Showing posts with label Front Porch Republic. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Dreamers and Plagiarists: Two Prophesies of Apocalypse by Jacob Howland for TABLET

Dreamers and Plagiarists

Two prophecies of apocalypse from Eastern Europe eerily bookend our cultural and political unease

BY JACOB HOWLAND JUNE 09, 2024

About a year ago, I read a long piece written during the COVID interruption that dealt with the uncertainty of our times, with existential and actually-existing threats/phenomena like climate change, terrorism, pandemics and war forcing us to live in a state of constant precarity, where adaptation to a seemingly endless array of crises was deemed not only a necessity but the new norm/means of surviving or at least coping with it all. “Welcome to the Precarium,” was the quip that I came up with, as I tend to view all of this rather cynically, as crisis after crisis seemed to have some sort of a profit-making angle to it, another opportunity for the centralization of power, or both. The health and welfare of living beings and the planet seemed like afterthoughts, with the loss or degradation of any or all regarded as collateral damage; i.e., the inevitable result of creating a greater good, long-term, with benefits for the majority. “Creative destruction” as a means of progress, as the powers that be become ever more clever with respect to how they confound and then kill us, or have us kill each other.
This being said, I’d like to suggest the reading of a very insightful essay that was recommended on the Front Porch Republic website (where I “hang out” a lot), which touches on similar themes. The author addresses the writing of two Eastern European writers, Dostoevsky and Witkiewicz, both of whom envision apocalyptic-like times of extreme precarity:

Times of crisis tend to give rise to awful feelings of aporia. Usually translated as “perplexity,” the Greek word literally means “no way out.” Anxious dreams of missed connections and incompletable phone calls seem to presage some inescapable but inscrutable fate. Extreme outcomes are as likely as anything else, and no one knows what we should fear most. The slow strangulation of free nations by Islamization? Societal collapse that plunges us into violent chaos? Global totalitarianism, maintained by the algorithmic controls and seductions of advanced AI? All bets are off.

Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Polish author Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz long ago envisioned the opposed apocalyptic fatalities of boiling chaos and glacial tyranny. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the murderer Raskolnikov dreams of an unstoppable epidemic of insanity that turns people into homicidal cannibals. The plague is produced by microorganisms endowed with reason and will: infinitesimal, monomaniacal, self-replicating intelligences. These viral fragments of fanatical thoughts — call them ideacules — turn the infected into rapacious, peculiarly conscious zombies. Each is certain that he or she alone sees things as they truly are, while everyone else is mad. Bitter conflict ensues, and human beings tear one another to pieces.

In Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability — completed in 1927, five years before Brave New World, but set a century in the future — military conquest and potent pharmaceuticals suppress the highest individual longings. Poland surrenders to an army of Chinese communists accompanied by hawkers of a fiendishly hallucinogenic, soma-like drug that induces Buddhistic serenity by pulverizing the ego, dissolving it so thoroughly in oceanic feelings of mystical unity that it can no longer formulate any coherent program of life.

Crime and Punishment and Insatiability bookend the profound uncertainty of our historical moment with prophecies of physical, political, and moral destruction, all associated with highly transmissible forms of the decayed philosophy that, since the French Revolution, has gone by the name of idéologie. Raskolnikov’s crimes test his vaguely Hegelian theory that “great geniuses” have an innate right to “step over” divine and human laws, destroying the present for the sake of a better future. His dream suggests the mayhem that would ensue if everyone assumed, as he did, that they belonged to this privileged class. And as Czesław Miłosz writes in The Captive Mind, a book that tries to explain why Polish intellectuals capitulated to communism, the drug that pacifies the unhappy Poles in Insatiability is “an organic means of transporting a ‘philosophy of life’” — that of the Sino-Mongolian leader Murti Bing. Like Dostoevsky’s demonic microbes, Murti Bing’s pills short-circuit the intellect. But they also unstring the bow of the human spirit, preparing one to submit to “even the most mechanical tyranny.”

In Raskolnikov’s dream and Witkiewicz’s story, ideological contagion or “cures” spread to Europe from the depths of Asia. What explains this curious coincidence? Perhaps it is because Russians and Poles never forgot the Mongol armies that swept across the steppes and sacked the cities of central Europe. Called Tartars by the Europeans because they seemed to have come from the pit of Tartarus, the lowest depths of the underworld in Greek mythology, the Mongols ruled in the Russian lands of Kievan Rus’ for more than two centuries. They established an administrative state, levied taxes, and demanded submission, thereby laying the groundwork for czarist authoritarianism and Soviet totalitarianism. In any case, life imitates art: COVID, a plague that may have originated in a Chinese bio-weapons lab, heralded a new era of nightmares of censorship and centralized governmental control in the West.

Raskolnikov’s Bible-tinged nightmare occurs while he is delirious with fever during Lent. He dreams that the whole world has been condemned, and “all were to be destroyed except a few chosen ones” who were “destined to renew and purify the earth.” As in the story of the flood, the earth itself is polluted by man’s evil and needs to be cleansed. Victims of the plague become “possessed and mad,” so that they make less sense to one another, and are scattered more violently, than the originally hive-minded people of Babel.

Affected in unique ways by invasive ideacules, the infected live in their own airtight worlds and share no criterion of truth. They are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their personal judgments, scientific conclusions, and moral beliefs. Indeed, “never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth.” Yet “everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else.”

