I have little time to write and anyway the excellence of George’s prose shames my efforts. But I really disagree on any questioning of activism and I would caution George who said in another thread he’s saddened by recent events.

We the people have to keep fighting. We are arriving at another critical point—and this time we the people hold most of the cards. The powers of greed know it’s a fight, and know that free ideas are dangerous. They know that if it gets quiet, it makes it easier for them to win.

Indeed they are looking for tactical relief, because they are currently running out of propagandist ammunition. Economics is running aground on non-computability, non-prediction issues, and economists will find it an increasing trouble to avoid a study of institutions, which are a non-rival sort of good. I think that a full study of institutions will argue for a much more egalitarian society, and that this can be communicated successfully to any adult.

The recent ascendancy of the Right since Reagan is by contrast a mere passage, made by the strategy of a wealthy elite that caught the rest of us unawares and without a way to talk back to the onslaught. It doesn’t have much to say to the future, except to illustrate that one-way mass media was a controllable thing until the internet blew it out of the water—and also that it was possible for the plutocracy’s op-ed punditry to promote one-equation economics to the level of gospel truth, happily coinciding with their propaganda’s need for intellectual, theoretical justifications to sound important and scientific.

On the question of the outer shape of the current disease, I agree I think with John Quiggin: Modernity is not a single behemoth. In other words, It, as a single entity, isn’t really doing anything. It is a collection of many contexts, and they are all going in at least slightly different directions. Life is salutary, pure, nifty, beautish, if still short.

But anti-modernist tracts such as Lasch (and thank you George for pointing out Lawrence) are important to read, they are in fact very instructive and we need more comparative analyses, because each separate complaint always connects in some way with a cognitive failure in ratiocination (also known as instrumental reason) and a formal typology of these failures is one of the next things to construct.

I think the Enlightenment epistemology is dual, and what we have seen for 350 years is a development of only one part of it, i.e. mathematical science and the ratiocinative attitude, and the floundering rehearsal of the other part of it in the long Romantic reaction. We are in another late stage of the Romantic reaction now.

But if the cognitive failures of rationality can be unified as a simple idea, using connecting concepts from science, philosophy, and theory, and using the opportunities for instruction presented by the problems of predicting complex ecosystems and the failures of economics, it can become a public argument for the use of transparent, accountable, democratic institutions, and we could actually fix some problems.

A social critic who prods us on the second kind of point is doing a valuable service. One who complains about the first, or fails to distinguish the two, is essentially cranky.

Why just “one more time”? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (and the hospitality of Crooked Timber), we have unlimited space and time. Let’s thrash out these questions for good and all.

Modernity has bestowed great gifts: productivity, mobility, comfort, safety, publicity, tolerance. There is no need to dwell on these benefits, for the simple reason that outside the Vatican (and perhaps the holy city of Qom), no one denies them. But these benefits have come with a price, as benefits usually do. Productivity has a cost in finite resources, and the organization of mass production has a cost in work satisfaction. Mobility has a cost in community cohesion, which may in turn undermine individual psychic stability. Comfort, if pursued to the exclusion of all strenuousness, has a cost in health. Publicity has a cost in privacy and freedom from distractions. Safety has (or may have) a cost in self-reliance. Tolerance may have a cost in self-control.

Lasch devoted most of his career to expounding these real and potential costs. I think it was well worth doing. Did he deny, crankily and undialectically, the corresponding benefits? Well, he didn’t exactly dwell on them. But to suggest that he deplored air and auto travel, X-rays, antiseptic surgery, central heating, movies, mass-produced pianos and books, civil-rights legislation, and all the other blessings of modernity—or ought to have deplored these things, and even forsworn them, if he had understood the logic of his own position—strikes me as outlandish. He didn’t reject science, technology, and progress en bloc.

But even if he had, what would follow? That he had encumbered his argument with an absurd and unnecessary corollary. Correctly estimating the dangers of modernity need not entail underestimating the achievements of modernity. If Lasch made that mistake, so much the worse for him. But his diagnosis and etiology remain, to be judged on their own terms. Mass anomie and narcissism are no less harmful merely because giving up the way of life that has produced them may produce even worse consequences. The questions remain: Do the causes Lasch identified have the effects he described? If so, then what, if anything, should we do about it?

