Lasch—The Progress-Consumption Nexus

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[74] The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, "You've come a long way, baby," and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. ... The "education" of the masses...emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority...only to subject them to a new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.

If the first part seems harsh on women, perhaps consider that Lasch, in such matters as above, does not really favor the emancipation of anyone in particular from certain communitarian strictures. In any case, the synchrony between emancipation and consumerism is undeniable, whether or not either the patriarchs or the admen have conspired to make it so, and whether or not any lesser evil can be reasonably proposed.

Related, from Lasch on Paul Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (1928):

[74, footnote to above] Family life according to Nystrom, inherently tends to promote custom, the antithesis of fashion. ... On the other hand, "the conflict of youth with convention" encourages rapid changes in dress and styles of consumption. In general, Nystrom argues, rural life, illiteracy, social hierarchy, and inertia support custom, whereas fashion—the culture of consumption—derives from the progressive forces at work in modern society: public education, free speech, circulation of ideas and information, the "philosophy of progress."

Lasch—An Autonomous Youth Culture

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)

[69] The rebellion against the middle class presents an ever-changing face. From one point of view, it was a rebellion of women against the "family claim." From another point of view, it was a rebellion of intellectuals against middle-class culture. But it was also a revolt of youth, and as such it set a pattern which had been followed with variations only of detail by each subsequent generation of youthful rebels... The mass society, lacking the cohesive influences that make a society into a community, tends to break up into smaller communities, autonomous, self-contained, and having no viable connection with the whole. The existence of a "youth problem," a phenomenon mistakenly regarded as a problem of inadequate law enforcement or of a decline of public morality or of society's failure to provide adequate incentives for young people, in reality signifies the emergence of an autonomous youth culture.

...

[80] Europe quickened [Randolph] Bourne's political sympathies. A progressive, he became something of a socialist as well. After Europe, his writing acquired a certain sharpness and bite which it had lacked before; in his later work he was less the genteel
[81]
essayist and more the critic of politics—and his critique, as time went on, became increasingly astringent and increasingly effective. Yet in the conventional sense Bourne had no politics at all. His politics remained largely an extrapolation from his own emancipation from the cultural stagnation of Bloomfield. Though he spoke glowingly of social and political advance, he conceived of it as cultural progress. On the continent, he had noted, "life was enriched by a certain natural sensitiveness to art," the absence of which in England and America had a "brutalizing" effect. He advised a friend in New York, an architect, that if he could do anything "towards spreading that sensitiveness at home," he would have accomplished a work "as important as that of the best social reformer." "Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we shall not have, I fear, any great social advance."

Wouldn't I of all people like to think so. But I do fear that cause and effect are miscast here. My bandleader at work, for example, told me I have a "disease" when I said I was going to the library after work. Like my old roommate in The Valley, he confuses openness to dating particular "fat" women with being "into" "fat" women generally. And of course, he can play. He's got the hatred of ugliness part mastered as well or better than his mastery of chords and scales, along with more than the usual sensitiveness to art. But no great social advance is on the horizon around here. More like the reverse.

Politics, in short, was important to Bourne as "a means to life." Even his opposition to the war, on which his reputation as a public figure came to rest, was a politically negative act (however appropriate or correct) signifying his continuing preoccupation with the personal as opposed to the public. He opposed the war precisely because he saw that it represented a monstrous intrusion of the public on the private. It showed him the danger, if he had not know it before, of making politics a cult; and it was the reaction to this "cult of politics," he told Van Wyck Brooks, that had finally "driven so many of the younger generation back from the liberal camp." ...

[84] These observations, drawn presumably from private rather than from public life, nevertheless had a way of slipping over into politics. Youth and Life was a political manifesto and a call to revolution. But in Bourne's politics, the source of injustice was seen not as the monopoly of the means of production or as the unequal access to privilege and power, but as the simple fact of age. The older generation ruled the world; "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." More precisely:

Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals.

Bourne was like other rebels before him in wishing to throw off the dead hand of the past; to that extent he belonged to a long line of radical thinkers. What was new in all this was his conceiving of the struggle quite literally as a struggle of youth against age, in spite of his awareness that youth is often more conservative than age itself. That only confirmed his opinion of the evil effects of the social domination of the middle-aged. If young people were conservative, when their natural tendency was to be radical, that was surely because they found the world in which they were expected to make their way "rather narrow and shallow."

What was also new in Bourne's radicalism was the way in which the political problem, once it was formulated in this way, dictated nonpolitical solutions. To say that "friction, maladjustment, social war" had their origin in the ascend-
[85]
ancy of age over youth was to rule out politics altogether as a means of social advance. Specifically, it was to rule out the conventional radical solution of social revolution. Bourne could not urge the young to seize power as Marx had urged the proletariat to expropriate the expropriators. In the first place, the struggle for power was itself a form of "friction and social war." In the second place, Bourne saw clearly enough that revolutions are seldom led by men in their teens or even their twenties. ... A revolution of youth is a contradiction in terms. But in the third place, it did not require a revolution, after all, to bring the young to power. The young would come to power as a matter of course, but in their middle age—there was the rub; and what would be the gain if by that time the rebels of today had become the reactionaries of tomorrow? The young must somehow discover how to take their youth with them into middle age.

This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical, but even more radical, than it would naturally be. It must be not simply contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the times, so that when it comes to control of the world, it will be precisely right and coincident with the conditions of the world as it finds them. If the youth of to-day could really achieve this miracle, they would have found the secret of "perpetual youth."

Not Marx but the spirit of Ponce de León presided over Bourne's vision of the better world.