[E]ach thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge and could not agree what to regard as evil, what as good; they did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite.

As the pandemic evolves, a residual instinct of sociability leads to sporadically organized aggression:

They gathered whole armies against one another, but already on the march the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall on one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating each other.
Dostoevsky describes an unprecedented (yet today all-too-familiar) kind of zombiism, an intellectual death-in-life that is produced by the mindlessness of decayed reason. Vestiges of spiritual instinct — or at least a dim memory of old ways and habits — nevertheless survive in his Kafkaesque prophecy: “In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious.”

The infected are eventually defeated by the simplest tasks. They vehemently disagree about well-established methods of everyday work. Trades cease, “and the land too was abandoned.” Farmers are no longer able to till the rocky soil east of Eden, as Adam did when he was forced to abandon light gardening in the earthly paradise. Fires and famines break out, and “everything was perishing.” As for “the pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth” — “no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words and voices.”

If you remove your earbuds, you can hear the muffled tolling in the big cities of the West today. We sense that we are called to action. But who is ringing the bells? On whose authority are we summoned, and what are we called to do? As in Milton’s vision of hell, we stumble in darkness while seething with rage.

The fundamental issues of our day will not be decided along the horizontal axis of left and right, but the vertical one of spirit and somnolence.

Dostoevsky observes that violent chaos ensues when the emergent social order that sustains individual liberty and free society is lost. Raskolnikov’s dream reminds us that this order depends on civic like-mindedness that springs from a general intellectual capacity to register and attend to the basic facts and contours of moral, material, and historical reality. Should that capacity be destroyed by severe ideological partisanship, we will sink, as Plato puts it, into “the unlimited sea of dissimilarity.”

While Dostoevsky imagines the savagery that erupts when social order disintegrates, Witkiewicz — who committed suicide when the Nazis invaded Poland from the west and the Soviets from the east in September 1939, dividing the nation into fascist and communist halves — comes at the political and psychological problem of ordered liberty from the other side. He anticipates a world in which ideological tyranny, prepared by societal decay, crushes individual vitality. Together, he and Dostoevsky describe the eternal conflict in the human psyche between the labor of wakefulness and the consolation of sleep, the struggle to wring some redeeming meaning out of life and the desire to be done, once and for all, with the suffering this struggle entails.

A vampish old princess in Witkiewicz’s novel declares, “Life’s an open wound that can be filled only with sex.” Socrates filled that wound with the intrepid pursuit of truth in the company of friends. The tortured intellectuals and artists of Insatiability split the difference, frantically trying to sate lusts of the body as well as the mind. The best that can be said of their schizophrenia is that it is a last vestige of rapidly vanishing humanity.

The atmosphere in Insatiability prior to the arrival of the communist steamroller (Chinese forces are already in the Urals when the book begins) resembles that of the West in 2024 to a horrifying degree of specificity. Cultural putrescence, nihilism, and decadence are the order of the day. People cretinized by automation no longer find any meaning in their work. Intellectual rigor has been “driven beyond the pale of society.” The pseudo-fascist state is “a malignant tumor” that spreads to every realm of life, while newspapers trumpet the reigning party doctrine. Yet no one knows who runs the government. Creativity has given way to “plagiarism,” as third-rate art and music are recycled and repackaged. The hypernarcissistic general on whom the Poles depended for salvation is a crude “slab of mediocrity” whose followers nevertheless regarded him as an earthly redeemer.

As a socialistic global consciousness prevails, the concept of sovereign and independent nations has been almost universally abandoned. In the West, natural languages are being replaced by Esperanto, whose very name speaks of hopeful fantasies of world peace. A few intrepid souls still roam on “the vanishing horizon of individualism,” but widespread “swinishness” prevents even modest sacrifices for the greater good. Self-indulgence is the order of the day: Philosophers go on ether binges to escape boredom by entering the “realm of nothingness,” while military commanders drink vodka by the bottle and inhale cocaine in front of their troops. Amid the general confusion, the approach of the Chinese is awaited by many as a “solution … from without” — one that nevertheless aroused the vague terror of “something … sliding down like a glacier from the Mountains of the Unknown.”

The complementary prophecies of Dostoevsky and Witkiewicz make it clear that the fundamental issues of our day will not be decided along the horizontal axis of left and right, but the vertical one of spirit and somnolence. Dostoevsky’s ideacules bring people to blows over private “truths” that are incomprehensible to anyone else, while Witkiewicz’s brainwashed characters come to believe that “Anything shown … in the name of Murti Bing, had necessarily to be the truth.” In our time, too, volatile mixtures of subjectivism and slavish capitulation to authority have replaced informed understanding and individual judgment.

What is next for the West? Will we rip one another apart in solipsistic fury? Will we narcotize ourselves with drugs and sex robots? Either way, a revelation is at hand, one that we await with an impatience born of nervous exhaustion.

Jacob Howland is the Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin.

