FORUM: Christopher Lasch (II)

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. Yesterday and today we 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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He took children seriously

Susan McWilliams Barndt

Christopher Lasch paid attention to children. Today, we need to pay attention to that attention.

Part of why we should do this, as Lasch saw, is because so few Americans pay any meaningful attention to the youngest among us—or take seriously the question of how to raise these young people well.

In fact, Lasch’s attention to children and child-raising is noteworthy just because it exists. Not many scholars of American politics take the vantage point of a parent in their scholarship—especially not many male scholars of American politics, and extra-especially not many male scholars of the late twentieth century.

Such a blind spot might seem like a strange ellipsis in American political thought. After all, it does not seem too controversial to say that the real measure of a society lies not in the material but in the humans it tends to produce. (The Nazis made really good cars; that is not the measure of their worth.) If you want to evaluate a culture, it makes sense to evaluate the way that culture cares for its children and prepares them to be adults. Or as Lasch put it in The True and Only Heaven, you have to see “from the point of view of a parent” in order to be able to see a society for what it truly is.

But Lasch himself wouldn’t have been surprised that scholars of American politics neglect children—because they are part of a broader culture that treats children with almost total moral indifference, if not disdain.

Lasch argued that, seen through parents’ eyes contemporary American society looks pretty grim. “To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent,” he writes, “is to see it in the worst possible light.” That is because contemporary American children are raised in what are at best schizophrenic conditions. 

From one point of view, contemporary American children are treated like precious snowflakes. A chorus of adult voices tells them that they can be anything they want to be. Parents and teachers consider self-esteem to be a key educational goal. (My extended family can all sing, from memory, the “I Am Special” song that was a staple of our preschool educations.) Grade inflation means that many children are getting exceptional grades for unexceptional work; at my daughter’s public middle school, less than half of the students meet state standards in math, but more than half of the students have an A average. In those ways, growing up in contemporary America is like growing up in Lake Wobegon, a place where “all the children are above average.” 

But those same children, Lasch saw, can see they inhabit a culture that treats them as not special and not above-average. Quite the opposite: The culture treats them as dispensable—“America’s first generation of disposable children,” as Eric Wright puts it. Earth is becoming more uninhabitable, and few people are even trying to fix it. Armed assassins regularly mow down classrooms full of children, and few people take meaningful action to stop it. Those classrooms themselves are overcrowded and underfunded, and few people call for better schools. The internet feeds children an endless diet of violence, pornography, and predation, and few adults even monitor what children are doing online.

How is it possible for children to grow up well in such schizophrenic conditions? How is it possible for such children to avoid becoming cynical? To develop a true sense of their worth and capacities? How are they supposed to grow up to care for a country that hasn’t cared too much for them? And how is a society ever going to flourish—or even just solve its basic problems—when these are the conditions in which its future citizens grow up?

And this accounting only scratches the surface. For there are other things that American children don’t see, but feel: the lack of parental leave policies that would allow working parents to stay at home with their newborn children; the low and unstable wages that compel most parents to hold jobs rather than take care of their children in the first place; the increasing financial barriers to higher education (even public higher education); and more. A complete evidentiary list of America’s neglect for children would be very long and would transcend conventional political platforms. Lasch’s list (from 1991) looks like this:

[O]ur obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of “making it,” our addictive dependence on drugs, “entertainment,” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties; our preference for “nonbinding commitments”; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we “impose” our morality on others and thus invite others to “impose” their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.

Throughout his career, Lasch called on us to reflect on the broader moral failures that are signaled in America’s third-rate care for its children. Lasch understood that soulcraft has to be part of statecraft, and by that measure the American state is weaker than most social scientists or pundits allow.

I was a child when Lasch issued his call. I am a mother now. I see no signs that Lasch’s call has been heeded or even really considered. I hope that will change, but mine is what Lasch called “hope without optimism.”

Christopher Lasch took children—and child-raising—seriously. Today, thirty years after his death, we should take his thinking on children seriously—if for no other reason than to let Lasch remind us that we need to be more serious about our children and our future.

Susan McWilliams Barndt is Professor of Politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She has authored and edited numerous books including A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017) and The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018).

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A herald of postliberalism

Dominic A. Aquila

Devoted readers of Christopher Lasch were deeply saddened by his untimely death in 1994. Among his students—I was fortunate enough to be among them—the loss was especially soul-piercing. He mentored us with great kindness, generosity of heart, and warmth. 

At the time, some found consolation in James Seaton’s brief remembrance of Lasch in the August 1994 number of First Things, entitled “The Gift of Christopher Lasch.” For those who knew Lasch personally, the law of the gift—to borrow a favorite phrase of St. Pope John Paul II—was palpable and alive in him. Regarding democracy, Lasch’s gift was, as Seaton put it, a “persistent engagement with and against the ideologies of the present.” Thirty years after Lasch’s passing these ideological habits of mind persist, and Lasch’s work remains a reliable source from which to continue contesting their narrowness of mind, furrowed ways of thinking, and harmfulness. 

