere "hayseeds" or worse still as "proto-fascists.**

* See Benjamin DeMott, "Class Reclaimed," review of The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch, In Reviews in American History 19 (December 1991): 599-603. DeMott gives the impression that he is in substantial .agreement with Lasch over the importance of the Populist moment as a source of a "usable past. "

**A note on the problem of Marxism and Populism in passing. In a brief book review of Pollack's The Populist Mind, an anonymous writer for Science and Society [32 (Winter 1968): 121] demonstrates the semi-orthodox Marxist impatience with the American Populists, Who like the Nazis glorified the folk. Marxist analysis is steeped in the fascism critique of inter- war Europe.

If Lasch were alive, he could point back to this book and tell you "I told you so." Whenever I have a conversation about globalism these days, I invariably bring this book up. The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the loss of commitment to one's country are only a couple of the themes here. It's really pretty depressing, since things have gotten much worse than I think Lasch would have expected.

(Partial review in my blog at http://www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/sea/archives/2005/12/12/culture-of-narc.php. Review in Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/26/101827.php)

In the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don't know how to value anything and cannot identify values worth having. The Minimal Self deals more with cultural and psychological issues, with some attention to the political and social movements that came out of the Counterculture of the 1960's. (He addressed a few points about the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age in the Afterword of the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism). His method, again, is a review of the social and psychological effects of living in a late capitalist, postmodern society.

This time, he pays more attention, on the one hand, to the experience of alienation and fear, and on the other hand, to the emerging politics of the narcissistic self.

His first main clarification of narcissism is identify it as a cultural response to fears about survival, at two levels - survival as a distinct person, and survival in itself. The second and third Chapters deal with the Survival Mentality, and the Discourse of Mass Death. The Survival Mentality looks at survival themes in the arts and the media. There has been a shift in thinking, so that for many people, survival has become success. There is a pervasive sense of oppression, and for many, victim-hood has become the defining characteristic of personal identity. The Discourse of Mass Death looks at cultural responses to the reality of mass death, the extermination of populations of disposable people. Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps used the Biblical term "holocaust" to identify the event. He argues that this was partly a response to the debasement of the term genocide, (from ethnic slaughter to any ethnic conflict) and partly a response to a horrifying insight. The Holocaust was a radical slaughter of people who had been systematically dehumanized in a totalitarian regime. He moves on to discuss the debasement of the term totalitarian, originally conceived by Hannah Arendt as a monstrous use of power to render people valueless and superfluous, to a synonym for an authoritarian regime. His argument is that totalitarianism and the Holocaust represent a deep break in the human condition, calling for a renewal of religious faith and a commitment to decent social conditions.

The argument that the Holocaust is distinctive because the Nazis made their victims seem subhuman to the soldiers and functionaries ordered to kill them seems flawed. The dehumanization of victims is a necessary step to induce thousands of human beings to engage in mass murder, and a necessary mechanism of genocide. (For an example from recent memory, watch Hotel Rwanda and listen to the Hutu propagandists calling for the extermination of the cockroaches). The Holocaust lurks like a monster in our consciousness because it exposes the frailty of the American and Western European faith in free markets, democracy and culture. The Germans were a civilized, educated people, who happily elected a lunatic, and followed him into war and mass murder. Both Liberals and conservatives in the West tended to view Western culture as more highly evolved than other cultures, and incapable of the brutalities of humanity in earlier times and other places.

Lasch goes on to review the psychological studies of Holocaust survivors and the relevance of the Holocaust to Jewish identity and world politics. Psychologists study Holocaust survivors as examples of survival under extreme stress. Lasch suggest that when the events are studied this way, the horror is watered down, and people are left arguing about who had it worse, and how to survive. This reflects a disengagement from hope. He argues that where individuals have no power to protect themselves from these monstrous powers, their only refuge from pervasive fear is in imagining ways to survive.

