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Stop the Wheels
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19755 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
1,349 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN
Progress and Its Critics
Christopher Lasch
New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991
591 pp., $25.00
Since the 1960s University of Rochester history professor Christopher Lasch has produced volumes of social and cultural criticism, among them The Minimal Self, The Agony of the American Left, and the widely acclaimed The Culture of Narcissism. For those who have read either The Minimal Self or The Culture of Narcissism, his latest sprawling work should not contain surprises. As in his earlier writings, Lasch identifies himself with the socialist Left while blaming modern vices, particularly hedonism and individual self-indulgence, on the dynamics of market capitalism. His reductionism in this regard is as sweeping as that of neoconservatives, whom he blasts with considerable energy.
While Peter Berger and Norman Podhoretz are properly scolded for tracing all social and political problems to "new class culture," Lasch is equally obstinate in blaming all signs of moral disintegration on capitalism. As I myself suggested in a letter to Lasch, capitalism, as he explains it, is often a metaphor for human evil. It is also a highly protean contaminant, one that causes whatever Lasch chooses to lament: be it social therapy, sexual permissiveness, or the American military.
Despite this hatred for the market system, or what remains of it, and his leftist affiliations, Lasch has a following that goes beyond his own side of the partisan spectrum. At a time of disalignment on the Right, he strikes notes that disaligned traditionalists like to hear. He defends the family, especially in its lower middle-class form, and speaks nostalgically of small towns. He warns against the Enlightenment's appeal to universal rights and appears to take the side of rooted communities against multinational corporations and the therapeutic professions. He considers social psychologists and most social workers as the purveyors of capitalist self-indulgence rather than an ethic of responsibility.
Even more important, Lasch tries to liberate democracy from the concept of progress, which he associates with Marxism as well as capitalism. Indeed, he scolds Marxists for perpetuating the identification of progress with material wealth, a tendency inherited from middle-class capitalists. Lasch's invectives against social therapy, consumerism, and
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