FORUM: Christopher Lasch (I)

Thirty years after Lasch’s death, how should we remember him?

When Christopher Lasch died at age sixty-one on Valentine’s Day, 1994, the nation lost a man who for many embodied the very definition of the term intellectual. Lasch was best known for his 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, but the fifteen years on either side of it were filled with books, essays, and reviews in which Lasch brought immense learning, wit, and vision to a vocation he took up with an integrity rarely seen in the nation’s history. Over the next two days Current will feature essays by five writers in response to two questions: Thirty years after Christopher Lasch’s death, what strikes you as most significant about his life and work? How would you describe his ongoing relevance for American life today?

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A clear-eyed friend

Catherine Tumber

Christopher Lasch was spared the Web-powered digital onslaught that seized the world soon after his death, but he surely saw the code on the wall. It’s as if the tech watchwords that have permeated our common life—”Disruptive Innovation,” “Move Fast and Break Things,” “frictionless change,” “Information Wants to Be Free,” the very name YouTube—were tailor-made to defy his lifelong soundings on the moral fragility of democratic self-government. Although he didn’t write often about technology per se, Lasch was critical of the widespread view that it is inherently good, inevitable, and spurs “moral progress.” And he was drawn to thinkers who swam against the tide of technological determinism, from Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich to Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lewis Mumford. Reading the range of issues he engaged from the vantage of today’s tech-besotted world should prompt resistance to the casual digitization of everything in sight, which mows down all that is shapely, surprising, and honorable in democratic culture. 

To the frustration of even some admirers, Lasch was not prescriptive but exploratory, alive to shifting historical tensions in the formation of culture, character, and public debate. He disparaged academic specialization as of a piece with the weaknesses of liberal culture, reflecting ideas and structures that merely mirror those of the capitalist market both privately and in (what’s left of) the public sphere. His interdisciplinary shifts of emphasis—from neo-Marxist foreign policy and sociology to his use of  psychoanalytic theory to capture the narcissistic drift of  postwar American culture, and theological debate to piece together an American populist intellectual tradition—reveal recurrent themes that run counter to the algorithmic precision that clings to us like quicksand today.

Threaded throughout Lasch’s work is a reckoning with the limits—physical, metaphysical, phenomenological—imposed on the human condition. If his tone reads as unnecessarily dour to liberals, “progressives,” and self-proclaimed conservatives, that’s a pretty good sign that they share Tech World’s presumption of endless “positive” growth. Such optimistic fatalism has not only blurred traditions of thought rooted in hope and humility—it has distorted our understanding of the very nature of democratic freedom, offering only two accounts of its enactment: liberatory or libertarian. To Lasch’s way of thinking, freedom is not itself an end (and thus endless). It is, rather, bounded by structures of meaning shaped by human judgment hewn from what Arendt called “necessity.” In democratic culture, freedom is contained by various forms of debate in the public realm, the cultivation of emotionally rich autonomy in oneself and in the coming generations, and a vigorous sense of fair play. In today’s world, after many decades of democratic corrosion (traced carefully by Lasch over the course of his life,) digital expansion into every nook and cranny of human endeavor has accelerated these distortions of freedom with astonishing breadth and dispatch. 

The illusion of unlimited, unrestricted growth fuels the mood of unappeasable indignation underwriting our severely polarized politics. Consequences of a more material nature stem from the tech industry itself—its disruptive search-and-destroy business models, its eye-popping wealth accumulation, and the obscene wealth inequality it has fostered in concert with also-newly-emergent industry partner, private equity. Written in 1993, the last full year of Lasch’s life and just before widespread use of the internet, his final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy registered the dangers, warning that democracy requires “rough equality”—both on the ground and in aspiration. Instead, the two industries have worked hand-in-glove, with deregulatory bipartisan support, in a giddy mood of “irrational exuberance,” peddling frictionless change and so-called free access while stripping out value and jobs from industries vital to the “rough equality” of democratic order. Meanwhile, productive work was summarily downgraded as insufficiently “smart” and shipped overseas, as the twin baronies of innovation set about upending housing markets, retail, and hospitality, among others, and absolutely decimating local news gathering—a crucial safeguard of democratic accountability. Today, entire cities are “news deserts.”