The next chapter returns to themes of survival in the arts and the media looking at novels by writers as diverse as Philip Roth, J.G. Ballard, Henry Burroughs, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, and a variety of modern visual art. Here, Lasch tries to show that artists are discerning and expressing concern for survival, in order to show that survival concerns are dominating people's imaginations.

He devotes a chapter to a reexamination of the Freudian theory of narcissism, and its cultural parallels. In this area, he adds substantially to the ideas covered in The Culture of Narcissism. He draws on Melanie Klein and the later Freudian writers and their theorizing about narcissism and the fragmentation of the ego The simple version of Freud's theory is that every person has three basic personality structures - id, ego and superego. The id represents basic physical needs and raw emotion, the superego represents social needs and rules, and the ego represents rational self-mastery and the true mature self. Freud identified the ego ideal as an aspect of the superego. Later writers argued it was a separate psychic structure. Lasch treats the ego ideal as a separate structure drawn to visions of unity and perfection in a demanding and selfish way. The ascendancy of the ego ideal is narcissism. In Lasch's thought people who become fixated on cultic religious practices, personal growth, identity politics and special issue politics are cultural, if not psychological, narcissists. They are typically self-righteous and supercilious, dramatic and intense, and largely detached from the world. They cultivate postures of critical irony or spiritual detachment. They don't ignore the world outside the self, but they disengage when they can't control the world outside the self.

Later in the book, he explores the history of the Counterculture and the politics of narcissism. He builds his point by tracing the evolution of the idea of the self, in an arc from individualism to narcissism, in religion and psychology, drawing on his knowledge and skill as a historian. He looks at the tension between ecstatic religion and rationalism within the American Protestant Churches, the assimilation of a light version of Freud's ideas into the optimism of American psychology, and the influence of Romantic and mystical figures like Jung and Bateson. The end product is an emphasis on being righteous about your feelings. He argues persuasively that the concerns of the New Age and the American New Left with primitive nature, identity, authenticity, feelings, imagination, feminine principles, and utopian visions are essentially narcissistic, and represent a disengagement from the political process.

The idea that emerges, not necessarily in Lasch's own words, is that there is movement to a politics of taste. The common themes unifying his discussions of the ego ideal, narcissism, the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age are sentiment, intuition, drama, and beauty. The politics of narcissism are the politics of dramatic protest against the fact that the world is ugly and unhappy. It is idealistic in the sense that it protests the failure of the world to live up to imagined aesthetic ideals of peace and harmony.

The Freudian section of the book is difficult, with Lasch developing an obscure idea of the ego ideal within the obscure and unhappy field of Freudian personality structures. However, it allowed him to develop the metaphor of narcissism and to apply it to modern cultural and political movements. In the first chapter, he reviewed three different sets of reactions to his earlier book, all of which interpret him as a critic of materialism and self-gratification. Conservatives saw him as a critic of a decadent morality and mainstream liberals saw him as a critic of consumerism. The emerging New Left agreed that society was narcissistic, but thought this was a sign of cultural progress. It was focused on self-fulfilment, rather than justice. Lasch didn't agree with any of those visions and responded by suggesting an alternative to the well-accepted but muddled left-right vision of politics.

He suggested that we might think of three factions, the parties of the superego, the ego and the the ego ideal, each focused on one aspect of the Freudian structure as the dominant mechanism of social control. The party of the superego favours the use of rules. The party of the ego including classical political and economic liberals, want to manipulate people to act the right way. The party of the ego ideal - the Counterculture, the New Age, the postmodern liberalism of feeling, and identity - is self-righteously utopian. His suggestion is fertile with ideas. It creates a framework for his discussion of the cultural and psychological foundations of the modern Left, and implies that the new liberalism of identity politics represents the collapse of democracy, under the pressure of life in the modern world, into postmodern absurdity.