Uh...Fallacy of Induction, anyone? :^|

His statement of the problem took the problem out of politics and put it squarely into the realm of psychology. The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis
[86]
coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age. ...
[87]
The nineteenth century, someone said, was the century of the child. The coincidence, toward the end of the century, of so many independent discoveries of the mystery and sanctity of childhood leads one to think that childhood must have owed its discovery not so much to a set of intellectual influences—romanticism, naturalism—as to the social conditions of the period; to some common experience through which an entire generation had passed. To look critically at the patriarchal family was to see it, first and foremost, through the eyes of a child. Psychoanalysis—which has been credited with opening up the study of the child—appears to have acted more as confirmation than as revelation. It gave the weight of science to the intuition which had already impressed itself on so many sons and daughters of the middle class: that culture was founded on repression.

But if psychoanalysis shared with American progressivism this common ground, nothing could be more illuminating than the way in which they diverged. Freud was led by his evidence to a stupefying irony: an ever-mounting burden of guilt was the price men paid for civilization. Freud was a European, and such a conclusion was implicit, perhaps, in every detail of the European scene. Jane Addams caught a glimpse of it in Madrid. But the American, faced with Europe, found it easy to repudiate its implications. Having no past, Americans could
[88]
look forward to an untroubled future. The American progressives drew back from the implications of psychoanalysis even as they embraced it. If culture and nature were in conflict, culture would have to go.

But in fact no such conflict was thought to exist. John Dewey's resolution of it was characteristic. In traditional societies, he explained—he was thinking of the primitive societies which anthropologists were just beginning to study—the young had to be brought up in the ways of their elders. These societies, being content merely to perpetuate themselves, were obliged to instill in new generations reverence for the customs and rituals of the old. Under such circumstances, socialization might indeed require repression; for "the natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born." But in progressive societies the "life-customs" themselves are constantly changing. Progressive societies accordingly "endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own." If the better society of the future was defined as a "cooperative commonwealth" (as all of the new radicals, progressives, single-taxers, and socialists alike, defined it), and if it was true, moreover, that children were more adept in the art of cooperation than adults, then children themselves became the teachers in the school of social progress. Teachers became pupils. Far from repressing the natural impulses of the young, progressive societies—progressive schools in particular—tried to encourage their emulation by adults. "For certain moral and intellectual purposes," Dewey concluded, "adults must become as little children."
[89]
This discovery of Dewey's ran parallel to Jane Addams's discovery that it was the "neighbors" who educated the social worker by demonstrating socialized democracy in action, rather than the other way around; and the sentence in which Dewey summed up his philosophy of education reads almost exactly like a sentence of Randolph Bourne's—the one in which he spoke of adults becoming "as little children."

Lasch—Circs Not Likely To Be Repeated

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[154]
The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital-
[155]
ism in the West now has to be seen not as a stage in a rigid sequence of developmental stages—as it was seen not only by Marx but by the nineteenth-century sociologists as well—but as the product of a particular history, a unique conjunction of circumstances unprecedented elsewhere in the world and not likely to be repeated. A growing awareness that modern capitalism rests on a "particular history of political victories and defeats," in the words of Roberto Unger, and that these victories and defeats can no longer be dismissed as the mere enactment of a preestablished design," has generated growing dissatisfaction with "deep-structure social theories" in general, as Unger calls them, including not only Marxism but classical sociology and its twentieth-century offshoots. The "deeply entrenched necessitarian habits of thought" associated with the sociological tradition have by no means disappeared, as Charles Sabel reminds us; but they have become increasingly hard to defend.

One of the many difficulties that confront structural theories of history is the achievement of "modernization" under conservative direction—for example, in twentieth-century Japan, in later-nineteenth-century Germany under Bismarck, even to some extent in nineteenth-century England under Disraeli. Industrialism, it appears, can take place without a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and political power. Social theorists in the nineteenth century almost all shared the belief, stated in its classic form in Tocqueville's study of American democracy, that the "irresistable" growth of equality had "all the chief characteristics" of a "providential fact," since it was "universal" and "durable" and "eluded all human interference." They argued about whether equality was consistent with order and freedom, but most of them agreed with Tocqueville that "the revolution . . . in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men" was giving rise to a new order in which "great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown"—in short, to a condition of "universal uniformity."

[155]
Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and Western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully-developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocractic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by the right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes
[157]
with a good deal of exaggeration, " . . . runs counter to deeply grooved mental reflexes"; but an understanding of the "characteristic patterns of modernization" forces us to conclude that revolution is the better way.

That this conclusion rests on a tortured reading of history should be obvious at a glance. Early modern revolutions encouraged the growth of democracy, but the same cannot be said of the twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and other developing nations. The more we learn about these matters, the less we are likely to believe in "characteristic patterns of modernization." If there is such a pattern. it is surely western Europe whose history deviates from the norm. The Bolsheviks thought of themselves as modern-day Jacobins, but their revolution did not reenact the revolution in France. It was no more democratic than the autocratic programs of development instituted in Germany and Japan. Theirs too was a "revolution from above," as was Mao's revolution in China and Castro's in Cuba. If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above. Even in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, it was seldom greeted with enormous popular acclaim. On the contrary, it was greeted with enormous popular suspicion and often with open resistance.

Nor was this resistance—usually dismissed as mindless opposition to progress—necessarily misconceived. The subsequent history of industrial societies does not justify complacency about their capacity to assure an equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. The relationship between industrialism and democracy looks more and more tenuous and problematical. If we insist on a law of historical development, we might be justified in concluding that "societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly . . . hierarchical over time," in the words of Lawrence Goodwyn. "Supporting evidence is so pervasive," Goodwyn adds, "that this may now be taken as law"—a "direct counter-premise to the idea of progress."

...

[162]
The concept of modernization no longer dominates the study of economic development in the non-Western world; but the conceptually seductive images with which it is associated still color the West's view of its own history. ...

"Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of
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the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions. Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state's dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry. Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family. The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systematic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.