In a word, the digital world is invasive, consistent with yet exceeding that advanced by the “parasites of Monopoly Power,” in the late-nineteenth-century populist movement’s memorable words. “Before rushing blindly into the computer age,” Lasch wrote in 1984, “we need to remind ourselves that events have already falsified most of the predictions about ‘post-industrial society.’” Rather than creating an abundance of skilled “knowledge” jobs for the college educated and eradicating dirty work, he argued, it has deskilled and destabilized the workforce while eliminating the cultivation of judgment from both schools and the workplace. “Everything we know about technological ‘progress’ indicates that it promotes inequality and political centralization.”

The internet has generated new, far more portable invasive forms and greased the skids for older ones that Lasch had already brought under scrutiny. A sharp critic of consumer culture, with its mass-market delivery conduits running from celebrity-enshrining magazines to radio and television, Lasch was particularly attentive to its divisive effects on families —sites of childhood nurture and character formation and (even without children) essential bulwarks against the corrosive grind of the capitalist market. In its development of “free content” in exchange for aggressively marketed attention-demanding screen time, the internet super-charged business strategies that eroded family bonds—generational market segmentation, the revaluing of entirely new skills and knowledge transmitted independent of parental guidance, the exhausting unprecedented pace of digital obsolescence—and that, as Lasch painstakingly explained, had been undertaken since at least the 1920s. That unrestricted access is merely a regrettable byproduct of the wonders of social media—that only “digital natives” are now employable—would not likely have surprised him.

When I first encountered Lasch’s writing as a dazed-and-confused mid-’70s college student, I felt suddenly located, as though a friend had reached through the muck of sectarian left infighting and therapeutic psycho-spiritual babble and pulled me up to stable land. What Lasch offered, very broadly speaking, was the view that moral principles are not entirely fixed across time and place, but that they’re hardly fluid either. The manner and language we use to engage life’s moral underpinnings is dependent on structures that embed freedom, be it the private realm of family and friends or the public realm of political disputation. It’s a given, Lasch understood, that these human-made worlds often conflict—within and with one another. And this is why we need a sturdy sense of self, forged from the helpless narcissism of infancy, that can withstand life’s heartbreaking limitations and discordant notes, and even draw from them sources of esthetic expression and spiritual strength. 

For all the optimism that roundly greeted the digital dispensation, it’s become clear that its tentacles—reaching deep into both the private and public domains, disfiguring truth and exposing the innocent and unsuspecting to sexual and commercial predators—must be trimmed. As Lasch argued in The True and Only Heaven, facing such challenges requires not fundamentally passive optimism but hard-won hope. Only a hopeful disposition rooted in faith in a world that will outlive us can ground the moral courage, imagination, and judgment we must summon during this period of multiple challenges to democratic self-government. For those stumbling around stunned by the losses inflicted by digital “progress,” Lasch’s work still offers the steadying hand of a clear-eyed friend. Grab hold.

Catherine Tumber holds a doctorate in U.S. social and cultural history from the University of Rochester, where she studied with Christopher Lasch. Her books include a critical study of gnostic feminism titled American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self 1875-1915 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Small Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World (MIT Press, 2012). Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Baffler, Boston Review, Raritan, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The Nation, the Washington Post, The American Prospect, Wilson Quarterly, Architectural Record, In These Times, and American Literary History, among others. To learn more about her work, visit https://catherinetumber.com/.

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Christopher Lasch changed my life

Christopher Shannon

Many years ago I attended the annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. The conference included a plenary event to promote the release of a new documentary, Paul Goodman Changed My Life. Goodman was the author of Growing Up Absurd and several other works that exerted a profound influence on the counterculture of the 1960s. But by the early twenty-first century he was virtually unknown, and certainly undiscussed, in American intellectual circles. In the discussion that followed the presentation on the documentary, several historians noted that Goodman was just one among many authors—including David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt and Philip Rieff—whose works, once required reading for anyone claiming to be an intellectual, had virtually disappeared from mainstream intellectual discourse. 

I first learned of these authors through the writings of Christopher Lasch. His works were also once on the required reading list for American intellectuals. But since his death in 1994 his works have also fallen off the required reading shelf. 

And by the way, Christopher Lasch changed my life. 

I first encountered Lasch not in books but in person. In 1983, after a few years drifting as a college flunk-out, I returned to school at my hometown University of Rochester. With dreams of becoming a writer, I chose English as my major. In the spring of 1984 a friend suggested I take a history class from this guy Christopher Lasch, who was supposed to be a big deal. I had some vague awareness of his name from the brief fame accorded him by receiving the National Book Award for The Culture of Narcissism (1979); I had also heard a bit about him from my brother-in-law, who knew the Lasch family from growing up in nearby Avon, New York. The title of Lasch’s spring course, “Recent American History,” was not exactly designed to attract an English major with dreams of becoming a writer. Still, I had always liked history in high school and, living in the 1980s, I was curious to learn anything that might shed light on how America ended up with a washed-up Hollywood B-actor as its president. 