His new classification is basically a critique of the failures of the logic of individualism against the manipulative programs of modern social planning, on the government side, and advertising on the economic side. His own loyalties seem to lie with the party of the Superego, which he identifies with social critics like Daniel Bell and Philip Rieff. He has substantially adopted Rieff's analysis of the emergence of the therapeutic sensibility. He has much in common with Daniel Bell, who was described by Rick Perlstein, in "The Prophet Motive, Daniel Bell's take on capitalism 20 years later" (Slate Magazine, 1996):

Daniel Bell is, simply, one of the most important cultural critics of the postwar era, though also something of an anomaly, with his uncompromising commitment to both economic equality and bedrock cultural conservatism.

Lasch writing in 1984, two decades after the Counterculture of the 1960's, two decades before matters reached their present state, was an early critic of postmodernism. His original idea that cultural narcissism reflects uncertainty about survival becomes stretched, but the book works very well, when read with The Culture of Narcissism, as a critique of the ideology and art of postmodernism and mass culture in late capitalist society.½

(First reviewed in blog at http://www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/sea/archives/2005/12/12/culture-of-narc.php and Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/15/094936.php)

Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and it stands as one of the most distinctive works of social criticism and commentary of the last three decades. Lasch used the term narcissism, a psychological term based on a myth, "as a metaphor for the human condition". Analyzing culture through a psychological, diagnostic metaphor is an experimental venture. Many writers fail. The bookstores and libraries are filled with half-baked social theories dressed up in medical jargon. And, of course, narcissism has become one of the catchphrases of popular psychology, with literally hundreds of self-help books mentioning narcissism in some way. Lasch's ideas stand out from a mass of inferior material.

Lasch was a student and teacher of American history, with an emphasis on populist and radical ideas and politics. He described himself as a radical and a populist. He was a critic of capitalism as practiced by modern corporations, criticizing the way advertising constantly undermines people's confidence in their skills, their abiliities and the quality of their lives, in order to sell them new products and services. He was also a critic of the educational system, psychology and social work, identity politics, celebrity culture, the destruction of tradition, the devaluation of ordinary skills, and the devaluation of families in modern society. He is basically a democrat and a humanist, with a strong sense that social limitations and social forces make people lead degraded and unhappy lives. This perspective makes him an ambivalent critic of popular culture. The fact that he is a critic of popular culture doesn't make him a conservative, but some aspects of his critique resonate with intellectual conservatives. Liberal philosophers and ideologues of individualism, identity, and self-actualization like Charles Taylor, writing in The Malaise of Modernity, associate him with Allan Bloom and other conservative social critics.

The term "narcissism", was relatively obscure in 1979. As Lasch noted in the Afterword to the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism, by 1979, Tom Wolfe's identification of the 1970's as the "Me decade" was a journalistic and cultural cliche. Freud used the Greek myth of Narcissus in his own distinctive method of psychological analysis - psychoanalysis - to describe a particular pattern of feeling, thinking and acting. In classical Freudian theory, a very young child is the perfect narcissist. Radically dependent, and frightened of being alone, the child tries to be recognized by adults, to control adults, and find a sense of peace and security. This explains the child's fears, demands for attention, fantasy life, and extreme emotions. This kind of process is normal in children, but abnormal for adults. As we grow up, we learn about attachments, trust, and independence. We learn our limitations. Narcissists don't get it - they are so insecure about themselves that they constantly demand attention and constantly try to control other people. It is an elusive concept, because people responding to the same insecurities may act in dramatically different ways. A narcissist may appear to be neurotic, needy and passive-aggressive, or may present as a self-confident person, focussed to the point of being obsessed, perhaps a bully or a predator.

