Lasch—Gilligan's Island

Christopher Lasch
Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism
(1997)

"6. Gilligan's Island"

[129] ...Gilligan's data often seem to be at odds with her conclusions. She and Brown deplore the "self-silencing" that sustains a "patina of niceness and piety," but the impression conveyed by their description of school life is a good deal more grim than these words would suggest. Niceness and piety are not much in evidence at Laurel School in
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Cleveland. The social tone, moreover, is set not by adults, but by adolescent cliques with their gossip, their whispered secrets, and their rigorously enforced structure of popularity. ...

Gilligan's early work celebrated women's "concern with relationships" as the source of their "morality of responsibility"; but the snobbery and the backbiting that prevail at Laurel School might well give her pause about the "human strength" of "affiliative ways of living." The ugly side of adolescent sociability suggests that a "web of relationships" can be suffocating, inhibiting, and oppressive rather than "creative and cooperative." ...

[Gilligan] and Brown observe in passing that it seems "profoundly misleading" to describe women as "connected" and men as "separate." Such characterizations, they say, ignore the "depths of men's desire for relationship and the anger women feel about not having power in the world." But this is a trivial objection. They would have done better to remind them-
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selves, on the strength of their own evidence, that women are just as likely as men to misuse power, to relish cruelty, and to indulge the taste for cruelty in enforcing conformity. ...

Brown and Gilligan would be uncomfortable, I suspect, with the suggestion that women and men are equals in their capacity not only for kindness but for cruelty. It is an article of faith, among those who claim to speak for the oppressed and exploited, that black people, say, cannot be accused of racism or that women should not be judged by "masculine" standards of justice. Early feminists refused to absolve their sisters in this way. Indeed they were sometimes accused of hating women, because they dwelled unsparingly on the petty tyrannies by means of which women sought to compensate themselves for the narrowness of their lives.

The demand for access to the great world of politics and learning derived its original force from the observation that narrow circumstances breed narrow minds. But when feminists began to argue for their rights on the grounds that it would give "maternal influence" a wider sphere, they sacrificed moral realism to political expediency. They turned conventional stereotypes to political advantage but lost the ability to explain what makes the world of women, unless it is integrated into a more impersonal world where the quality of ideas or workmanship counts for more than "relationships," so confining to the spirit, so productive of petty jealousies, so highly charged with envy and resentment.

[134] Gilligan and Brown read the annals of Laurel...as another chapter in the "conflict between integrity and care," with a subplot that vaguely alludes to Little Women, The Secret Garden, and other classic tales of enterprising girlhood. But the absence of adult ideals, not their ruthless imposition, is the real story here. The girls at Laurel suffer from the effects of generational segregation, the deflation of ideals, the loss of an impersonal public order. In most societies known to historians or to anthropoligists, the young get an education by working alongside adults. The requirement that adolescents spend most of their time in school is a fairly recent innovation, closely linked to the rise of modern nation-states.

Formal schooling prolongs adolescence, and at the same time walls it off from unsupervised, pedagogically unmediated contact with the world of adults. Fortunately, schools are never wholly self-contained. Adolescents avid for knowledge of the world have always managed to evade pedagogical supervision and to acquire vicarious experience of adult ways, largely through the medium of unauthorized reading. ...
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It is only in our own time that schools have fully committed themselves to the dogma of immediacy, to the deadly notion that young people can be interested only in things directly touching their own lives. The replacement of historical narratives by the study of "social problems," the preference for literary works with a contemporary setting and an adolescent cast of characters, and the attempt to sanitize the curriculum by eliminating anything that might give offense all serve to discourage imaginative identification with images of the exotic or unfamiliar. Adolescents will not get much sense of a life beyond adolescence from a reading list limited to Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[170] The therapeutic conception of insanity, disease, and crime repudiated theological assumptions of their inevitability and relieved the patient of responsibility for his actions, insisting that he was neither possessed nor willfully sinning, but sick. The new conception of the family as an asylum similarly repudiated fatalism and the assumption of original sin, insisting on the child's innocence and plasticity. ... Whereas the church, in attempting to stamp out sex, had merely made it an obsession, these theorists maintained, marriage put sex at the service of procreation and encouraged a healthy acceptance of the body. This...had demonstrably better effects on the health of the individual and the community, according to bourgeois moralists, than the church's denial of the body.