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Defending Lasch, Left and/or Right by Russell Arben-Fox for THE FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC

FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC

Defending Lasch, Left and/or Right

By Russell Arben Fox -October 8, 2009

Wichita, KS. No one, I think, has ever summed up the longing for a life with front porches–the localist longing which is this blog’s raison d’être–better than Christopher Lasch did, in this plaintive passage from his masterpiece, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, when he spoke about his and his wife’s hopes for their family life when they were young:

“We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of “significant others.” A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children–that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools; we knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by–joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship–they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the “nuclear family.” Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit (p. 32).”

With this passage’s reference to extended families and its suspicion of an over-reliance upon public schools, with its invocation of moral and cultural virtues and of dozens of humble, bourgeois practices (evening meals, organized sports, family games, etc.), it could probably be labeled–by those who usually identify with the left, that is–as either a nice but harmless bit of right-wing nostalgia at best, or as a canny bit of “traditional values” agitprop at worst. But it’s neither, of course, because Lasch was himself a product of the left side of our confusing and often inaccurate ideological divisions.

Though he never took socialism particularly seriously, and though he spent most of his career probing the pathologies and misunderstandings of American liberalism, his fundamental political and economic aspirations were generally clear: he liked democracy, and believed in equality (among his last political acts were a vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, and speaking out in favor of a “huge jobs program” in the pages of Salmagundi in 1994). But such convictions don’t lay to rest his critics on the left, however.

A couple of months ago Crooked Timber, a well-known left-liberal academic group blog, hosted a symposium discussing a terrific collection of essays by George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? In that book, Scialabba–a wonderfully smart and incisive reviewer of and commenter on the intellectual currents of American life–provides sharp takes on all sorts of writers and thinkers, from (moving left to right) Richard Rorty, Edward Said and Irving Howe to William F. Buckley, Victor Davis Hanson and Allan Bloom.

The only author, though, to receive two full essays all to himself is Lasch, whom Scialabba clearly considers a hero of sorts, and this made some of the respondents to Scialabba mad. Rich Yeselson, in particular, really let him have it, shaking his head at the sympathy a leftist like Scialabba shows for a man like Lasch, who believed the real hope for democracy and equality was to be found in local cultures, intact families, supportive neighborhoods, independent labor and ownership…in other words, in ordinary–and therefore, it must be admitted, usually rather defensive, and perhaps often somewhat exclusionary–producers and workers:

“Because all of [Lasch’s] hardy “Artisans against Innovation”…plus the populists, plus the virtuous small “producers” have been wiped out by the early part of the 20th century, and because these folks were all proud of their skills and because they were ethnically homogeneous, Lasch can’t explain how the hell millions of unskilled, ethnically heterogeneous workers formed the CIO in the 1930s–and with it the backbone of the American middle class for the next two generations….So why does Scialabba let Lasch off the hook? Perhaps because he seems drawn most to writers and thinkers whom Sartre might have called the “unsalvageable,” after Hugo [Barine], the disillusioned leftist who goes down in a hale of Stalinist bullets at the end of Dirty Hands while shouting that he is “unsalvageable” (as opposed to those The Party cynically deems “salvageable” for its own instrumental purposes)….So Lasch, shouting out the Great Refusal to all of modernity, is another in this long line of gutsy truth tellers who push against the grain of the conventional wisdom. And Scialabba gives him bonus points for his unsalvageability.

“Way too many. Lasch builds a vast transportation device that does not move. His fantasy of a producerist ideology somehow redistributing wealth and power in a multi-polar world dominated by large pools of capital is just goofy. Lasch fears the very State that is the only entity capacious enough to circumscribe the power of private interests. He’s all dreams, he’s got no plans, and we want the plans….The people are busy–I’ve spent a lot of time around them. I’ve got a pretty good feel for this. Their jobs suck and they’re exhausted. When they get it together to do something amazing like build the CIO or create the Civil Rights movement, it’s a mitzvah composed of all kinds of things, especially incredibly tenacious, labor intensive organizing. Some of them are wonderful, and some of them are awful, and most of them are in between–kind of like everybody else. People who actually spent time around working class people…do not think of them or write about them in the way Lasch did….Lasch spent too much time trying to demonstrate that some stratums of the downtrodden were right or noble or resistant to the encroachments on their way of life. [Richard] Rorty spent his time just trying to argue against those with power who were trying to screw them, regardless of whether the downtrodden themselves were so wonderful or their way of life was so great. Because frequently they aren’t and it isn’t. A lot of local knowledge isn’t so humane….The world has always been a scary place, and it’s always been the fit though few who have undertaken to make stuff better. And, over time, they pick up some fellow travelers, and, oddly enough, things do get better.”

This is, of course, a particularly influential strand of the liberal progressive mentality in a nutshell: the conviction that most people, most of the time, are too invested in taking care of their own, or too exhausted by the simple demands of survival, to care much about systematic exploitation, and hence that any real “progress” towards equality and democracy is almost always going to have to come from the “fit though few,” not from ordinary people, in their own places, speaking from their own limits. It is a mentality that Lasch denies the truth of, root and branch.