In The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, a tour de force of intellectual history, Lasch demonstrated how the political ideologies of left and right had become obsolete for their failure “to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.” By the 1990s, differences between left and right amounted to policy disagreements and rarely extended to first principles grounded in right moral action. Over a decade earlier, in the paperback edition of Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, Lasch exposed the purblindness of the American intelligentsia. In a deliciously worded response to the critics of the hardcover edition of the book, Lasch wrote: “Praised by right-wing reviewers who misunderstand its political implications, condemned by the infantile left, greeted by the center with a mixture of suspicion, uneasiness and outrage, Haven in a Heartless World has baffled ideologues of every political color.” Such readers, wrote Lasch, preferred hand-me-down answers to the pressing political and social questions of the day, resorting to lazy-minded party doctrines rather than the hard work of thinking. 

Haven in a Heartless World appeared at nearly the same time as Theodore Lowi’s classic work The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, in which Lowi, with the clinical precision of a political scientist, exposed the vacuity of the “purely ritualistic” left-right debate. Lasch thought highly of Lowi’s work and assigned sections of The End of Liberalism to his undergraduate students at the University of Rochester. In a particularly sharp-eyed analysis of post-World War II American politics, powerfully resonant with Lasch’s critique of the hegemony of the ersatz left-right public discourse, Lowi wrote, “The decline of a meaningful dialogue between a liberalism and a conservatism has meant the decline of a meaningful adversary political proceedings in favor of administrative, technical, and logrolling politics”. Politics had become a question of equity rather than a question of morality. Like Lasch, Lowi saw that the emptiness of the left-right binary had resulted in a range of social and political pathologies. Both agreed that the putative disagreements between the left and the right were a thin veneer for a consensus on liberal principles underpinning the rational organization of social life on an increasingly global scale, made possible by an unshakeable faith in technologically driven progress, despite evidence to the contrary. 

To be sure, much of today’s mainstream American political discourse still moves ritualistically between the ossified categories of left and right. The ubiquity of social media seems to have breathed new life into it insofar as platforms such as “X” require ridiculously brief expressions of ideas, which encourage the use of well-worn political hooks. Nevertheless, there are enclaves of serious thinking that recognize the value of Lasch’s writing for, among many other of its qualities, its impatience with desiccated ideologies and ideologically driven public policies. For instance, in an article on the current interests of young (mainly Catholic) French intellectuals in The New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla notes their keen interest in Lasch among a “mélange” of other thinkers. They include George Orwell, Simone Weil, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Alasdair Macintyre, “and especially . . . Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—’uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots’—get repeated like mantras.” 

Rootlessness is one important contributor to the explosion of thinking about what a postliberal order might look like in the U.S. and abroad. To be sure, Lasch might not embrace the entirety of postliberalism’s first principles and their implications—especially at this point, when they have yet to crystalize into a coherent political philosophy and program. Nevertheless, Lasch’s work has come to be foundational for the various strains of these lines of inquiry. Besides the basic human desire for rootedness, postliberalism springs from a yearning for an alternative to the cold, bureaucratic and technologized existence offered by liberalism.

In this respect, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) has become a cornerstone of postliberalism, and has made Deneen one of its prominent spokesmen. While Deneen acknowledges classical and progressive liberalism’s laudable aspirations, it has failed because of a flawed ontology of the human person. In the wake of liberalism’s failure, Deneen celebrates Lasch’s delineation of “an alternative American tradition based upon a populist and anti-progressive defense of political and economic localism.” Lasch’s influence has been more than intellectual for Deneen—it has been vocational. Lasch modeled the life of a public intellectual whose gifts of mind and heart are placed at the service of the common good. 

What can we expect of a Laschian-inspired postliberal politics and how will come about? In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, published posthumously in 1995, Lasch cautioned that abandoning outworn ideologies “will not usher in a golden age of agreement.” But he foresaw the essential qualities that concern today’s postliberal thinkers: an interest in the common good, neighborly affection, and our mutual responsibility for each other. Lasch believed that “A public philosophy for the twenty-first century will have to give more weight to the community than to the right of private decision. It will have to emphasize responsibilities rather than rights. It will have to find a better expression of the community than the welfare state.” Accordingly, for Lasch and the many strains of postliberals, “the tutoring of mutual need” is an indispensable foundation for a postliberal order. 

Dominic Aquila is Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas), where he also served as Provost from 2008 to 2017. Christopher Lasch directed Aquila’s dissertation until Lasch’s untimely death in 1994. Aquila lives in Houston, Texas with his wife, Diane, and their eleven children and eight grandchildren.

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The bottom of things

Eric Miller

During the past two years I’ve attended two meetings of organizations devoted to intellectual inquiry. I thought I knew them well. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with evidence of not just how the times have changed, but of how they have changed us: One group had broken right, the other, left. 

Broken is the critical word. The shifts were a break from the past. But they also were the breaking of a tacit understanding about what such organizations exist to do: cultivate space for the joint, plural exploration of the truths we need to understand for the sake of life together. Frustrated by the narrowness of the dominant academic societies, I had found in these organizations open space. But as if on cue, the range of stances and forms of speech in each had constricted. Fresh air was a memory.

