Christoper Lasch

[padraig (u.s.)]

I think Mills is both more interesting and at least as worthy, if not more, of a revival than Lasch, btw

he was the same age as Hofstadter but intellectually and culturally feels very much like he belongs to the other side of that great generational rift the 60s produced. where most of his contemporaries had been frozen into a consensus of sacred American myths by the peak Cold War, post-McCarthyism climate of the 50s and consequently seemed hopelessly outdated when students and younger intellectuals began to question and overturn many of those sacred myths, Mills was exactly the opposite - he'd spent the 50s asking those same questions before basically any other major figure in academia (you get a similar feeling from early PKD fiction, questioning the unreality of the facade of Eisenhower-era conformity, but late 50s PKD was an unknown pulp scifi writer on the fringes of society, where Mills was a famous sociologist at Columbia). Unfortunately he died prematurely in 1962, otherwise I think he would be much more revered as a huge forerunner of the New Left - a term he literally coined - like a more serious, non-bullshit East Coast Marcuse (tho Mills, while familiar with Marxism, was not a Marxist).

this doesn't really have anything to do with Lasch per se I guess, just an excuse for me to write a paean to Mills who I think deserves it

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Do you personally believe cultural emancipation movements, at least some, will prove successful? Do you think it, success that is, is largely about refining the representation of disenfranchised demographics, to the enfranchised demographics?

it depends on what's meant by success - really it's to something you actually attain, but an ideal to strive toward

in that sense I think there have been many successes, albeit they're unevenly distributed geographically - i.e. it's still functionally impossible to be openly queer in much of the world

I do think representation is important bc it so heavily influences the formation of our values and has since the institution of mass communication

but 1) it's still not as important as material changes in peoples' lives - i.e. it's more important, for instance, to lower the rate of violence and self-harm that trans etc folk experience than it is to have more trans characters on TV, granting that it's not an either/or and the latter may help the former to some degree through normalization 2) it's easy to lose the forest for the trees nitpicking over details, tho that's also a function of what ppl are/feel able to actually influence

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

upstream of "success" tho, I have basic belief that these things happen and happened because they have to

the details and reality will be messy like anything but there's an undeniable massive groundswell of feeling behind every American cultural emancipation movement

at a certain point people have had enough that all that will keep them in check is the threat of physical force and/or extreme social ostracization

and even that might not be enough - in the struggle for civil rights, black Americans were willing to sustain a greater level of violence than American society was willing to impose

but it's like asking people to go back to a time of near universal religious belief. it's just not going to happen. that's a one-way journey.

it's certainly possible for a society to backslide - Jews were quite well integrated into German society even into the early 1930s

 

[version]

He really is hot atm.

 

[version]

i think you can read Lasch profitably, he's an interesting and fun writer if a bit cranky, but he's not the rosetta stone of the world we live in now and the cult of personality is annoying

There’s also a super weird interpretation of him, akin to ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism means I’m off the hook which is like ‘ah, we’re all narcissists, and there’s nothing we can do about it - but at least *I’m* self-aware

There's a Christopher Lasch cult of personality happening? Jeez - 2020 was worse than I thought.

Yeah, I don’t regret having read Lasch in grad school but I would never have thought to take him off the shelf yesterday if people hadn’t been trying to make him into some sort of Oracle of Our Times.

Everyone pretended to get really into Arendt during the Trump administration-there’s a good opportunity to adopt a pretend philosophy guy for the Biden admin. what if we told everybody Thorstein Veblen held the secret key to the Janet Yellen agenda -- it’s Christopher Lasch and the revival is already underway and there’s something to it even if he puts the cart before the horse

 

[catalog]

Woebot is not keen on him in retreat but has not properly explained why yet.

 

[Woebot]

Can't think of a single nice thing to say about Lasch.

 

[linebaugh]

Can't think of a single nice thing to say about Lasch.

From what Ive read he's the diametric opposite to everyone you wrote about in Retreat, while taking a good deal of pot shots at them as well. Whats your biggest gripe? shut this whole thread down

 

[Woebot]

Woebot is not keen on him in retreat but has not properly explained why yet.

i do explain in the book, no?

lasch doesn't grasp even the rudiments of what he tries to criticize - therapy, eastern philosophy. simply doesn't understand it and more disgracefully did no research at all.

it's an embarrassment. he tries to pull together some correction in the postscripts of the later editions which just go further to show his total ignorance.

tom wolfe says something stupid in the "me decade" article and lasch - whose previous book had been about children not obeying their parents - spins a whole other book out of that. he's just mouthing stuff which people wanted to hear said.

was delighted to note that in "the culture of feedback" daniel belgrad absolutely goes for lasch too.

