I have been reading Christopher Lasch for a long time. Lasch was one of the most famous American cultural critics of the late 20th century, and I first came across him when I found his most well-known book, The Cultural of Narcissism, in a cardboard box in my parents’ attic when I was a senior in high school. I devoured the book, a potent and vitriolic takedown of American capitalism and its freakish New Left “critics,” although I undoubtedly did not understand it very well. I had read Neil Postman’s jeremiad against television, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, for my junior year English class, and feverishly taken it to heart (I stopped watching TV soon after). The Culture of Narcissism seemed to impose Postman’s compelling critique of television upon the entirety of American society. I enjoyed this immensely.
The Culture of Narcissism became a bestseller when it was published in 1979. It also won the National Book Award. A few of Jimmy Carter’s advisers became enamored with the book, and Carter gave a speech that was intended to be a dumbing-down of Lasch’s argument, which is too difficult for me to quickly summarize here (the main thing you should know is that he uses “narcissism” in the clinical sense; he is not simply critiquing selfishness or self-absorption, per se). Carter implored Americans to stop living just for “things,” and to wean themselves off of oil. In the wake of years of oil shocks and persistent stagflation, the speech polled quite well. But, a few days later, Carter proceeded to fire his entire cabinet for some reason, inviting the derision of the press. This episode is now known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, and is firmly associated with Carter’s 1980 defeat in the national memory. Nobody remembers that the speech was received well, except the guy who wrote a book about the whole incident (Title: What the Heck Are You Up To Mr. President? Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country). These days, pundits endlessly cite the speech as evidence that the American public doesn’t want to hear the cold, hard truth about our way of life (they conflate the speech with the mass cabinet-firing). All we want is Reaganesque “optimism,” they say.
Lasch was profiled in Time magazine, and became a celebrity intellectual. As Lasch was a major critic of celebrity-culture and hero-worship, this was somewhat ironic and uncomfortable for him. Worse, he also felt that Carter had missed the point of The Culture of Narcissism, and so he wrote The Minimal Self in 1984 in order to clarify a few things. I won’t go into that complicated and fascinating book now.
So, when I was looking through the course catalog for my freshman year of college, I found a class with The Culture of Narcissism on the reading list. It was called “Psychohistory of the Modern World,” it was amazing, and the professor, Philip Pomper, became my advisor for the remainder of college.
Beyond the fact that I think he’s great, why should we care about Christopher Lasch? Nobody really remembers him anymore (he died in 1994), except the famous cultural critics of today who borrow his arguments. Like Chris Hedges and Chris Hayes.
Allow me to backtrack a bit. Since college, I’ve been reading a fair amount about economics, and more recently, ecological economics. Ecological economics is all about understanding our economic systems within the context of our fragile “Spaceship Earth.” It was inspired by the work of Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and the landmark 1972 “Limits to Growth” report, which claimed that there were limits to industrial growth, and that if we did not drastically change our polluting lifestyles, there would be a severe collapse of our economic systems, natural resource bases, and population levels in the first half of the 21st century. The most revolutionary implication of ecological economics is that there are definite limits to industrial growth, and the discipline as a whole borders on advocacy, in that respect. As I understand it, the field was originally very radical, but has apparently been mainstreamed into neoclassical economics, and is now focused on calculating externalities and cost-benefit analyses.
As I read about these ideas, I remembered that Lasch had written a book critiquing the idea of progress. I was never interested enough to read it. In my studies, I had encountered the idea of progress a bit, but I was still confused about what the concept actually meant. Did it just mean that everything will get better forever? Was it tied to utopian technological optimism? Had not “progress” been discredited by two world wars and the possibility of nuclear annihilation?
Those were the questions I had about progress in college. They were not pressing enough for me to explore the idea any further. Two years later, having read a bit of economics, a new and urgent-seeming question came to mind. Was progress the same thing as industrial growth?
And so I came to order “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics,” from the Jesup Memorial Library. It is definitively influenced by the Limits to Growth critique (See yesterday’s post). I am only four chapters in, but it has been a fairly explosive read. It has answered all of the above questions, and raised quite a few more. I will review the main idea of the book tomorrow. That’s all for now.
Corporate Hair 