Genuine democratic and egalitarian improvement in the lives of human beings–ending slavery, improving working conditions, respecting civil rights, providing education–always has at its heart, Lasch maintains, the activism of men and women from more or less well-defined communities, demanding independence and respect. It should be noted, though, that unlike some critics of the progressive ideal, Lasch himself didn’t think that the so-named “Progressives” of American history were themselves so thoroughly addicted to that liberal progressive worldview that they failed to recognize the communitarian and cultural undercurrents which efforts to better one’s own and others’ lives must invariably draw upon. He wrote, in his last complete work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, that:

“Progressive thought was lively and suggestive precisely because so much of it resisted the political orthodoxies associated with the idea of progress. A number of important progressives refused to accept the division of society into a learned and laboring class as the price of progress. Nor did they embrace the welfare state as the only way of protecting workers’ interests. They admitted the force of the conservative objection that welfare programs would promote a “sense of dependence,” in Herbert Croly’s words, but they rejected the conservatives’ claim that the “wage-earner’s only hope is to become a property owner.” Some of the responsibility for “operating the business mechanism of modern life,” Croly maintained, would have to be transferred to the working class–or, rather, wrested by the workers from their employers since their “independence…would not amount to much” it is were “handed down to them by the state or by employers’ associations” (p. 82).”

So readers of Lasch–perhaps especially Front Porch Republic readers of Lasch, drawn to him because of his populist case for an economy of producers, a society of communities and neighborhoods and families–remain confused. He praises Progressive reforms, but attacks the dole. He speaks glowingly of strikes and labor unrest, and calls it all “conservative.” How to defend such a person, when you don’t know which direction the target is facing when attacks come from left and right?

Many of Lasch’s fans have tried, of course. Alan Ryan, in an old essay in The New York Review of Books, wrote that Lasch’s “populist values…defy categorization,” since “Lasch sounded very like a member of the Republican right when denouncing work-shy, sexually predatory young men, and like an unreconstructed member of the Old Left when denouncing hard-working but financially predatory bankers, managers, and brokers.” Jeremy Beer, in an essay for Modern Age a few years ago, suggested that The True and Only Heaven was Lasch’s “attempt to provide a pedigree for a more radical, more democratic–and more consistent–brand of cultural conservatism,” one that combined economic leveling with traditional and local ways of life.

Kenneth Anderson, in a Times Literary Supplement essay published soon after Lasch’s death, seemed to want to remove Lasch from his frequent association with communitarian critics of modernity, and align him instead with the left-libertarian cause, emphasizing his “anti-statist and anti-capitalist” teachings, suggesting that it wasn’t so much radical self-interest and individualism which Lasch opposed, as it was “authoritarianism, the peculiar form of communitarianism emerging from the conjunction of state and therapy,” and concluding that the public virtues Lasch rightly believed to be necessary for democracy could never come from such communitarian-praised actions of the 1990s as “Bob Dole’s railing against Hollywood or Bill Clinton’s preaching against pregnancy to black teenage girls,” but rather that “communities [must be allowed] to reformulate themselves, if indeed they will and along such lines as they will.”

Which, really, isn’t at all an untrue claim…but it is an incomplete one, and Lasch’s own writings show why it is incomplete. While that may not settle Lasch’s place once and for all–which is a bad goal anyway; isn’t the whole point of criticism such as Lasch’s to “unsettle” us?–responding to this particular claim, at least, may make it a little clearer exactly how we who love our local places should defend Christopher Lasch.

The one time that Lasch engaged with communitarian thought in a sustained way (in the chapter “Communitarianism or Populism? The Ethic of Compassion and the Ethic of Respect,” in Revolt of the Elites), he described his disagreements with the movement as a “difference in emphasis” rather than one of “irreconcilable opposition.” In fact he has many good things to say about some of the movement’s foremost thinkers, including Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni, and lumps communitarianism together with populism as “third way” projects, “reject[ing] both the market and the welfare state.”

At its roots, his real reservations with communitarian arguments are, in essence, class reservations: as he saw it, communitarianism emerges from an academic, sociological perspective, and tends to look upon the crucial virtues which participation in the traditions and rough equality of decent communities can teach people as something needful and precious, and thus in need of conservation and compassionate support. Whereas populism, on his reading of its arguments, is more defensive, radical, and grounded in a defiant expression of the limits of life in a decidedly non-elite (usually, though not always, rural) working world.

Academic defenders of community can be misled by top-down thinking, missing the essential structures–including the bottom-level socio-economic class structures–which populists intuitively know that their communities depend upon if their expressions of respect, competence, and judgment–all essential parts of their contribution to democracy–are not to be blown away by elite and/or intellectual reconstructions of social life. He writes:

Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that trust, in a democracy, can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balanced by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole–its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members–than in the responsibility of individuals….But it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good. In the name of sympathetic understanding, we tolerate second-rate workmanship, second-rate habits of thought, and second-rate standards of conduct….Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance. Tolerance and understanding are important virtues, but they must not become and excuse for apathy (pp. 106-107).

The ability to make judgments is a function of maturity, and maturity comes, Lasch argues, drawing upon both history and psychology, when individuals depart infantile worlds of helplessness and instant gratification, and instead come to appreciate–and eventually fiercely protect–the chastened lessons of experience, struggle, and the limited victories of life. An environment where wealth and respect is fluid, mostly untied to practical disciplines requiring time to master but instead rewarded to those who excel in pleasing or manipulating their human and intellectual surrounding, will result in gaps between winners and losers that no person can consider legitimate, thus making any attempt to impose community-wide standards and responsibilities slightly ridiculous and primitive to members of the new class of elites; it will be obvious to those in power that those ordinary folk who have not made the meritocracy work for them, and entered into the world of financial and social opportunity and mobility which it makes possible, will likely have no grasp the modern world. Which, of course, in turn leads to resentment, and a poisoning of the very virtues which a localized economy of limits once taught.

