Did Christopher Lasch Predict 9-11?

No.

But he came pretty close.

I was reading a bit this morning in Lasch’s provocative and magisterial The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (W.W. Norton, 1991) and I was struck by this paragraph on p. 23.

A sign of the times: both left and right, with equal vehemence, repudiate the charge of “pessimism.” Neither side has any use for “doomsayers.” Neither wants to admit that our society has taken a wrong turn, lost its way, and needs to recover a sense of purpose and direction. Neither addresses the overriding issue of limits, so threatening to those who wish to appear optimistic at all times. The fact remains: the earth’s finite resources will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization. The right proposes, in effect, to maintain our riotous standard of living, as it has been maintained in the past, at the expense of the rest of the world (increasingly at the expense of our minorities as well). This program is self-defeating, not only because it will produce environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape but because it will widen the gap between rich and poor nations, generate more and more violent movements of insurrection and terrorism against the West, and bring about a deterioration of the world’s political climate as threatening as the deterioration of its physical climate.

Most of this is still relevant today, eighteen years later.