Son of the Third Way

This review appears in the Winter-Spring 2011 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch
by Eric Miller
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010)

At the age of fourteen, Christopher Lasch told his teacher just exactly what he thought about a particular book report she had assigned. This is just another example of “progressive education” and its “project system,” he wrote in the report. Progressive educators were pulling the students down to the same level as the bad ones, he insisted.

And thus began a career of criticism, one directed toward the crisis of “progress”—Lasch’s catchword, says Eric Miller, for “the long playing-out of the enlightened, liberal attempt to master the world with the doctrine of universal rights, the application of scientific rationality, and the might of the market.” The modern notion of progress was an illusion if it led to servitude and perhaps the burning up the world. The only cure for the culture was speaking the truth about it, and in doing so, Lasch suffered ridicule from both the Left and the Right.

Miller’s sympathetic treatment of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time, is a tour through twentieth-century American intellectual history, especially the span between Kennedy and Clinton, a period marked by protracted military conflict, increased centralization, the rise of the so-called culture wars, and the expansion of the global economy. Lasch was a social historian who became a public intellectual by interpreting the ideas of other public intellectuals. The grid whereby he analyzed ideas and movements remained for his entire life the preservation democratic values. If he was misunderstood, it was because others failed to see how their beliefs and actions undermined democracy.

Lasch’s earliest intellectual influences included Weber, Freud, and Marx. With Weber he understood how capitalism was predicated on free-floating labor, that for industrialism to succeed, work must be detached from the old household economy. Freud showed him that the formation of conscience and selfhood were so tied to one’s parents that to evade family relations was to relegate oneself to regressive or even pathological behavior. Early in his career Lasch identified himself with the New Left and neo-Marxism, especially the early Marx, the importance of voluntarism, and the pitfalls of economic determinism. By the early 1980s, however, Marx and Freud had become less satisfactory, and he increasingly came to view the crisis of progress as more of a spiritual disorder.

Hypnotized by Progress

As a social historian Lasch perceived that if personal freedom and economic opportunity became the core values of the culture then the old “repressive” social webs of family, church, and state would wither away. Capitalism had removed each family member from the home—first the father left for work, then the mother, and then the care of the children was outsourced to other institutions. American workers had confused a higher standard of consumption for a higher standard of living. Lasch found little comfort, says Miller, “in the fact that more and more women were by the 1970s finding employment in, of all places, corporate America and were thus active contributors to the vast economic and ecological wasting.” When Lasch wrote The True and Only Heaven (1991), he said the trouble with the Right was that it was insisting on a “riotous standard of living” at the expense of the rest of the world, and the trouble with the Left was that it was following right along.

Lasch’s disenchantment with progressive liberalism began soon after graduate school. Reason alone could not solve the problems of eliminating poverty, disease, discomfort, and war. Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy was overly optimistic, what historian George F. Kennan called the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” A better course to follow in the new atomic age would be to “accept the unhappy necessity of putting the national interest first.” Lasch saw little difference between the triumphalism inherent in both American liberalism and Soviet Communism.

He objected to the new radicals of the early twentieth century, whom he saw as dismissing the important issues of childhood, education, and sex—especially sex. While he participated in the campus demonstrations of the 1960s, he was not pleased with its drug scene, permissive sex, and hyper self-expression. Hedonism, he said, was a formula for “political impotence and a new despotism in which a highly educated elite through its mastery of the technological secrets of a modern society rule over an indolent population which has traded self-government for self-expression.” Many on the Left mistook nihilism for freedom. Ultimately, with its unwillingness to acknowledge objective truth, its disregard for tradition and a common culture, the Left and its intelligentsia had failed to deliver.

If the Left proved unsatisfactory, the Right fared little better with him. Conservatives promoted business at all possible costs, he complained early on, while failing “to protect the country from unwise innovation.” Miller points out that Lasch was labeled a “cultural conservative” soon after writing Haven in a Heartless World (1977), wherein he lamented the loss of family life. Yet he always saw the need to address the inconsistencies of modern conservatism, which was caught up in the cult of progress as much as the Left. “What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness?” he asked in a 1986 essay. Contemporary conservatism was a false conservatism. Neoconservatives were really liberals because they were more interested in capitalism than cultural preservation. The old labels had lost their meaning because tradition was at variance with the modern economic order.

Lasch’s own domestic life informed his writings, and he once recalled how he and his wife desired for their children to grow up in a “house full of people, a crowded table, four-hand music at the piano, non-stop conversation and cooking, baseball games and swimming in the afternoon, long walks after dinner . . . all these activities mixing children with adults.” Whereas the schools had once been the center of basic academic instruction, they now had become substitutions for the family, teaching people how the cook, drive, and get along with people. Lasch claimed fathers had abandoned their sons to so many surrogate institutions, making certain that they would remain in a perpetual state of boyhood, good fodder for the consumer culture. Placing the family at the center of production was preferable because it enabled parents and children to work and mature together.

Democracy was threatened by increasing authoritarianism, what Lasch called in the 1990s “the pathology of domination.” America might have won the Cold War, but not without a cost. He wrote in a 1990 New York Times op-ed that the United States and the Soviet Union had actually destroyed each other as major powers, with the fallout being greater centralization of business, government, and education. Modern organizations—economic and military—were growing in influence without regard to rational objectives other than their own aggrandizement. This left people with a sense of powerlessness. “Our incredible skill at understanding certain features of our plight,” Lasch noted, “is exceeded only by our inability to do anything about them.” Echoing the French social critic Jacques Ellul, he said Americans were hypnotized by economic and technological progress and could not perceive their predicament.