From the beginning, a medical view of reality thus underlay attempts to remodel private life. The struggle between the new remissions and the old proscriptions, between personal fulfillment and
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self-sacrifice, between the ideology of work and the ideology of creative leisure, began in the nineteenth century. Liberal clergymen themselves participated in the campaign to transform religion into moral and mental hygiene. They allied themselves with a nascent feminism and with the campaign to feminize society by extending the domesticating influence of women to institutions beyond the home. The religion of health had a special appeal to women because of its concern with personal relations, its attempt to substitute domestic enjoyments for the rough and brutal camaraderie of males, and its glorification of the child and of maternal influence on the child's development. The conflict between the work ethic and the therapeutic point of view, which became sharper as the century wore on, also presented itself as a conflict between masculine and feminine "spheres"—the split between business and "culture," the practical and the aesthetic, so characteristic of bourgeois society and of American society in particular.

Lasch—Spiritual Discipline Against Resentment

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

[386] Social theories derived from the Enlightenment, which assume that scientific mastery over nature ought to "exorcise" fear and awe and thus to make people feel more secure, cannot explain why so many of them feel more insecure than ever and find it tempting, therefore, to think of themselves as helpless victims of circumstances. Nor can such theories explain why the most effective resistance to the prevailing sense of helplessness, in recent years, has come from the very people having the best reason of all to identify as victims, namely the black people of the South, oppressed first by slavery and then by peonage, political disenfranchisement, and a vicious system of racial segregation. Culturally backwards by [Harvey] Cox's [a "Christain realist"] enlightened standards, Southern blacks lived in a culture full of "tribal residues"; yet they showed more confidence in the
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goodness of things—in the "existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness," in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.—than those who enjoyed fuller access to the fruits of scientific enlightenment. Their experience in the South gave little support to a belief in progress; yet they seemed to have unlimited supplies of hope. They had every reason to sink into cynicism and despair, to accept exploitation passively, or on the other hand to throw themselves into a politics of resentment and revenge. Yet it was in the civil rights movement, launched by Southern blacks in the 1950s, that the "spiritual discipline against resentment" flowered in its purest form. Social theories that equate moral enlightenment with cosmopolitanism and secularization cannot begin to account for these things.

In his analysis of nonviolent coercion, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr predicted, with uncanny accuracy, that the "emancipation of the Negro race probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy." The world waited for "such a campaign with all the more reason and hope," he said, "because the peculiar spiritual gifts of the Negro endow him with a capacity to conduct it successfully."

Are we absolutely for certain that the adequate development of this kind of strategy owed nothing whatsoever to Enlightenment thinking? The fallacy of incomplete evidence once again?

Niebuhr did not stop to analyze the source of those "spiritual gifts." If he had, he might have discovered additional evidence against the enlightened view that "organic unities of family, race, and nation" were "irrational idiosyncrasies" destined to be destroyed by a "more perfect rationality." The history of the civil rights movement indicates that the gifts Niebuhr admired originated in a way of life distinctive to Southern blacks. The movement's discipline against envy and resentment began to weaken when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to mobilize blacks in the North, where that way of life had broken down. It was precisely the "idiosyncrasies" of racial and regional identity, expressed in a highly idiosyncratic form of the Protestant religion (however "irrational" in comparison with more liberal versions), that sustained the spiritual resources—courage, tenacity, forgiveness, and hope—on which the movement drew so heavily. When civil rights agitation moved into the Northern ghettos, it had to address a constituency that was no longer shaped and disciplined by the culture black people had made for themselves in the South. Uprooted from its native soil, the movement withered and died."

Lasch—Enthusiasm Verging on Sentimentalism

Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations
(1973)

Ch. XII, "The "Counter-Culture""

[subheading 3. Some Cultural and Political Implications of
Ethnic Particularism]

[192] The experience of pre-industrial peoples brought forcibly into contact with modern technological society has been highly ambiguous. On the one hand, industrial technology and mass communications have had an undeniably disruptive effect on many patterns of pre-industrial culture; but on the other hand, they have often strengthened the determination to preserve older ways, precisely as a defense against disorganization and loss of identity. ...

