Lasch—New Orders from Indigenous Traditions?

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

p. 418—re: early 1920s series on the states by The Nation:

Condemnation of Southern backwardness, in a liberal weekly, might have been expected. More surprising was that a series conceived as an exploration of diversity so often ended by holding up a uniform standard of cultural progress, one measured by great works of art and notable achievements in science and technology. None of the contributors asked whether a new order in the South would not have to rest on traditions indigeneous to the region. None showed much interest in the requirements for a vigorous civic life, as opposed to the number of orchestras, art galleries, libraries, and universities. The implication was that "civilization," if it was ever to come to the South, would have to come from outside.

...

[419]
That states as different as Iowa and Massachusetts could prompt the same kind of disparagement suggests that the conventions underlying this disparagement had acquired a life of their own. The equation of civic culture with progress and enlightenment made it difficult to see anything but arrested development even in a state like New York, depicted by Charles F. Wood as a benighted region dominated by "fear and suspicion" of the modern world. ... "Resistance to change is their most sacred
[420]
principle."

Traditions indigenous to the region may not be impugned! Actually, the problem is that they may not be specifically enumerated, at which point the possibility of change is seen to have been foreclosed from the outset by the prescription of indegenous-ness. Populism and Cultural Relativism together at last!

Of course Lasch has a fair point that imposing cultural change from the top down cannot be effective or just. But that leaves only one solution: peoples with incompatible indigenous traditions cannot live justly under a common government. They need to breakup. Sovereignty must dawn again. This seems to be the conclusion, at least, of much of the presently resurgent nationalism in the world, whose trappings I despise but whose conclusions don't seem entirely wrong.