The Selective Exaltation of Norms

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[49] The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain.

Sure. But is this ever such a cut-and-dried case of promot[ing] a very specific view of life? Or, mustn't it be granted that individuals will process/respond differently even to such a supposedly rigid normative concept as the developmental schedule? Isn't there always something like rugged instrumentalism available as a rejoinder to such assertions as this one?

The point is more than incidental. Rather, it shades over into the general question of human variability, bearing therefore on the breadth (or narrowness) of viable structurings of art, employment, built environment, etc., and therein how to accommodate as many and oppress as few individuals as possible. Lasch's view of many things suffers greatly from this kind of essentialism, the kind that appears only in the rationalization stage and not (always) as the epistemological cause. The epistemological cause here would, I think, more properly be labelled consequentialism...a motivated consequentialism perhaps.

Perhaps normative templates are more useful the better equipped we are to make use of them. But that is, truly this time, an elitist thought and as such requires careful handling.

The elite in this scenario would be "right-brained" people who aren't inclined to take anything quite so literally, not even a normative concept of developmental stages; the oppressed would be "left-brained" people who can only take such things literally and seriously.

[161, footnote] Miriam Van Waters [Parents on Probation] wrote: "So much alarming popular literature has been written about defective children that a diagnosis of defect...freezes the parents into despair." Such observations, however, seldom prompted those who made them to question the wisdom of professional teaching, which by its very nature—even when it seeks to reassure—holds up a norm of child development, deviations from which necessarily give rise to parental alarm...

Well, if no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, then there are grounds for questioning just how necessarily this parental alarm follows from the erection of normative models.

In such terms as these, Lasch seems to think that consent has been overridden or violated, i.e. by the welfare state and by the helping professions, with all of their alarming popular literature and professional wisdom. But we could just as well say, following Eleanor's quip, that such fearful parents in fact do give their consent, NOT in their relationship with the state, with experts, with therapists, et al, but, rather, precisely in their relationship with their children, who in this anecdote, as in any properly bourgeois milieu, are so much the center of everyone's universe that despair of some kind or another is all but assured. If bourgeois parents have such a low tolerance for deviation from any perceived norm, it would be very much in the spirit of Lasch's broader thesis here to consider their own complicity in this, and to seek a dynamic social-psychological explanation rather than the facile, static one of expert tyranny.

It is true that Progressivism has done much to disseminate both the filiarchal bent itself and the sentimentalism and fear of backsliding which can so easily turn it sour; but it also seems possible to argue, as Lasch himself did, that such efforts tend to constitute the face of a wave rather than its crest, hence that the concurrent advents of bourgeois filiarchy and of the helping professions in fact have a common root cause. If so, then perhaps it is the resulting intensity (McLuhan dubbed it a "lethal intensity"; Sennett was more equanimous) of certain parent-to-child attachments that needs to be let go more so than the very possibility of impersonal expertise in these areas. Indeed, the Lasch who railed eloquently and incisively against "the loss of an impersonal public order" in education is strangely and conspicuously absent from these pages.

In other words, perhaps once the intensity is let go, parents can be empowered to receive, digest, evaluate, and respond to scientific advice without being made to feel inferior by the smallest deviation from the norm. Everyone can then "deal with experts from a position of stregth," as Lasch says (p. 219) distinguishes old elites from new. In those terms, I am suggesting that the intensity itself constitutes a position of weakness vis-a-vis expertise, no matter what positive aspects may also attach to the intense family. Perhaps this is merely talking past Lasch, taking the side of the experts in the same conflict where he sides with the family. If so, then my personal bias of a supremely unintense yet stable and nurturing childhood is surely part of the explanation. Still, I would reiterate that Lasch's break with experthood here itself constitutes a decisive break with "impersonal public order," precisely the break he rightly denounces elsewhere. He courts incoherence here after everything he has said in previous chapters about "universal norms" and upholding "standards." He laments "constant experimentation" in the arts while affording prospective parents little more than their own intuition and whatever folk wisdom is passed down to them from their tribal elders. He evinces greater belief in literary standards than in parenting standards. This is rather strange. "Standards" inherently create "experts." If you want to hang onto the first, you had better learn to live with the second. I am eager to further unpack "the expert problem" beyond the meager research I have so far done, but I also cannot see how an "impersonal public order" can exist at all without experts and expertise as its immediate vehicles.

Further along in the footnote:

Those who noted that the attack on maternal instinct undermined maternal
[162]
confidence felt no reservations about this development, because in their view the confidence destroyed by medicine rested in the first place on ignorance and complacency.

and, quoting some more early writers...

"...a great complacency which was formerly the young mother's protection..."

Right...protection from other bourgeoise and their prying eyes.