PS - More anon, perhaps, about busing and Stephen Holmes. For now, to bed.

Second, he just doesn’t give modernity much credit for anything, yet he’d ardently argues on behalf of redistributing all of its material benefits to the poor and the working class.

1. Yes, I certainly read his avowal in your book—and his book, too—that he “had no wish to return to the past….” To paraphrase Bob Dylan, I don’t believe him. He wrote those remarks even before The True and Only Heaven. I don’t even think I believed them at the time he wrote them—and that he felt compelled to write them surely indicated that a great many readers thought that Lasch’s arguments were not nearly as lucid as he thought them to be. But after TTAOH, there’s certainly a lot of evidence against Lasch’s representation of Lasch, i.e. thousands of words Lasch himself wrote. He kind of gives authorial intentionality a bad name.

2. I am not so cavalier about Lasch’s indictment of modernity as to say, in effect, “what so bad about that”? I would more precisely say that Lasch’s argument suffers from (at least) three grave flaws. First, life was really very bad for all kinds of subjugated, subaltern people, principally women and african americans, during the halcyon pre-modern days he depicts. He tries to address this, but inadequately, in my view. Second, he just doesn’t give modernity much credit for anything, yet he’d ardently argues on behalf of redistributing all of its material benefits acknowledges—to the poor and the working class. When Lasch was dying of cancer, one of modernity’s exemplary expressions, the personal computer, enabled him to finish his final book. Enormous, multi-national companies make computers—Dell, Apple, HP. Sometimes small companies make them for a little while—but, yes, in our modern world, the big companies eventually eat them like sharks feasting on carefree swimmers. Artisanal production is, today, a luxury of the rich for the rich—I, not of the rich, am not counting on the artisans to help me write these observations. Thank goodness that many many more of us—not enough of us, but a great many of us—can afford the coldly, mass produced products that have made Mr. Jobs and Mr. Dell obscenely rich. Similarly, Stephen Holmes, in his definitive evisceration of the TTAOH reprinted in his The Anatomy of Liberalism, facetiously wondered whether Lasch had written the book with his thermostat set at 55 degrees. Lasch somehow thinks, that in the name of a greater sense of self and stronger connection to one’s productive capabilities, you can mitigate the great productive power of capitalism—but yet have plenty that will be left over to expropriate from the expropriators. It doesn’t work that way—dividing up less leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism.

Alas, that’s modernity, too. As is having the glorious right, by virtue of being a distinguished professor at distinguished university, to be a cranky anti-modernist without anybody telling you what to write or what to think. It’s pretty much JS Mill 101 that the most effective polemics are those that confront the strongest arguments of one’s strongest interlocutors. Lasch doesn’t. He assembles a lot of supporters for his reading of history and culture in TTAOH, but precious few dissenters who might give him a hard time. Finally, Lasch’s idea of the good life—both today and in the past—is predicated on a homogeneous community. He explictly supports ethnic homogeneity at a few points—I don’t have a text in front of me right now, but he does. Yes, this is quite anti-modern, and, no, I don’t think this is a good thing. I have spent a fair amount of time in places that have wonderful senses of community, but people in those communities have a lot of difficulty with those who are “other” to the community. Sometimes, they get over that difficulty on a case by case basis. Sometimes, broader lessons are learned, and, strangely, these are exactly the kinds of situations about which Lasch is not only pessimistic, but about which he seems to be opposed! I’d be happy to keep Lasch’s sense of community, but add to it the modern sense of not only tolerance, but, hey, even indifference to “otherness.” But I’ve seen this happen, too—people from different races, ethnicities, men and women, gay and straight, getting together and forming a community in the hopes of organizing a union or maintaining one. In short, let’s hear a word for heterogeneous communities. I don’t think homogeneous communities are so great—at the extremes you get people who want to kill the other, at the more mundane level, you just get a good deal of soul crushing boredom. No doubt if Lasch had lived in such a community, he would have run for the hills.