Lasch’s overall conclusion, in analyzing this process, is that democracy needs a defense of community that is more specific than the kind which some sorts of arguably condescending, vaguely redistributive, communitarianism promises; it needs some local, historical basics, and bite. He concludes:

“Back to basics” could mean a return to class warfare (since it is precisely the basics that our elites reject as hopelessly outmoded) or at least to a politics in which class became the overriding issue. Needless to say, the elites that set the tone of American politics, even when they disagree about everything else, have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class. Much will depend on whether communitarians continue to acquiesce in this attempt to keep class issues out of politics or whether they will come to see that gross inequalities, as populists have always understood, are incompatible with any form of community that would now be recognized as desirable and that everything depends, therefore, on closing the gap between elites and the rest of the nation (p. 114).

I think this is unfair to many communitarian writers, at least some of whom have very clearly articulated the impossibility of preserving the democratic and egalitarian potential of community membership in an environment where often unregulated and technologically unlimited capitalism ruins any sense of common life between the classes, and thus often ruins as well any possibility of collective, virtue-teaching participation, the sort where–as the quote at the beginning of this post emphasized–families could take a secure place in, and thus contribute to, a wider context of life. But whether you call it populist or communitarian or something else entirely, the driving charge of Lasch’s critique is clear.

As he says in his introductory essay in Revolt of the Elites, “a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation…civic equality presuppose[s] at least a rough approximation of economic equality” (p. 22). Scialabba sums up Lasch’s overall claims similarly in one of the essays in What Are Intellectuals Good For: “[Lasch’s] ideal has at least two radical implications. The first is that democracy requires a rough equality of conditions. Dignity and virtue cannot survive indefinitely amid extremes of wealth and poverty; only someone with a paltry conception of virtue could believe otherwise. The second is that the democratic character can only flourish in a society constructed to human scale” (pp. 182-183).

What follows from such a diagnosis? Good question, and one might be justified in thinking that Lasch’s vocation as a critic too-easily saved him from the harder work of answering it, and thereby building up some alternatives. (In this, he was perhaps taking too much comfort in being in the same position as his populist forerunners; on the last page of Progress and Its Critics, he called the populist tradition failure to develop a strong political or economic theory “its most conspicuous weakness”–p. 532.)

But it is not as though answers are impossible to find in Lasch’s oeuvre: he wanted to see jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced…and he wanted, to every degree possible, this done in a manner which did not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey–another Progressive!–here) “the local homes of mankind” (Revolt, p. 84). Complicated? Obviously.

Some of the above would require broad reforms and expensive legislation and politically unpopular stands, while some of it–perhaps the even more difficult parts of it–would depend upon individual and family sacrifices and changes. Is the goal itself impossible? Yeselson thinks so; in one of his further responses to Scialabba, he insisted that “Lasch somehow thinks, that in the name of a greater sense of self and stronger connection to one’s productive capabilities, you can mitigate the great productive power of capitalism–but yet have plenty that will be left over to expropriate from the expropriators. It doesn’t work that way–dividing up less leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism.” That’s quite a leap there–a not-completely-unreasonable leap, but a big leap nonetheless. One can only hope that Yeselson is wrong, and we can make compromises which move us in a Laschian direction, seeing as how our current global environmental and economic situation suggests what we will have to accept “dividing up less” anyway.

Scialabba, assessing the final value of Lasch’s perspective, suggests that at our present moment we have only three options for the future: “1) ecological catastrophe; 2) a domestic and international caste system, with extreme and permanent inequality, harshly enforced; or 3) a voluntary renunciation of universal material abundance as our goal and of mass production and centralized authority as the means”…then adding that “[o]bviously, only the last is even potentially a democratic future.” Assuming that people who like localism like it at least in part because of its democratic promise, then defending Lasch’s fierce commitment to economic and civic equality seems to be a necessary step in any vision that includes front porches.

Lasch’s connection of democracy and community to equality–as both a prerequisite and a result–moves him definitely to the left, I think (making “equal prospects for a flourishing life” a central value being almost stereotypically a left-wing attitude rather than a right-wing one), but it’s an odd left, a left that owes more (and more directly) to Rousseau’s moralistic concern with how modern economic life could warp private life and the development of individual character (a point Ryan made in the aforementiond NYRB essay). A left conservatism, perhaps? Or maybe, more simply, just different, more serious, religious left? Paul Gottfried, in a long, thoughtful and lyrical reminiscence about Lasch (and others), wrote that Lasch’s ultimate goal was to articulate “a religiously based communitarianism that could serve as an alternative to multinational capitalism.”

Why religiously based? Because, it seems, he doubted that individuals would be able to recognize and adhere to the limits of local communities (and thus receive and be able to contribute to the virtuous blessing of such membership) when confronted by market-and-technology-driven inducements (or delusions) of personal liberation and opportunity…unless, that is, there was a tangible belief that such limits–moral, social, and economic–were reflections of, or perhaps even instantiations of, a higher order of things. It is actually at this point that Scialabba’s defense of Lasch hits its most difficult patch: “[Does Lasch] propose to resurrect ‘the theological context’–the existence of God, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul? The Covenant and the Incarnation? Must we believe in order to be saved? If so, then we are lost. We cannot believe the unbelievable, even to salvage our culture” (What Are Intellectuals Good For?, p. 172).