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In the United States, and probably in other advanced countries as well, the revival of ethnic particularism has coincided with a new wave of enthusiasm for popular culture on the part of intellectuals and educated people generally —an enthusiasm verging on sentimentalism. Support for black culture is at least as great among educated whites as it is among blacks themselves; and whites are much more likely to romaniticize it, since they do not experience at first hand the poverty that is also an element of black culture, along with its positive features. ...

The identification of reason with technological rationalization has given rise to a revolt against reason itself, one aspect of which is a revival of cultural primitivism among the educated. Intellectual and literary culture has come to be widely regarded as an instrument of exploitation and domination; thus we have the demand, advanced by some black nationalists and supported by many white radicals, that "black culture" replace "white culture" in the schools; that English be taught as a foreign language; and that in the universities, black studies be defined as a completely autonomous branch of learning. To what extent is the scholarly interest in black culture itself tinged with these attitudes?

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In a recent essay on black culture...John Szwed suggests in passing that the expulsion of whites from the civil rights movement was prompted not only by the blacks' desire to assert political control but by a rejection of "unreasonable and irrelevant white cultural models of change." This assertion seems to me to reflect a fairly widespread tendency to furnish cultural explanations for clearly political events, a tendency that can easily end in the complete rejection of politics as itself another "white cultural mode of change"...

[This assertion] also helps to point up the importance of the way culture is defined. The anthropological concept of culture as a people's total way of life, which has given rise to what Szwed calls the "cultural approach" to the study of society, is often confused with culture in the narrowed sense of accumulated ideas and techniques, transmitted for the most part in writing. That this confusion has become pervasive is suggested by the popular use of the term "life-style" to include everything from novels to the length of people's hair. One of its consequences is a growing disposition to regard culture in the more restricted sense—literary culture or "high culture"—not as potentially the common property of all men, but as something peculiarly bourgeois, white, or male, depending on the polemical frame of reference. The revolt against capitalism, racism, and the oppression of women becomes identified with a revolt against culture; or worse, the revolt against culture becomes a substitute for the revolt against capitalism, racism, and sexual exploitation.

Until recently, high culture was regarded, even by radicals—one is tempted to say, especially by radicals—not as the monop-
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oly of any particular class or race but as mankind's inheritance. Gramsci once wrote:

In the accumulation of ideas transmitted to us by a millennium of work and thought there are elements which have an eternal value, which cannot and must not perish. The loss of consciousness of these values is one of the most serious signs of degradation brought about by the bourgeois regime; to whom everything becomes an object of trade and a weapon of war. The proletariat will have to take on the work of reconquest, to restore in full for itself and all humanity the devastated realm of the spirit.

Partly because the proletarian movement never successfully addressed itself to this task, we now find ourselves confronted with demands for cultural autonomy that confuse intellectual culture with bourgeois "life-styles" and reject the former along with the latter. The discovery that ethnic cultures (in the broad sense of the term "culture") have been unexpectedly resistant to homogenization coincides with, and to some extent may be informed by, a misguided and regressive rebellion against literary culture that seeks in the sentimental myth of the folk an antidote to bourgeois decadence. Were the political movements to which the scholarly rediscovery of ethnicity corresponds—movements for ethnic equality and self-determination—to adopt this primitivism as their own, they would then be adopting "irrelevant white cultural models" with a vengeance.

...

[196] The issue is not whether black people have a culture. In the essay already alluded to, the writer sets up a strawman, the contention that Afro-Americans have been "stripped" of their culture, and then proceeds to demolish it—incidentally with many asides to the effect that anyone who questions his own interpretation of the distinctiveness of black culture must be politically on the side of integration. But surely the question is no longer whether blacks have been "stripped" of their culture but whether the culture they do have is primarily African in origin or whether it has been formed in response to oppression in America, as the theorists of the "culture of poverty" have tried to show.