I was totally unprepared for what I was to encounter. Gone was the timeline from high school history. Gone was the president-by-president narrative of American politics. This was history that addressed politics but placed politics in the broader context of ideas and culture. Most of all, this was history presented as a debate among historians over the meaning of history. The scales fell from my eyes. Lasch’s account of everything from World War I to interest-group politics was far more exciting and compelling, even more poetic, than anything I was learning in my literature classes. I finished out my time at the U of R as an English major but went on to graduate school committed to following the path of Lasch into the history of ideas and culture. 

The mid-1980s was a good time to follow in Lasch’s footsteps. Though none of his books, least of all Culture of Narcissism, qualify as conventional history monographs, his approach to history as a form of cultural criticism had a profound effect on a rising generation of historians who came of age reading his works. I think in particular of the group of historians who contributed to The Culture of Consumption (1983), a collection of essays edited by T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard W. Fox. This was history in a Laschian mode, thoroughly researched but written as an intervention in contemporary cultural debate. Following Lasch, many of these authors wrote from a perspective that integrated the Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School with a kind of cultural conservatism respectful of traditional social structures and religious ideas. If older Marxist analysis criticized capitalism for denying workers the emancipation that could come only through revolution, the authors of The Culture of Consumption were more likely to criticize capitalism for destroying the traditional communal structures that gave meaning to the lives of everyday people. I was fortunate to attend graduate school in the American Studies program at Yale, where many of the contributors to The Culture of Consumption had either studied or taught. 

As a Catholic at a highly secular institution, I found this, dare I say, “school of Lasch” an unexpected bridge between my Catholic faith and the broader scholarly world. In the American context, the traditional world evoked and invoked by Lasch did not extend much past the Puritan New England of the seventeenth century. Lasch and his followers were, however, profoundly influenced by the works of European social history, particularly the neo-Marxist E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which reimagined the class struggle as one less between labor and capital than between tradition and modernity. Thompson’s classic work begins in the firmly Protestant England of the late-18^th century but presents the social and work traditions threatened by the rise of capitalism as, if not timeless, at least clearly stretching back before the Reformation into medieval Catholic England. 

In addition to the philo-Catholicism of Marxist social history, Lasch also introduced me to the work of the most significant Catholic thinker of the last half-century, Alasdair MacInytre. Lasch’s exploration of traditional alternatives to capitalist modernity led him to the work of MacIntyre, a moral philosopher who drew on the tradition of Aristotlean-Thomistic virtue ethics to critique the incoherence of contemporary moral philosophy. If social history’s celebration of pre-industrial work habits risked the danger of nostalgia, MacInytre’s concept of “tradition” offered an intellectual framework for understanding how ideas change over time that still allowed for substantial continuity; openness to change did not require accepting the progressive extinction of the past. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition was still vital—not simply because we might prefer it for nostalgic reasons but because the Enlightenment project of constructing a moral philosophy founded on autonomous reason alone had failed on its own terms. I had attended a Catholic high school named after St. Thomas Aquinas and even took Thomas as my confirmation name. But I never imagined that a medieval Catholic thinker would have anything serious to say about modern thought.

Echoes of these premodern Catholic traditions can be heard throughout Lasch’s magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991). Space does not permit an overview of this book. If you have not read it, read it! Sadly, the book’s reception as a serious work marked the last moment in which Lasch would command the attention of an audience of both scholars and general readers. Lasch delivered his magisterial critique of progress at just the moment his erstwhile allies on the left were rebranding themselves. Trying to secure a foothold in mainstream politics, the left chose to discard the confrontational badge of “radical” for the comparatively moderate term “progressive.” Much had changed since Lasch numbered himself among the fellow-travelers of the sixties political left. Student rebels had matured into “tenured radicals,” while the success of Reaganite conservatism led them to rediscover the virtues of the previously despised “liberal” tradition in America. The new “progressive” consensus was in many ways a revival of the old liberal consensus of the 1950s, a connection obscured by its privileging of women and minorities who, beneath the masks of gender and race, espoused the values and world view of the originally white-male, professional-managerial class. 

Lasch would have none of it—and it would have none of him. His works ended up on the shelf of forgotten books, alongside those of Paul Goodman. Our politics and our intellectual life have been the worse for it. 

Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills (1996) and American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022).