From Culture to Anticulture

Lasch spent most of his academic life at the University of Rochester, where he was looked upon by his students as a professor with high expectations. Throughout his teaching career he was disturbed by the increasing lack of quality in his students’ work. He once complained to his parents, “Assuming that the quality of writing is closely related to the quality of thought, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, I do not see a bright future for the life of the mind in America.” He was critical of compulsory education and thought the university had evolved into a trade school for overgrown adolescents. His vision for education reform in the 1970s included Jefferson’s assumption that all citizens need basic education, but higher education should be available only to those able to appreciate it. Basic education should be the responsibility of the local community and not educational bureaucrats. The industrial economy and public education had worked in tandem to dismantle local, familial educational networks. “The schools,” he wrote, “are plagued by boredom, disruption, violence, drugs, and gang warfare.”

When Lasch began his writing in the early 1960s he was optimistic about political and educational reform. Miller demonstrates how a decade later his research took a darker interior turn as he felt the political landscape closing in and the possibility of university reform collapsing. Out of this mood came perhaps his best-known work, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979). For Lasch, the narcissist was not a hedonist or selfish egotist (although he certainly would have agreed that Madonna and Rush Limbaugh were natural by-products of a culture like ours). The book argues that the loss of “inner resources” once provided by the home had produced an unfettered citizen who found his identity in a “grandiose self” as reflected in the new electronic media and its offspring—celebrity culture. Paternalism, once associated with fatherly beneficence, had given way to a new paternalism found in both the state and the market. The citizen had been transformed into a consumer and cast into a state of malaise, looking to products and services to satisfy the age-old problems of “loneliness, sickness, weariness, and lack of sexual satisfaction.” Lasch came to believe that the narcissist was the only type of person modern capitalism can form. Tragically, a culture based on immediate gratification was not a culture at all, but an anticulture.

Lasch saw the decline in religion corresponding with the rise of narcissism, which warranted for him a reconsideration of the importance of moral and spiritual values. Lasch has been described as a “fellow traveler with Christianity,” but Miller makes plain that he was not someone who believed in a personal God. Nevertheless, his creed allowed for a sovereign and active God of pure being and the belief that humans have a divine nature, as expressed in a guilty conscience. Because he saw one’s true selfhood as “a painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations [idealism] and limitations [realism],” his beliefs, Miller suggests, formed a kind of generic Calvinism. Reformed thought lives easy with the ideal/real tension, and while not accepting the God of Jonathan Edwards, Lasch thought Calvinists were some of the best cultural critics.

Lasch had early hopes that intellectuals would lead the way to a humane democratic socialism. Modern Americans were not achieving true freedom and democracy—to the contrary, they were a people without a polis, citizens of neither the city of God nor of man. His particular socialist vision called for decentralization, scaled-down institutions under regional and local control. He admired the agrarian revolt of the late nineteenth century, praising it as “one of the last expressions of what once had been a flourishing provincial culture.” His “program” emerged as a “populist strategy of political action” dispossessed by the “growth of irresponsible bureaucratic organizations like [the] corporation, the multiversity, and the Pentagon.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lasch could be described as someone holding to the unusual combination of cultural tradition and leftward political economy. For this reason some identified him with the Tory radicals.

As the 1970s played out, Lasch placed less confidence in the Left and its leadership, faulting them for embracing the modern assumptions of progress and thereby eschewing traditionalism, which emphasized “dignity of privacy, kinship ties, moral order, and civic duty.” If there was any salvation for the nation at all, it resided in the “new populism”—and he preferred the populist label over all others—which he saw as a continuation of the Jeffersonian ideal. The best hope for democracy and true freedom was a return to localism, self-help, and community action. Neither the Left nor the Right had addressed the need for limits. Ultimately, be believed, the problems confronting us were not political but cultural and spiritual. As such, a “politics of limits” would require “the abandonment of the whole ideology of progress and the recovery and restatement of old religious insights, ones that stress the finitude of human powers and intelligence.”

Miller’s biography is straightforward, thorough, and exceptionally well written. As the publisher indicates, this is the first book-length treatment of the historian’s life and work. Most interesting is Miller’s insight on Lasch’s development of thought with regard to spiritual matters and how it shaped his views on democracy. In the closing chapters Miller asks whether Lasch’s populism was enough to provide what he was demanding from the culture—namely, a sense of transcendence. Instead of looking to the nation as a whole, Miller says, perhaps he should have looked more to the stewards of spiritual matters—the ecclesiastical communities.

The release of Hope in a Scattering Time comes to us at a moment when modern capitalism is once again being questioned for its ability to make good on its promises. As such it reinforces claims articulated by E. F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful), Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America), Allan C. Carlson (The Natural Family), and many others—Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton come to mind. Lasch desired a revival of civic participation on the local level, a return of oikos as a viable economic unit, and an infusion of sacramentalism into the culture, making this critic of modern progress a most notable son of the third way. ♦

Arthur W. Hunt III is associate professor of communications at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is currently working on a book titled Surviving Technopolis: Essays on Finding Balance in Our New Manmade Environments.