If we assume from the outset, of course, that religious belief–perhaps especially the kind of beliefs which sustained many community-grounded populist and progressive pushes towards greater democracy and equality throughout American history–is “unbelievable,” than it would appear that Lasch’s whole oeuvre is compromised. His close analysis of the role families and local communities do and should play in developing democratic citizenship and economic egalitarianism won’t hold water, if there is no reason for anyone to ever stay on the farm once they’ve seen the city. We might as well accept Yeselson’s–and many others’–criticisms, and consign Lasch to the dustbin as we ponder strategies for extending justice. Or else, of course, we could just give up on social and economic egalitarianism entirely. Which if, to be honest, where the majority of devotees of localism probably already are, anyway.

But, so long as belief has a chance, Lasch’s criticisms remain pertinent for making a defense of his great populist/communitarian insight: that local producers and democratic egalitarians needn’t be enemies after all.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Porch-Sitting with Christopher Lasch (FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC)

LOCAL CULTURE

Porch-Sitting with Christopher Lasch

Below is the introductory essay to the new issue of Local Culture, which is devoted to the work of Christopher Lasch. If you subscribe by September 1, you’ll receive this issue in your mailbox. You can whet your appetite by perusing the complete table of contents.

Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. In the early years of the Clinton administration he said that “the old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality.” He noted that “in some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself.”

That was in The Revolt of the Elites (1994). The book asked self-reflection of the nation’s absconding meritocrats whose talents seemed better-suited to poolside reflection, for in Lasch’s view they had become the very clerisy in a culture of narcissists. They were incapable, Lasch said, of the noblesse oblige to which older elites understood themselves to be duty-bound; they were actually at home in a global bazaar where they could disport themselves with the world’s other elites, devoted to certain versions of mobility — geographic and economic especially — that proved perfectly compatible with the kinds of social stratification that mobility was reputed to abolish. Despising in proper modern fashion the old aristocracy, they retained many of its vices but none of its virtues. And, being nobody’s fools, they knew that the best things in life, far from being free, require a great deal of money, and so they chased it, handing over judgment concerning their own interests to the all-absorbing market, which

puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to be a business proposition…. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image.

Lasch was dying of cancer (having declined to die of its cure) as he finished the book, but the nation it was urgently addressed to did not share its urgency. To the contrary, the nation had an appetite for events of greater pith and moment, among them a 232-day strike in Major League Baseball, the O.J. verdict, and the release of Disney’s Pocahontas. Two of our leading newspapers that did review the book also published a 35,000-word Manifesto by one Theodore J. Kaczynski, Ph.D. And now, as I write this in the year A.D. 2020, so ironically suggestive of the perfect vision belonging only to hindsight, it seems fitting to invite the culture to look back and judge the seriousness of itself reposed by its own reflecting pool, even as its prophets continue to go without honor.

But let not that culture be too chesty in its examination, for men and women Who Know are first-rate adepts in the rituals of writing, taking, and acing their own purity tests. And good grades are especially easy to make if you refuse to honor your prophets. To those who might have noticed, for example, that American public education was the world’s envy until the 1960s, when decline by reform began in earnest, such spotless report cards should signal the dangers that lie in their indifference to Lasch’s most prescient insights: that the history of reform in education, which is the history not of conservatism but of liberalism, has predictably led to illiberalism, in large measure for want of a sufficient concentration of its own vaunted humanitarianism; that this failure points to a severely limited open-mindedness among the open-minded; that social planning by the vicious will not produce a virtuous society; that such laudable goals as compassion cannot be achieved by “goodwill and sanitized speech”; that democracy “requires a more invigorating ethic than tolerance,” which is a “fine thing” but “only the beginning of democracy, not its destination”; that identity politics makes a poor excuse for religion, “or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”; that there is little to be gained by “fierce ideological battles … fought over peripheral issues”; that “the neighborhood is more truly cosmopolitan than the superficial cosmopolitanism of the like-minded,” and that “diversity — a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it — has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean,” in practice legitimizing “a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.” Lasch went so far as to say that we betray the civil rights movement when we make race a matter of victimhood (“it was the strength of the civil rights movement,” he wrote, “that it consistently refused to claim a privileged moral position for the victims of oppression”). For Lasch seems to have been of the unacceptable opinion, at least in his last book, that abandoning old ideologies “will not usher in a golden age of agreement. If we can surmount the false polarizations now generated by the politics of gender and race, we may find that the real divisions are still those of class.”

But then this was at the heart of Lasch’s late criticism of public life in America: “the elites that set the tone of American politics, even when they disagree about everything else, have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class.” The gap between them and the rest of us must remain, lest the agony of revolt be visited upon them.