Freud's ideas were popular with American psychologists for a while, but not necessarily widely understood or accepted. In modern therapeutic literature, narcissism tends to refer to the more aggressive presentations. Mental health professionals used to use the term megalomania as the formal DSM diagnostic category for individuals with a personality problem marked by a grandiose sense of the self. The colloquial term was egotism. In 1980, DSM started referring to it as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The clinical disorder is marked by lack of empathy for other persons, manipulative actions, grandiose fantasies and pretentious behaviour. Narcissism isn't an especially popular term, but it has gone into common usage to describe people who might otherwise be described as vain, conceited, arrogant, pretentious, selfish, self-absorbed or manipulative. When the word is used this way, it becomes a matter of opinion and perspective. Simple confidence and strength can appear as narcissism to an insecure or defensive person. As Christina Rosen said in her essay The Overpraised American :

But therapy today is itself a form of attention, as a glance at popular self-help books reveals. Lasch might have diagnosed the problem of cultural narcissism, but the contemporary self-help industry has rushed in to try to solve it; the shelves of bookstore self-help aisles are filled with offerings such as Why Is It Always About You? Saving Yourself from the Narcissists in Your Life and Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me: How to Recognize and Manage the Narcissists in Your Life. In the ever-indulgent world of self-help, the narcissist is, of course, never you; it is always someone else.

Lasch used the term as Freud had used it, rather than in either the modern clinical (DSM) sense or the modern popular sense. He specifically refused to label self-confidence, self-interest and detachment from the needs of others as narcissism. His working method was an analysis of social conditions, looking for indications of narcissism in the Freudian sense. He started with the idea that a lot more ordinary people were acting like classical narcissists, and tried to understand what social circumstances were contributing to this behaviour.

Lasch explains cultural narcissism as a response to anxiety, and a social strategy for people who lack a secure sense of their selves. This analysis allows Lasch to identify several interconnected social systems that cause social anxiety, that fail to educate and support people in being aware of their identities as human beings with rights and responsibilities, and that promote extravagant and grandiose behaviour. While he discusses various systems separately, Lasch also describes the evolution of the modern, technological, materialist, consumption-oriented, personally liberated, nominally egalitarian American society. People are insecure because they are in fact vulnerable. More and more people are adopting narcissistic strategies to protect themselves. One strategy is making a grandiose show of ourselves. Another is turning to religious and psychological practices to reach psychological states where we experience peace, harmony and transcendence.

Lasch mentions a therapeutic sensibility as the prevalent way of understanding people's feeling and actions. He suggests which has largely replaced religion as a source of language about moral and political matters. People understand themselves and others in terms of personality and emotional forces rather than character and moral choice. It is based on the idea of health and it looks for causes - or excuses - for behaviour in both nature and nurture. He discusses the modern fascination with being aware of feelings and justifying actions based on feelings. He suggests that this kind of awareness is superficial and false - he devotes a chapter to the banality of pseudo-self awareness. The therapeutic sensibility subjects people to the judgments of therapeutic experts and people imitating therapeutic experts, which makes people self-concious about how they present themselves. It encourages people to present themselves in socially conventional "healthy" ways, but it celebrates spontaneity and authenticity in personal relations. This makes it acceptable to act like a celebrity, which usually means flamboyant and theatrical behaviour - life as a performance. The therapeutic sensibility is genially non-judgmental towards impulsive and selfish behaviour, but harshly judgmental towards discussion of character, goals and values.

American industry became adept and producing commodities which were supposed to save labour and increase personal freedom. The advertising industry became adept at selling new commodities. This caused people to become dependent on industrial systems, which is a form of vulnerability. The selling process depends on manipulative language, and manipulative tactics to persuade consumers that they need something new. The language of advertising is often appeals to the consumer's sense of entitlement while undermining the consumer's sense of his own status and competence. The process contributes to distrust of language, and a pervasive anxiety about having the right possessions to signify safety and success.

Work itself has become more tenuous. Lasch suggests that the old model of work involved purposeful activity and genuine accomplishment. Less jobs involve strength, skill and concrete achievement, and more jobs involve the slippery businesses of networking and selling. Work becomes an exercise in presentation. Workplace relationships become competitive, exploitative and unsatisfying. The old model of success was the self-made man, who created wealth by skill and ingenuity. The modern model is the happy hooker, happily selling herself. The American educational system has become the recruiting and training arm of industry, producing workers and consumers, instead of self-reliant citizens.