"Souls full of love also bring heads full of ignorance. . ."

Well, yeah. But are the parents under discussion here, the ones whose sense of their own competence rises and falls in direct proportion to external validation, are these parents quite so full of love for the child? Or for themselves? How's this for narcissism, eh? If narcissism is overcome, might we then find the helping professions more helpful rather than less?

i.e. Because WE are better able to make use of them, not because they have relaxed their "standards" as a way of mollifying our insecurity?

Is their project not precisely to ask

what people need as opposed to what they say they want

?

This precisely as a gentle counterweight to

the liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests

?

(The True and Only Heaven, p. 209)

We're now in Devil's Advocate territory, by default that is, since I don't know too much about the present state of these professions or really care that much about them. If the rest of the world is any indication, they cannot be in great shape overall. But I do find Lasch's abiding insistence on this line of argument incongruously weak and undercooked against the backdrop of his larger body of work, and sometimes in outright contradiction with it, as I have tried to show.

Lasch's observation, here and elsewhere, that

Without struggling with the ambivalent emotions aroused by the union of love and discipline in his parents, the child never masters his inner rage or his fear of authority

is compelling, but still his ultimate conclusion,

It is for this reason that children need parents, not professional nurses and counselors

describes only one side of the street, as it were: how the child feels about the parent. Perhaps it can be seen that the other direction of travel carries a very similar ambivalence, and that it is in fact too similar to be healthy. i.e. The child functionally exercises a certain authority that should not properly belong to them when the love of parent-for-child reaches a certain intensity in relation to that of child-for-parent. The sweet spot, then, would be a parent-for-child love that is slightly less intense than that of child-for-parent; the reverse, wherein the parents are desperately loving in an effort to meet their own needs while the kids are above it all, is what seems to me quite lethal about so much of what I hear and see from the parents in my own midst. This is not too far from Lasch's broader thesis in this work, the thesis of "love without discipline" (169), of "an excess of seemingly solicitous care but with little real warmth," (171), and so on. Surely experts have played their part here; just as surely, experts are vestigial representatives of a dwindling "impersonal public order," and in that capacity they are more needed than ever.

And of course it is soft-pedaled here but never stated forcefully/explicitly that nature trumps nurture.

e.g.

[159] these considerations did not prevent Van Waters from arguing that not only broken homes but "normal" homes often produced broken children...

This soft-pedaling/elision is significant, since for nature to well and truly trump nurture would call into question precisely the kind of connection between changes in family dynamics and personality structure toward which Lasch is headed here.

[176] Because these family patterns are so deeply rooted in the social conditions created by modern industry, they cannot be changed by prophylactic or "educational" reforms...
[177]
...[reforms which], by extending the sway of the health and welfare professions, usually do more harm than good. ...the psychological patterns promoted by the family are reinforced by conditions outside the family. Because those patterns seem to find their clearest expression in the pathology of narcissism, and ultimately in schizophrenia, we should not jump to the conclusion that the family produces misfits, people who cannot function efficiently in modern industrial society. In many ways it does a good job of preparing the child for the conditions he will encounter when he leaves home.

Footnote to this paragraph, on the "radical" critique of familial "privatism":

this criticism of the nuclear family merely updates and clothes in the latest liberationist jargon an indictment of the family first articulated by social workers, educators, penal reformers... By associating itself with psychiatric criticism of the family, the "cultural revolution" thus reaffirms one of the strongest tendencies in the society it claims to criticize.

...

[212] Measuring experience against a normative model set up by doctors, people will find themselves as troubled by departures from the norm as they are currently troubled by the "predictable crises of adult life" themselves.

My note says:
There is a larger tension throughout CL's work, it seems, regarding such "normative prescriptions." He is apt in some cases (as here) to take the Libertarian position; elsewhere that of the Social Conservative, who points out that people need to be told what to do. Perhaps there is a deeper wisdom behind which topics receive which treatment. If so, this is not obvious upon first readings.

Now:
Well okay, this time it's because it's doctors as opposed to people who are writing these particular prescriptions. But the doctor, incidentally, is the very archetype of the expert we disobey only when we can afford to; the graver the matter, the more obedient we become. So, to reiterate, this resistance to doctors' "standards" sticks out like a sore thumb, surrounded as it is here by selective exaltations of "standards" in other areas of life.

Also, the political dichotomy above isn't quite right. There's plenty of cultural conservatism to be found in this chapter, or at least that is where the analysis seems unavoidably to drop us off. But these tenets are also, ultimately, based on a kind of authority. It is different in kind from expert authority, and that is the real question of interest here. But the assertion, once again, that people will be simply cowed by experts seems to take too much for granted, not just about expert authority but also about traditional/communitarian authority.