Besides, how else to secure such amusing surprises in public life as November 2016? Not to gainsay the palpable mischief that followed, for Mr. Trump has managed to bring out the worst in just about everyone, and that includes the elites, but is no one else amused at the gymnastics of, say, the New York Times trying and failing to understand an election it tried and failed to predict? The certified diverse members of its confused news room might wish to leave off rewriting the year 1619 and consult the books of a dishonored prophet — if, that is, achieving a little clarity on the dysfunction of public life and discourse prove more desirable than recoding the American brain to suit the moment’s prejudices. Its vaunted “Here’s What Else is Happening” pages might feature fewer stories on drag queens and more on middle Americans suffering the economic consequences of investor-class joy-riding.

I mentioned above the betrayal of the civil rights movement. It deserves at least a little elaboration. In The True and Only Heaven Lasch noted that Martin Luther King’s difficulties in bringing the civil rights movement north, specifically to Chicago, were due in large measure to the fact that “the North lacked the stable black communities on which the civil rights movement rested in the South.” King “did not join in the criticism directed by black militants and newly radicalized white liberals against the Moynihan Report, accused of shifting attention from poverty to the collapse of the family and thus ‘blaming the victim’ for the sins of white oppression.” In Lasch’s judgment an “important difference between the North and the South lay in the demoralized, impoverished conditions of the black community in cities like Chicago, which could not support a movement that relied so heavily on a self-sustaining network of black institutions, a solidly rooted petty-bourgeois culture, and the pervasive influence of the church.”

In fine, the nonviolent strategy that had worked in the South was ineffectual in the North, where living conditions characterized by poverty, familial dissolution, and the absence of mediating institutions did not conduce to the southern strategy. Whether Lasch remained to the end a man of the Left, as Wilfred M. McClay states (herein), or whether he had moved beyond both Left and Right, as Eric Miller has implied in Hope in a Scattering Time, his biography of Lasch, it is nevertheless the case that Lasch, in pointing to the necessity of strong families and viable mediating institutions, was surrendering his liberal bona fides at a time when fewer and fewer remained to him.

He was clear enough about this in his blistering remarks, published in Harper’s, on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for children’s “rights” and her attempt to liberate children from their families in a manner analogous to the liberation of blacks from slave-owners and women from men. The essay’s biting title was “Hillary Clinton, Child Saver.” “In a society composed of sovereign individuals,” Lasch wrote,

the family becomes a political battleground on which the generations confront each other as adversaries, each appealing to outside forces in the hope of shoring up their own position. The older generation is attracted to the political slogan of “family values,” the younger to the growing campaign to give the rights of children the full protection of the law.

Into this dispute stepped a self-appointed referee whose “writings exemplify the view of families that so many working people find objectionable. From her perspective, the ‘traditional’ family is, for the most part, an institution in need of therapy, an institution that stands in the way of children’s rights — an obstacle to enlightened progress.” Such, Lasch implied, explained the defection of “‘Reagan Democrats’ from a party that no longer seemed to care about people engaged in the hard work of raising children.” And in any case he minced no words: “her writings leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free.”

If Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that people, children included, also need protection from the state every now and then, she failed to understand that “the best defense against the state is the informal authority exercised by the family, the neighborhood, the church, the labor union, and all those other intermediary institutions that make it possible for communities to educate, discipline, and take care of themselves without calling on the state.”

Moreover, she argued that when children are dependent upon their parents, they are “discourage[d] from taking responsibility for themselves,” though dependence on the state would apparently not have the same effect. Lasch would have none of it:

The growth of the welfare state weakens those institutions, and reformers then cite the resulting disarray in order to justify another dose of the same medicine. Far from encouraging individual autonomy, however, the welfare state turns citizens into clients. Clinton thinks it would be a good thing if young people could “organize themselves into a self-interested constituency” like other victims of discrimination. She does not seem to see that dependence on the state is no better than any other form of dependence — worse, in the case of those who are necessarily dependent by virtue of their inexperience.

Lasch followed instead the analysis offered by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which long ago had pointed out that “professional supervision” concocted by reformers is a waste of “normal, casual manpower for child rearing.” According to Lasch, Jacobs had demonstrated that healthy neighborhoods encourage what she called “casual public trust”; they

teach children a lesson that cannot be taught by educators or professional caretakers; namely, that “people must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.” When the corner grocer or the locksmith scolds a child for running into the street, the child learns something that “people hired to look after children cannot teach, because the essence of this responsibility is that you do it without being hired.”

Having thus incurred the ire of the Left with his remarks, Lasch played equal-opportunity with the Right: parents who do not wish to surrender their duties to the state are “perhaps the most conservative group in the country,” and yet “conservatism” betrays them, for it is an ism

that begins and ends with a celebration of the free market. Republicans may hate what is happening to our children, but their commitment to the culture of acquisitive individualism makes them reluctant to trace the problem to its source. They glorify the man on the make, the smart operator who stops at nothing in the pursuit of wealth, and then wonder why ghetto children steal and hustle instead of applying themselves to their homework.

The Right, having refused to “indict the market in the collapse of the family,” was essentially sounding the fox horn, which is to say inviting the Left into the hunt for legitimacy amid its “party’s declining fortunes.”

By looking at the “children’s cause” through the eyes of hard-pressed parents, they can make “family values” more than an empty phrase. They can begin to heal racial divisions by showing that when it comes to children, all families want the same thing: protection from an intrusive commercialism that corrupts the young and undermines parental authority…. What they all need is a protected space for their children to grow up in.