An elite class of managers, bureaucrats and professionals has gained increasing power. Political life has become a form of theater and entertainment. Politicians speak to the public through advertising, propaganda and stage-managed events. People find that public life has become distant, and they find themselves powerless to participate. The social sciences have been important to industry and politics, providing new techniques to motivate, persuade, manipulate and control workers, consumers and citizens. The managerial and professional class has aggressively expanded its power and influence. One its projects has been the idea that expert judgments on the process of human social living are possible and desireable. The managerial class discredits tradition, common sense and personal judgments. This has contributed to the erosion of democracy, and the disempowerment of ordinary citizens.

The social structures of families and small communities, in which children learned the business of being human from interaction with trusted adults have been disrupted and largely discredited. For most of the time, adults interact with other adults in the workplace, while their children go to school, where children interact with each other and with a few selected adults. At home, children's interactions with adults are limited, and tend to be organized around the consumption of commodities - including entertainment commodities in the form of TV, movies and games. Family bonds are strained, the parental role in the socialization and education of children is minimized and parental authority is radically undermined. Adults are culturally sanctioned for not fulfilling their children's wishes and for hurting their feelings, which reduces them to negotiating with their children, and bribing them to behave well. Adults fail in the task of socializing children, and children become insecure tyrants.

Lasch devoted a short chapter to "The Flight from Feeling, The Sociopsychology of the Sex War" which starts with the claim that the modern dream of a rich, satisfying, erotic and emotional relationship is an illusion, and that "personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened". Love is based on trust, and it is hard to trust anyone in a culture of narcissism. People are so isolated, so vulnerable, so fearful that they can't have satisfying emotional relationships. The sexual revolution has not, contrary to the hopes of 20th century liberationists, allowed people to become more intimate. It has simply made us promiscuous.

Christina Rosen covers many of these points, and relates them to the current state of culture in her essay The Overpraised American.

The Culture of Narcissism addressed important social and existential themes - alienation and anomie, but it was read as an attack on popular culture. Lasch felt that he had been misunderstood. He wrote The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, published in 1984, and added a long Afterword to the 1991 paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism to clarify his stance. In the Afterword he wrote:

" The best defences against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted ... that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable us to explore a small corner of the world and come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

... We find it more and more difficult to a achieve a sense of continuity, permanence or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom."

(First reviewed in blog at http://www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/sea/archives/2005/12/26/elites.php and Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/27/120941.php)

Chrisopher Lasch said, in the acknowedgements in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, ISBN 0-393-03699-5) that it was written under trying circumstances. He had cancer and died before it was published. It was based on essays published in several intellectual magazines and journals. In The Gift of Christopher Lasch, James Seaton, writing in First Things, a conservative, religious, intellectual magazine, saw his work turning from fashionable radicalism to "the moral and spiritual depth that becomes possible when an intellectual disdains the consolations offered by the intellectuals' view of themselves as morally and mentally superior to the rest of humanity." The conservative critic Roger Kimball was less gracious, even condescending in "Christopher Lasch vs. the elites", (1995, Vol. 13, New Criterion, p. 9). (Lasch praised Kimball's book Tenured Radicals in one of his essays, and said little that Kimball would disagree with, except on capitalism and high culture).

Lasch favoured pragmatism in philosophy and populism in politics, and he was skeptical of high culture conservatism. The lead essay is a refutation of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a favoured text among cultural conservatives. Ortega argued that modern politics were dominated and degraded by mass culture and that mass tastes were responsible for increasing ugliness in art and banality in public life. Lasch argues that the masses are primarily workers and consumers, with little choice in how to fill their needs and satisfy their tastes. They consume the tangible and artistic products that are available. His view is that society is dominated by elites. He argues that technocrats in business and government exercise wide powers of economic and social control, perpetuating their own power and influence as a new aristocracy of talent. He argues that there are enduring class divisions in American society, in spite of cultural pretenses to the contrary, and that technocrats are part of the ruling class.