 

[catalog]

i do explain in the book, no?

It feels like the early criticisms you make of him are not substantiated, but perhaps a fuller explanation comes later on in the book. Basically I didn't get a good sense of what he said and why you think it's wrong from what I've read so far. But I'll go back and check it once I've finished the book (nearly at 300 pages now).

 

[Woebot]

the central argument in "culture of narcissism" was that individuals in the seventies had become too "selfish"

the exact same line that adam curtis takes in the century of the self - also garbage.

he posits that previous generations only lived for their forebears and children - and here was a generation that was obsessed with "nowness"

this entirely ignores the ethical dimension inherent in what the counterculture and human potential movement was trying to achieve. that social concept, which comes from taoism, i would summarise as connection as alignment. and this has at its heart an ecological perspective too. you don't just live now - you live "correctly" now.

this as opposed to the dominant [judeo-christian-newtonian-cartesian-blah-blah] cultural model which is connection as ethical and social duty. this relies on the importance of the psychological dominance of the [church-state-military-industrial complex]. the whole frigging patriarchy if you like.

but this generation he criticizes are the ones living in communes. eating vegetarian food. forming greenpeace. trying to cultivate dolphin-mind. having massive rock festivals. sharing joints. if not that they are trying to reform their straight world a little.

and along comes christopher lasch saying exactly what the old order wants to hear.

 

[Woebot]

It feels like the early criticisms you make of him are not substantiated, but perhaps a fuller explanation comes later on in the book. Basically I didn't get a good sense of what he said and why you think it's wrong from what I've read so far. But I'll go back and check it once I've finished the book (nearly at 300 pages now).

ok - didn't mean that to sound sharp. i don't know exactly where you are. there's bits in the esalen chapter and in the sick world chapter. i didn't write an extensive lasch takedown per se.

 

[linebaugh]

to be fair in culture of narcissism he's not saying that individuals have just become too selfish, he's saying that individuals have been forced to become hyper concerned with their self interests in response to economic and political realities. like a survival tactic. He's less concerned with the counter cultural movement itself and rather opportunists that spring from it and how its ideas are congruent with developments in already existent hierarchies, like corporations and governments stratifying their command centers to shirk accountability. But I wouldn't be surprised if he made hasty generalizations about the counter culture else where. I get the sense he feels it both replaced old school socialist labor politics while also giving the new establishment its talking points, even if he never says so plainly in the book.

 

[catalog]

ok - didn't mean that to sound sharp. i don't know exactly where you are. there's bits in the esalen chapter and in the sick world chapter. i didn't write an extensive lasch takedown per se.

Yeah I've not got to either of those chapters yet. I perhaps should not have weighed in on this thread until I had done, or at least read some lasch myself. It's interesting how he's undergoing a renaissance though, as intellectual justification for the dirtbag left element.

What you've said above, about how his takedown reaffirms the old order, chimes very well with what Alex williams (gek opel who used to post here?) says in this podcast about the limits of the dirtbag left agenda ie that it's not progressive, idealises 50s Sweden and trad gender and religion, rather than post work and so on. It's a reactionary movement, therefore doomed.


The binary of connections you've identified (alignment vs duty) cuts to the heart of things, seems to keep coming up in your book. Two things can appear to be exactly the same thing on the surface, or in terms of outward manifestation. The same effects can be produced by drugs or breathing. But the intentions behind them are the crucial differentiating factors.

 

[version]

Some of the people who recently got into Lasch (and others) are now being referred to as "post-Left" . . . If they had anything interesting to say then I guess that'll soon be over as they've now been neatly packaged and quantified and can be dismissed.

Twilight of the American Left

The dissident 'post-Left' mocks the Democrats' progressive agenda

unherd.com

 

[luka]

a good example of how identity formation is now done along political lines rather than musical lines (like it was in the good old days)

 

[luka]

i did an experimental follow of Aimee Therese for a while but the shrill ranting racism started doing my head in so i had to leave it.

 

[luka]

this argument

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general.

is what Vim has been saying for years. Dissensus is very familiar with these arguments.

 

[luka]

overal the piece reminded me of reading one of Keiran Reynolds reports on internet music.

 

[version]

i did an experimental follow of Aimee Therese for a while but the shrill ranting racism started doing my head in so i had to leave it.

Yeah, she's awful. I heard a clip of her and Logo "debating" something the other day and I dunno how anyone could listen to the whole clip, let alone an entire stream of the two of them.