This went over about as well with the Left as Lasch’s criticism of another progressive orthodoxy: “A feminist movement that respected the achievements of women in the past,” he wrote in Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, “would not disparage housework, motherhood or unpaid civic and neighborly services. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment. It would demand a system of production for use rather than profit. It would insist that people need self-respecting honorable callings, not glamorous careers that carry high salaries but take them away from their families.”

Toward the end of his career Lasch took an interest in — and became broadly informed on — the enduring properties and dangers of that ancient heresy, Gnosticism, on which he wrote several essays for New Oxford Review and Salmagundi. This was no intellectual dalliance. Rather, it sprung organically from the soils of Lasch’s intellectual disposition and his seemingly effortless ability to intuit and name the maladies that are so inimical to human flourishing. Allowing for a very broad definition of Gnosticism — that Creation and Fall are the same event, that the physical world impedes our return to the realm of pure mind or spirit, and that salvation comes not by love or grace but by knowledge (and knowledge granted to a privileged few at that) — granting this definition, we can see why Lasch thought it necessary to recognize and name this ancient menace, newly returned to work its woe on a technological society in permanent departure mode. I single out but two aspects of his thinking, both rather obvious, that played into this late interest: (1) the mistake of trusting our elites who (2) have long been engaged in a flight from this world. It seemed a merely passing remark when in The Revolt of the Elites Lasch noted our “loss of respect for honest manual labor.”

We think of creative work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter, and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life — hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise.

He indicted them for having “no experience of making anything substantial or enduring” and for being mere consumers of productive labor. “They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality — ‘hyperreality,’ as it is has been called — as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women.”

But Lasch clearly regarded this as a Gnostic resurgence. And who should be surprised by this rough beast, its hour come round again, slouching toward Silicon Valley to be born? “The ‘postmodern’ megalopolis,” he wrote in New Oxford Review, “has given rise to forms of social life uncannily reminiscent of the Hellenistic empire,” which he called “sprawling” and “polyglot” and which suffered the “decline of small property and local self-government,” the absence of which created a vacuum that political and economic centralization were (and are) quick to rush into.

But the similarities did not end there: “The militarization of government and civic life was an added discouragement to any form of popular participation. The widening gap between the rich and the poor did not prevent a rapid circulation of elites or the rise of a parvenu class that was widely traveled and superficially sophisticated but only half educated.” In short, “the second century was a time when the accumulation of wealth, comfort, and knowledge outran the ability to put these good things to good use. It was a time of expanding horizons and failing eyesight, of learning without light and great expectations without hope — a time very like our own.” In Lasch’s view Gnosticism “could take shape only in a climate of the deepest moral confusion.” He had learned from reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that contempt for the physical world and the life of the body in it leads inevitably to the destruction of both. But what more could a world-despising Gnostic ask for than release from the world and the body born into it — except maybe a few more technological shortcuts through the splendid messiness of this one life?

You can join the madding crowd of politicized intellectuals in condemning Lasch as a man who couldn’t mind his business as a historian. But Lasch was clear about the study of history. A properly “prophetic” study of the past, he wrote in Salmagundi, as opposed to a mere scholastic curiosity about it, puts itself to the important task of the criticism that is essential to the examined life. “Here the study of Gnosticism,” to take but one example, “is shaped not by questions growing out of a tradition of specialized scholarship but by the suspicion that an understanding of the gnostic sensibility will shed light on the spiritual condition of our own times.”

Historical scholarship becomes a form of philosophical and cultural criticism…. Gnosticism commends itself as an object of study, to those with a speculative turn of mind, not because new information has come to light or because gaps in the scholarly record remain to be filled but because it is important for the modern world to understand how it lost its way and might regain it.

Lasch believed that our grip on the real world — not just the “environment” but “our human home” — was weakening. Our sustaining traditions, our mediating institutions, our privileges of association — all were being dismissed as parochial by the greater parochialism of the elites. And so “an ancient dualism reasserts itself as a plausible description of existence”:

the world is a wilderness, a madhouse, a living hell, escape from which (whether in space ships or suicide, in daydreams, in carefully engineered revivals of old superstitions, or simply in a kind of cultivated inattention) holds out the only hope of freedom.

Gnosticism, “the faith of the faithless,” is as well-suited to us as it was to those living in the second century. “We can expect many people, still only dimly aware of its undeniable attractions, to fall on it as a religion seemingly made to order for the hard times ahead.” For, again, “the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself.”

Such was Lasch’s cast of mind, and such was his rhetorical power in plain style. Philip Lee rightly noted in Against the Protestant Gnostics that in the New Testament the formulation isn’t escape from the world but pilgrimage through it. It is a notable feature of Lasch as a man — as distinct from Lasch as a social critic or historian — that, even in the late stages of cancer, he chose pilgrimage, not escape. And then Valentine’s Day 1994 beheld the end of a journey that most agree was far too short.

Local Culture is pleased to feature the artwork of Lasch’s daughter, Kate Loomis. The cover is a pen-and-ink drawing from a photograph of Lasch, ca. 1980. I am grateful to Lasch’s other daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, not only for her reminiscence here but for the photographs included in these pages. Readers may be interested to know of an online bibliography of Lasch’s work compiled by Robert Cummings at Truman State University: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/3271.