"Opportunity in the Promised Land" traces the history of the term social mobility, a term that was popularized in the media after 1945 as kind of modern myth that tempers the reality of limited opportunities for the majority of modern Americans. "Does Democracy Deserve to Survive" addresses the way that American culture seems to have given up on the capabilities of the ordinary citizen, increasingly treating citizens as unintelligent and lazy consumers.

There is an essay on communitarianism and populism - he favours populism. There is an essay on isolation - we meet each other at work, or in specialized contexts. The social institutions of the neighbourhood have withered. We end up relying on our own families for our entire social life, unless we are fortunate or wise enough to connect with friends and fellow human beings in other ways. There is an essay on the racial politics of New York, the politics of identity and outrage of Al Sharpton, as opposed to Jim Sleeper's vision of a city of proletarian strength, professional excellence and high cultural achievement.

"The Common Schools" looks back at the principles of moral fervour and democratic idealism of Horace Mann, one of the founders of the modern public school system and finds the source of some of the persistent problems of the educational system in the loss of Mann's moral fervour combined with the fulfilment of some of his methods - a professional class of teachers working in a specialized institutional system, taking charge of children and promising, unrealistically to turn them into responsible moral citizens.

"The Lost Art of Argument" sheds light on the issues of superficiality and bias in the media. In the decades before and after the Civil War, newspapers were frankly partisan, but they engaged their readers in serious disputes about public affairs. The ideal or the pretence that a newspaper is a vehicle for the delivery of neutral information can be traced to the commercial alliance between the media and the advertising industry. Advertisers wanted to be able to publish commercial information in a respectable medium, and the newspapers wanted to respond to the tastes of consumers as interpreted by advertisers by being more dignified and useful. The identification of news became the function of a professional elite of journalists and editors. The delivery of the news became a specialized art, serving a business. He notes that Walter Lippman, a liberal propagandist of note, developed the idea of professional journalism as technocratic institution mediating the flow of information between citizens and the techocrats who administered business and government. Lasch argues this has the effect of putting distance between citizens and events, eliminating the engagement of argument. In argument, there is the chance of persuading an opponent and the risk of being persuaded. (I watched Good Night, and Good Luck as I was reading this essay, and it put the conflict between Murrow and Paley in a fuller perspective). Being immersed in a stream of information and progapanda is not the same. We are consumers, with no influence, no ability to speak back, no way to stop the noise, except tuning out. Some news engages the sentiments, but nothing seems to have an real connection to our lives.

This essay is useful in understanding why the media is not necessarily a trustworthy source of information to make decisions. The news is a cultural product, and the media expresses the dominant cultural values of materialism and consumption. It maintains a stance of fashionable criticism of established authority, and is infatuated with novelty and celebrity. It is "conservative" on economic and political stories and crime but generally "liberal" on cultural issues (favouring tolerance, diversity, choice, liberation, personal growth and the pleasures of consumption over self-restraint). It doesn't as much reflect as create the tastes of mass culture. The stance of objectivity, combined with sheer laziness and stupidity, means that political stories are reported literally, superficially and uncritically. The media is full of badly written political propaganda, celebrity news, sports and entertainment and lifestyle information. We are losing contact with the debate over vital issues and becoming disengaged from the democratic life of our cities and nations.

As well, people tend to learn how to present themselves and even how to write and speak by watching and imitating the styles of celebrities and the media, hence:

When words are used merely as instruments of publicity or propaganda, they lose their power to persuade. Soon they cease to mean anything at all. People lose the capacity to use language precisely and expressively or even to distinguish one word from another. ... ordinary speech begins to sound like the clotted jargon we see in print. Ordinary speech begins to sound like "information" - a disaster from which the English language may never recover.

"Academic Pseudo-Radicalism" begins with a comment about stratification and specialization in higher education. One of historical goals of higher education was the democratization of liberal culture. Due to the rising cost of universities, a liberal education is increasingly unavailable to most students. The students who get one are increasingly homogeneous in affluence. They are taught by a self-obsessed academic elite, occupied with postmodernity and identity politics. They specialize in the rhetoric of revolution and transgression, the language of creating one's one values - but it is just posturing by comfortable members of a comfortable elite. Meanwhile, as for an education in the history and values foundational to our culture ...

