"The Revolt of the Elites"

A book review that might tickle the reader's fancy. Should the reader's fancy be in need of a tickle.

From The New Criterion, April 1995 edition:

Christopher Lasch vs. the elites

"A characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally
selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in intellectual life, which of its
essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive
triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable …"
—Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

… the bad news goes on and on.
—Christopher Lasch

With the untimely death of Christopher Lasch last year at the age of sixty-one, we were deprived of one of our most articulate and earnestly plangent social critics. By training, Lasch was a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture. Early books like The New Radicalism in America: 1889–1963 (1965) and The Agony of the American Left (1969) chronicled the manifold ambitions and disappointments of American radicalism—ambitions and disappointments, incidentally, that were very close to Lasch’s own heart. But he aspired to be more than a chronicler. By the mid-1970s, having learned to blend the seductive techniques of Freudian social analysis with crisply written, up-to-the-minute diagnoses of contemporary cultural pathologies, Lasch had emerged as the bad conscience of the American Left. His focus became broader, his rhetoric more apocalyptic. His most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), was a stinging indictment of American society for being greedy, flaccidly self-centered, and politically frivolous. Subtitled “American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,” the book was the perfect intellectual corollary to the dour presidency of Jimmy Carter—indeed, Carter’s adoption of Lasch’s theme in one of his televised sermons to the nation helped to make the book a best seller.

Although its language was sometimes over-blown—one section is entitled “The Banality of Pseudo-Self-Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence”—there was a lot to admire in The Culture of Narcissism. What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus. Lasch was especially caustic about the hedonistic antics of the so-called New Left. He understood that what presented itself in the lineaments of radical consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s was mostly a blind for moralistic self-indulgence. Promises of liberation and transcendence, he saw, often concealed new forms of tyranny and irresponsibility. Lasch considered himself a radical, but his criticism of contemporary America—parts of it, anyway—sounded a distinctly conservative note. In a section on “Schooling and the New Illiteracy,” for example, he had this to say about the Left’s effort to “democratize” education:

It has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational standards.

Reading such passages—and they occur frequently in Lasch’s later work—it is sometimes easy to forget that his attack on our cultural “malaise” (a favored Laschian epithet) issued from an unwavering commitment to radical populism. However devastating was his exposure of the fatuities of the New Left, the real villains, in his view, were “capitalism,” “mass communications,” and “the corporations”—the usual suspects put forward by the Left. Hence he attacks “welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance.” But he places the blame for the shambles not on the questionable policies of the New Deal and the Great Society but on “capitalism” and its “new modes of social control.”....

....MUCH MORE