By Francis X. Maier
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Christopher Lasch’s last book. Published just a few months after his death, The Revolt of the Elites (1995) crowned a series of five extraordinary works that began with Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). A consummate historian, Lasch was also a penetrating social critic. He was never religious and always remained a man of the old democratic left. But he saw the world clearly and wrote with honesty. As a result, he had many Christian admirers. And much of his work aligns, albeit imperfectly, with Catholic concerns. Reading him today is like leafing through the diary of a fiercely lucid prophet.
In short, Lasch argues that the appearance of modern life conceals its true nature. We are surrounded by material comforts and options, but without a higher meaning. Our personal autonomy is celebrated in market rhetoric, only to be undermined in practice, because a consumption-based economy needs a constant flow of dependent consumers. The Industrial Revolution created new wealth and alleviated the hardships of many, but it also separated work from home, centralized and collectivized the workforce under “scientific management”.
This, in turn, fueled the rise of the social sciences, which—according to Lasch—proceed from the assumption that most people are incapable of understanding and directing their own lives, and therefore need the guidance of a phalanx of expert “helping professions.” As he documents tirelessly, the early leaders of American social science viewed religion as a form of mystification and the traditional family as “the last stronghold of the amateurs”; a breeding ground for authoritarianism, neurosis, and social disorders that required therapeutic intervention from properly trained specialists.
That attitude persists subtly and infects the broader culture, extending even to politics.
The Founding Fathers of the United States presumed a citizenry of reasonably intelligent and productive adults; in other words, people capable of self-government, participating in the community while managing their own affairs.
Today, the nation is a very different creature. As early as 1962, John F. Kennedy stated that “most of our problems, or at least many of those we face today, are technical problems, administrative problems… they deal with issues that are beyond the comprehension of most men.” [emphasis added] Think about that. For Lasch, who quoted that phrase in his work, Kennedy unwittingly expressed the spirit of a ruling class that is increasingly elitist, a class that is often suspicious of the very people it claims to represent.
Since Lasch’s death, the nation’s “technical” and administrative problems have only increased, as has the tangle of professional bureaucracies meant to handle them, and the army of therapists who deal with the inevitable social and psychological costs. The gap between the expert class and the mass of citizens it governs has also grown. For Lasch, this pattern of governance generates new forms of weakness of character and illiteracy in everyday life:
“People find themselves increasingly incapable of using language with ease and precision, of remembering the basic facts of their country’s history, of making logical deductions, of understanding anything beyond the most rudimentary texts, or even of comprehending their constitutional rights. The conversion of popular traditions of self-sufficiency into esoteric knowledge administered by experts fosters the belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, is beyond the reach of the common citizen.”
For the individual, the result is a cocktail of anxieties, appetites, resentments, and the feeling of being manipulated. A leader like Donald Trump is almost inevitable: the product of a populist reaction.
Ironically, as Lasch writes in The Minimal Self (1984):
“A culture organized around mass consumption fosters narcissism… not because it makes people greedy and self-assertive, but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their ability to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs… Narcissism implies a loss of self, not self-affirmation. It refers to a self threatened by disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness.”
Indeed, for Lasch, modern life is a Faustian bargain. A mass consumption-based economy requires not only the organization of production, but also the ordering of consumption and leisure, of needs and desires. Options abound in a galaxy of goods, but the maturity of the true “self” shrinks and withers like a white dwarf star.
How does all this relate to Catholic concerns?
Despite their evil and mendacity, the great atheistic ideologies of the last century still had a kind of “religious” or metaphysical dimension. Marxists believed—in fact, they had a vigorous faith—in the eventual disappearance of the State. Today’s advanced consumer economies are very different. They are practical, not utopian, in essence. They do not debate or attempt to refute the supernatural or the transcendent. Instead, they make it uninteresting, unintelligible, and finally absent. They are anesthetics for the soul and impediments to the mind. Profoundly materialistic, and therefore, more atheistic than past ideologies. Fully assimilating into such a culture comes at an inhumanly high price—“inhumanly,” because what is at stake is precisely the meaning of our humanity.
We are more than mere animals, more than the product of social forces, more than objects of behavioral conditioning, more than our appetites and material needs. God made us for immortality, glory, and love; the kind of love that Jesus showed in redeeming us. A “disinterested” love that enlarges the human self. Giving ourselves in service to others, and receiving that same gift in return, expands the orbit of joy. That is the secret of Christianity: when we give, we receive more. We become more truly ourselves. We become what God intended us to be.
Christopher Lasch offered us a look at our world as it (probably) is. It needs to be transformed. If we truly believe what we say we believe as Christians, changing it is up to us. We are not powerless.
About the author
Francis X. Maier is a senior research fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.