The common life requires more. Intellectual integrity requires more: This is what Christopher Lasch’s life as a scholar and intellectual still forcefully conveys, three decades after his death. 

Our bedrock need as a nation for intellectual integrity was the founding premise of Lasch’s work. It was the conviction that sparked the book that raised him to prominence in 1965, The New Radicalism in America. Not yet thirty-five years old, Lasch, with high-modernist verve, called out the most admired figures of his own kind—the intellectuals—for their buttressing of what he had come to see as a compromised tradition—compromised by the tendency of intellectuals to, as he wrote, “forsake the role of criticism” and instead meld themselves into political movements and conform themselves to cultural moods in ways that diminished their ability to achieve what they (and those who looked to them) most needed: vision. 

This was no summons to an ivory tower. Lasch himself was deeply involved in politics in these years, joining others who were trying to work out, as The Agony of the American Left (1969) testifies, an institutional pathway toward a more fully and richly democratic America. But such an undertaking would require the most searching forms of inquiry any society can muster—inquiry that never imagines one’s own side, or one’s own mind, to be beyond suspicion, to have finally found its way home. If Lasch knew one thing, it was that to stop listening to the other side is to stop listening. It was a mistake no society, or human being, could afford to make. 

Two decades later Lasch laid out a pathway toward democratic vitality that was the fruit of long years of listening. By the time he wrote The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) he was convinced of, as he put it, “the uselessness of the old labels and the need for a reorientation of political ideas.” He believed there were resources—voices, testaments, movements, sensibilities—within the American past that could help us push toward what he simply called “a decent society.” Listening intently to them, he made their case in subtle and discriminating ways, seeking purchase for their wisdom and hope. The range of voices he gathered was remarkable. If Thomas Carlyle, as Lasch wrote, had regarded the French Revolution as “a missed opportunity to get to the bottom of things,” Lasch would make no such mistake. All his writing bears elegant witness to this impulse, ethic, and code: to not be beguiled by easy resting places, or by seemingly secure foundations, but rather to stay on the quest for truer vision and deeper understanding. 

Lasch, even while absorbing the profound epistemological disorientation of the last third of the twentieth century, never doubted the existence of a deeper rationality than what we tend to practice, much less apprehend. It was a rationality that called forth a necessary criticism and offered the possibility of ongoing union, even among opponents. If an unceasing impulse, book by book, to seek new categories and frameworks was a hallmark of Lasch’s writing, it was a reflection of his confidence in—his delight in—the supple nature of reality itself. To read Lasch is to read a mind alive, aware that it exists not within a void but a habitat, one that invites exploration of the most searching kind. His disdain for what he termed “the critical habit of mind,” which thrilled to the conceit that in its knowing secularity it had transcended “premodern systems of thought and belief,” led him to some of the most illuminating criticism of the vaunted (but increasingly undervalued) postmodern age. He described the “self-image of modernity” as “disillusioned but undaunted,” and with savage wit made clear “the spiritual price” of such a stance—the true peril that comes from premising a civilization upon such a foundation, quivering and shaking before our eyes. Reality demands more. Our progeny require more.

Lasch was not an architect. He was a guide. His was not to build. His was to show the way to the clearing where the building could take place—past the ruins, around the bogs, away from the cliffs and crags. As he took us past them he kept us in touch with what we are, and with what we might yet be. That the title of The True and Only Heaven comes from Hawthorne (“The Celestial Railroad”) riffing on Bunyan was utterly fitting. Lasch, ever on pilgrimage, was sure that the light he saw in the distance was real, and that deepest rationality requires us to affirm it. “Hope,” he wrote, “asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.” Hope was the opposite of its sham and shady counterfeit: “optimism,” which we in our late state of delusion venerate as a virtue. No, Lasch thrust us toward hope, toward, as he said, “trust” and “wonder”: a stance toward the universe that leads to “the grateful recognition of life as a gift rather than a challenge to our power to shape it to our own purposes.” The latter impulse was optimism in its raw promethean guise. The former was the wellspring of possibility—the hope-activated action we will surely need, he wrote, “in the troubled times to come.”

Is there any doubt that the troubled times have arrived? As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1990 Lasch offered no assurance that “the future will be safe for democracy.” He warned that yesteryear’s “totalitarian regimes” seemed to be “evolving toward some type of bureaucracy that fits neither the classic fascist nor the socialist model.” He contended that the biggest threat to democracy would come not from forces without but from “the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.” He was right and right again. 

As we witness that rough beast not slouching toward us but stretching forward into the void where democracy should be, I’m reminded of a line I discovered many years ago in Lasch’s early syllabi: “Judgment, rather than memory, is above all what this course seeks to foster.” Lasch was warning students that his class would require more than the memorization of facts. It would require a decisive reckoning with the past itself—an all-out effort to get to the bottom of things. 

The times were urgent. They still are. Today we need the memory of Christopher Lasch to help us keep our own judgments keen and sharp. If he left us too early, it’s not too late to look back with gratitude and learn again to hope.

Eric Miller, Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, is the author of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (2010). He is the editor of Current.