The history of Harlem helps to clarify this issue. As late as the twenties, even after the mass migration from the South had begun to be felt, Harlem retained a vigorous community life. It was at once more prosperous and more self-sustaining than it has since become. The collapse of the Negro artisan class, the Great Depression, the economic deterioration of New York City in general, and perhaps also the ideology of integration, combined to render Harlem vulnerable not only to economic but to cultural penetration from outside. It became an after-hours playground for whites looking for forbidden pleasures and hungry for soul. ...

Those who deny the pathological elements in the culture of poverty would do well to ponder Malcolm's account of his own degradation, in a world where high status meant a light skin, straight hair, the company of white women, and flashy clothes (manufactured by white merchants especially for the ghetto and sold at inflated prices). Relations between blacks and whites—sexual relations in particular—came to be founded on a pattern
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of mutual fascination, exploitation, and degradation. The revival of black nationalism in the fifties and sixties, with its puritanical morality and its reassertion of the work ethic, was directed precisely against this kind of cultural "integration." It reflected an awareness that the two races had too long, and at too close range, witnessed each other's shame.

Unfortunately, this same nationalism proved unable to formulate an adequate politics. Like other black nationalist movements in the past, it advocated physical separation. At the same time it put forward a mythical view of the Negro past, which encouraged an escapist preoccupation with Africa. Neither at the political nor at the cultural level did it succeed in expressing the two-sidedness of the life of American blacks. For a time, it appeared that the black power movement of the mid-sixties would achieve a real unity, combining an emphasis on the distinctive elements in black culture with a struggle for power in American society as a whole. But this movement quickly split in two. The political wing propounds a new integrationism in the name of "Marxist-Leninism," while the cultural nationalists ignore politics altogether. Meanwhile, a new generation of academics had rediscovered popular culture as a field for scholarly research—and also, perhaps, as a way of resolving nagging doubts about their own relevance. The question, as I have already suggested, is whether this new scholarship will encourage a better understanding of the relations between modern technological society and the pre-industrial cultures it has partially absorbed, or whether it will merely surround poverty with the romantic glow of the intellectuals' own alienation. An appreciation of the resilience of pre-industrial culture could contribute, however indirectly, to the growth of a genuinely antitechnolgical politics. Romanticizing poverty, on the other hand, would merely prolong the present political stalemate and at the same time encourage a process of cultural "Balkanization"—a regression to a state of generalized ignorance disguised as ethnic pluralism and having as its political counterpart a system of repressive decentralization, combining "community control" of culture with centralized control of production, and a
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colorful proliferation of "life-styles" with the underlying reality of class domination.

Parsons on Universalistic and Particularistic Systems

Social systems in which a considerable number of individuals are in a complex and delicate state of mutual interdependence tend greatly to limit the scope of "personal" emotional feeling or, at least, its direct expression in action. Any considerable range of affective spontaneity would tend to impinge on the statuses and interests of too many others, with disequilibriating consequences for the system as a whole. (187-188)

[A footnote to this passage...]

This tendency for multiple-membered social systems to repress spontaneous manifestations of sentiment should not be taken too absolutely. In such phenomena as cliques, there is room for the following of personal inclinations within the framework of institutionalized statuses. It is, however, probable that it is more restrictive in groups where, as in kinship, the institutionalized relationships are particularistic and functionally diffuse than in universalistic and functionally specific systems such as modern occupational organizations. In the latter case personal affective relationships can, within considerable limits, be institutionally ignored as belonging to the sphere of "private affairs." (188)

Talcott Parsons
"The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States" (1943)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 177-196

Note (4 June, 2016): It would be interesting and productive to consider the various contemporary trends toward social theories of art in light of this observation. Such theories seem hell-bent on delivering a more particularistic, functionally diffuse relationship between artist and audience in place of the universalistic and functionally specific relationship that persisted in earlier European high culture. Of course, the larger implications of this are never sufficiently considered, either on the side of drawbacks to contemporary social theories of art or of benefits of the supposedly outmoded romantic/modernist theories, and so the various systemic-level drawbacks articulated by TP throughout his later essays could make for potent rebuttals. The notion that particularistic/diffuse/interdependent social structures inherently restrict "spontaneous manifestations of sentiment" certainly would be a damning charge if it could be proven.