In "The Abolition of Shame", he reflects on the disappearance of a moral vocabulary from American culture, the disappearance of the idea of personal responsibility and the preoccupation with self-esteem. He discusses several current psychological studies of shame, judging them to be increasingly misguided as they move away from or ignore the idea of responsibility and treat shame as an enemy of self-esteem. He carries this discussion into the ideology of education and the ideology of parenting as taught by psychology. When psychology teaches that people have a right to approval - whether or not their actions merit attention or approval - it becomes propaganda for a morality of selfishness.

In "Philip Rieff and the Religion of Culture" he asks the question "whether a democratic culture can flourish, or even survive, in the absence of the internal constraints that formerly supported the work ethic and discouraged self-indulgence". Religion has declined among the educated technocratic elites, as a persuasive and coherent source of values, and as a general sensibility. People understand their own actions, and the actions of others in therapeutic, rather than religious and ethical terms, a situation discussed in the writing of Philip Rieff. Rieff had not published a book since 1973 (a situation that has just changed, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education), and Lasch spends several pages capturing his thought.

According to Rieff, culture is a way of life backed up by the will to condemn and punish those who defy its commandments. A "way of life" is not enough. A people's way of life has to be embedded in a "sacred order" - that is a conception of the universe, ultimately a religious conception, that tells us "what is not to be done".

Those who regard tolerance as the supreme virtue and confuse love with permissiveness will find these propositions forbidding ...

This kind of thinking seems to bring Lasch into line with Roger Kimball and other cultural conservatives, but he rejects the high culture project. He says "the worst way to defend culture is by deifying it .... modern intellectuals should not aspire to be the successors of the clergy .... it tends to make a religion out of culture." He goes on to argue:

Culture way well depend on religion but religion has no meaning if it seen merely as prop of culture. Unless it rests on a disinterested love of being in general, religious faith serves only to clothe human purposes with a spurious air of sanctity. That is why an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a culture Christian.

His closing chapter, "The Soul of Man under Secularism" begins with an attack on the "religion of art" as expressed by Oscar Wilde as offering the "seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familial or religious obligations." This leads into an unfavourable evaluation of Jung's spiritualized, aestheticized, romanticized version of psychology that has been so influential in modern thinking. This leads into a discussion of the false idea of social progress, taught by Jung and others, that the history of society can be compared to the growth of a child. In this view, religion is viewed as a childlike system of ideas that comforted our immature ancestors, which in modern times "is treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, rather than a challenge to complacency and pride".

He doesn't comment on the evangelism and fundamentalism that have become the religion of mass culture in modern America, except to defend it in populist and social terms. His defence of religion conveys a withering criticism of the modern idea of personal spirituality and all the pseudo-religions devoted to self-fulfillment and self-esteem. It would have been interesting to get his take on how the culture of narcissism has started to influence religious practice in American churches that consider themselves conservative - their grandeur, their use of modern technology, their familiarity with the psychology of personal fulfillment, their relationship with corporate values, their acceptance of consumerism, their self-righteous focus on criticizing the sins of others.

Lasch has been described as a difficult writer. His prose is good, but he tends to write in aphorisms and to argue elliptically. His philosophy is unsystematic, running from foundationalism to Jamesian pragmatism. But, he was a rigorous thinker, a gifted writer, and he had an honest belief in democratic values. His arguments fall outside the conventional ideological boxes, joining conservative social ideas with a radical critique of capitalist economics and social institutions. His ideas are worth thinking about.

O Boy. I read this in High School and somehow related to it. Maybe that is how I came up with that thesis idea for Faberge. Anyway, this is also a staple but written a long long time ago. Not quite a book end, but I will always remember the author because it showed me what could be possible for a radical and aggressive thinker.