Finally, I still think you’re too kind to Lasch about Boston, George. I think he conceded the racism there as a rhetorical strategy, effectively writing, “yes, they were racist, but….” Sorry: They were grotesquely racist. They were other things too, just like the white South was other things. But first: They were grotesquely racist.
That was the necessary glue which held together the anti-busing coalition in Southie and Charlestown. And the court didn’t have a choice. Those bankers and lawyers had to restrict busing to the boundaries of the city. Milliken v. Bradley effectively limited school integration schemes within district lines—those bankers and lawyers couldn’t have their kids schools in Newton and Belmont be part of the plan. It wasn’t attitudinal—or maybe it was, but that was beside the point—it was the law.

I am sad to say it, but I find Domhoff’s critique of Ferguson and Rogers to be convincing. (They both still strike me as impressive figures; Rogers even more so after I saw him talk at HKS the other month—he simply blew me away.) I am not sure why Domhoff seems so ignored; he does amazing and convincing work, yet I’ve never heard him mentioned. For those who want an introduction, his website contains web page versions of much of his work; his text Who Rules America? (a handsome new Obama edition came out just the other week) provides a (very) concise overview.

His critique of Ferguson and Rogers appears as “Which Fat Cats Support Democrats?” in chapter 9 of The Power Elite and the State—the gist is that their empirical evidence is off (there’s no clear correlation between industry and party (a claim oddly bolstered with a phone call to Robert Rubin!)) and their theoretical underpinning is unnecessary (the parties don’t need to have strong ideologies because policy is shaped by outside industry). The other thing from the standard Chomsky model he critiques is the notion that the media has an independent influence on public opinion; he argues instead that the media is basically open to be manipulated by anyone, activists or corporations, and that it tends to have a corporate slant just because corporations are so dedicated at manipulating it. (It’s not clear that Chomsky and Herman disagree—Chomsky’s always been adverse to theorizing on the subject and much of Herman’s propaganda model lines up with this analysis.) I’d be curious if anyone knows of a response to these arguments, but I currently find them convincing.

What I was trying to say—apparently not very clearly—was that there exists a path between his boss’s apathy and Chomsky’s idealism. I think the first task is one for the intellectual, which is why I raised it here: designing a political program that can gain wide assent. George has often averred that he’s simply a counterpuncher; the great works are already written, his job is merely to direct people to them. I’m not convinced that’s true—I think the clear articulation and stirring defense of a post-New Deal socialist program has yet to be written and someone ought to write it.

The second task is one for the sociologist: designing effective systems of change in which the average person can meaningfully participate. Apparently this is easier in the Third World—perhaps the problems are more blatant, the solutions more conceivable—but in the US it’s very tricky. Every strategy seems either impossible, or a waste of time, or (usually) both. My reading of the situation (and I was pleased to see that a great sociologist like Domhoff came to largely similar conclusions) is that the best opening is for people to work together to get left Congressional candidates elected. In particular, new technologies and Internet organizing have demonstrated that the left can actually pick up seats in this country. And, as the Obama campaign showed, electoral politics is a clear way to get lots of people pulled into political action by bits and pieces.

There is much more to do on both these fronts; I suspect they will be the causes of my life. I just hope that intellectuals are good for them.

One comment, in regards to your summary of Lasch’s diagnosis of the modern liberal capitalist trajectory (which I basically agree with):

The only possible futures, he thought, were: 1) ecological catastrophe;

Depending on which petrochemical engineer or economist you choose to believe, peak oil may have already gotten us there (assuming global warming hasn’t).

2) a domestic and international caste system, with extreme and permanent inequality, harshly enforced;

Again, depending on what you imagine said caste system to include or exclude (do you believe the meritocracy is a contributor to it, or a way out of it?), we’re already there, and arguably have been since the late 1970s.

or 3) voluntary renunciation of universal material abundance as our goal and of mass production and centralized authority as the means. Obviously, only the last is even potentially a democratic future.

There is a movement towards simplicity out there, and it is even possible that some progressive accomplishments (secure, guaranteed health care, anyone?) might make it a more viable option for the great masses of people whose life aspirations—when not deluded by an unregulated consumer economy that pummels them with distracting, dishonest, competitive messages—could be pretty well summed up by the wonderful, family-centered ideal (or idyll?) of Lasch’s you quote above. But simplicity has its enemies, on the left as well as the right.