In the early summer of 1991, a friend of mine told me of a new book coming out that I might enjoy. I had heard, but not read, The Culture of Narcissism, and the name Christopher Lasch was one I had heard without knowing too much about. Working at the seminary bookstore, I managed to order and get my hands on a copy of The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics and read it straight through. I can say without qualification that it, with a handful of other books, changed my mind about a great many things, and was formative for my own understanding of society, culture, and politics.
Lasch's masterwork is a tour de force, stretching back to Burke and Smith, through mid-19th century social critics in America such as de Tocqueville and Orestes Brownson, the syndicalists, with long excurses on Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, all a long argument that really boils down to a simple thesis - the Enlightenment project of social improvement has degenerated in to a parody of the ancien regime it overthrew, an elitist cadre of self-appointed guardians of public morals and private virtue in the service of keeping itself in power. Rather than either a reactionary diatribe against liberal shallowness or a neo-conservative shifting of alliances, Lasch uses his combination of intellect, moral passion, and masterly writing style in the service of a far more radical critique of American society than most one hears, even from so-called progressives and liberals today.
"Progress", in its debased, Americanized form has come to mean nothing more than turning our democratic ways over to technocrats (a phenomenon already pointed out by French critic Jacques Ellul in his classic The Technological society). With its disdain for politics, its withering view of the fine art of compromise, and its scathing (and occasionally horrid) snobbery toward the lumpen of our society, progressive thought in its dotage is no different, in effect, than the aristocratic buffoonery one saw in the dying days of the French and Ottoman and Russian and Austrian monarchies.
In the service of a call to reconsider small-"d" democratic values rooted in local communities, a sense of historical attachment and continuity, and a sense of place and possibility and hope, Lasch spells out in detail the way alternatives to the growing senescence of the Enlightenment has come to disregard these very values. In the process, of course, it has betrayed the democratic revolution it originally sought to support, intellectually.
I do not agree with everything Lasch has to say, by any means. In his detailed discussion of the Boston busing fight, he marginalizes the role of racism, which lay at the heart of the controversy. While I appreciate his argument that much of the feminist pro-choice movement's rhetoric is both racist and shallow, he does not turn it around and offer a serious argument in favor of legalized choice, which leads me to believe he was not in favor of it. For all that his view of the family has much to commend it, it also is far more idealized than the reality, past or present.
Even with these caveats, I can quite easily say that, along with James Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, Richard Rubenstein's After Auschwitz and The Age of Triage, and Gary Dorrien's three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology, Lasch's work continues to inform the way I think, view the world, and is one of the lenses through which I read much social, cultural, and political commentary.
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