In the spring of 1991, a friend of mine encouraged me to purchase a new book by then-University of Rochester historian Christopher Lasch. The book, entitled The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, is a tour-de-force, covering everything from the literature of Dickens to the theology of Jonathan Edwards to the French Syndicalists to the Boston busing controversy of the 1970's, and in the middle offers serious assesments of the careers of Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Burke, and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well. The argument of the book is simple: the ideological fantasy of a linear increase in human hapiness and self-satisfaction has run its course, but we do not as yet have the tools to grapple, ideologically, with its failures. Looking at alternatives from within the era of progress itself offers us a way forward. While not agreeing with everything Lasch said - I did not like his dismissal of the allegations of racism at the heart of the busing controversy, couched in suburban populist rhetoric - the book floored me for its clarity, breadth of research, and wealth of information.
Lasch made a name for himself towards the end of the 1970's with a book entitled The Culture of Narcissism, in which he argued that much of our social and cultural commentary on the previous decade was misguided because it failed to note that many of the hallmarks of what critics took to calling "the 'Me' decade" were actually indicative of a type of psychopathology known as narcissistic personality disorder. In the work in question, and its 1984 follow-up (less read in the age of Reagan, more's the pity), The Minimal Self, Lasch discusses in depth the nature of narcissism and the way it is displayed in a variety of dysfuntional social phenomena. A major point Lasch returns to again and again, because it is necessary, is that the so-called selfishness exhibited in social and cultural life was not indicative of a bloated sense of self, but rather in an absence of any meaningful, centered sense of identity. Much of what superficial criticism took as an absorption in the self was actually part of serious personality problems - much of America was exhibiting a lack of any sense of themselves, seeking to project into the world a self that they could then reabsorb, through social-psychological osmosis, as their true identity. The problem is that narcissists are incapable of holding on to identity for long because of the fundamental problem at the heart of their pathology - they lack the resources necessary for a secure identity. Thus, the search goes on.
Lasch's work was misappropriated and mis-interpreted at the time, and continues to be. In an updated edition of Narcissism, Lasch responds to a variety of critics by, in essence, restating his thesis, precisely because it was so poorly understood by his critics. Narcissism is not navel-gazing slef-indulgence. Rather, navel-gazing self-indulgence is indicative of any meaningful sense of individual identity, and shows that there is something profoundly wrong with social institutions which would foster such a pathology. Still, however, one can read accounts in which Lasch is invoked as a critic of selfishness, and it irks me, as someone who has read the work (and re-read it because it rewards multiple readings) to read people who use Lasch in ways that are diametrically opposed to the ideas he put forth.
Now we come to a study, written about here by Tristero at Hullabaloo and, with a slightly different take, here by my turtle-loving neighbors from the north (with a comment from Your's Truly), in which narcissism again rears its ugly head, yet this time - do we have to replay all the idiocy from the 1970's? - it again is misappropriated, misapplied, and an argument is made that tries to prove the exact opposite of what should be intended. A study claims that our youth are suffering from, you guessed it, narcissism. The evidence? Why, they're a bunch of self-centered, lazy creeps who don't do anything for anybody!
The study, flawed in a variety of ways, equates narcissism with self-centeredness, uses indicators that prove something else entirely (to which we shall return), and follows a methodology that would lose any other psychologist a Ph.D. on his or her dissertation. One point, made by Tristero, is that the study ignores the fact that the youth portrayed as self-indulgent do more community volunteer work than any other age-cohort. To dismiss this, essentially, as class work as the study-authors do, misses the point that this volunteer work is being done.
More on point, the study is hardly scientific because it seeks to prove something the researchers already took as axiomatic - that our youth are over-pampered, over-indulged, and we are reaping the rewards of parental leniency rooted in what is underrstood to be a failed liberal ideology. The problem, of course, is that these axioms are false - if you base scinece on untrue assumptions, your conclusions will be false as well. If I were to seek out physical confirmation of the luminiferous ether, and found it, that would prove nothing.
I do, however, have an laternative interpretation of the data gathered. Rather than indicative of narcissism among youth, the data could point to a struggle by well-grounded, psychologically healthy youth against the social pathology endemic to our political culture, a pathology most marked for its narcissism, its refusal to learn from mistakes or grant reality a separate, integrated existence (both hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder), and a tendency to exaggerate one's own skills and gifts, even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary (another hallmark of the disorder). In other words, it is not youth who are narcissistic, but the ruling elites, the genereational cohort that was the subject of Christopher Lasch's original criticism. In short, Lasch was right, and we are reaping the fruits of that social pathology.
Virtual Tin Cup
