Representativeness Heuristics and Fallacies

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

[xvi] I am much less interested, in short, in praising or condemning the new radicalism than in understanding where it came from. Even the effort to understand where it came from, unfortunately, will strike some readers as an insidious attempt to discredit the ideas of radicals and reformers by "psychologizing" them away. For some people, it is enough to say the reformers were moved by the spectacle of human injustice; to say anything more is to deny the fact of injustice. I am unable to understand this argument, nor do I know quite how to meet it (since I cannot understand it), except to say that the reformers themselves did not share this reluctance of their admirers to examine their own motives. They wrote about their motives with all the enthusiasm, and all the honesty, with which they wrote about social injustice, and I have relied very heavily on what they wrote.

If only the artists could be lucky enough to have their utterances taken seriously rather than psychologized away.

Of course it would be possible to ignore what they wrote about themselves, and to write instead
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about the evils of capitalism.

It would also be possible, later, to dismiss what they wrote about themselves and to tortuously/torturously explicate the psychological grounds for this dismissal. Of the artists, that is.

But that is not the book I have chosen to write. I have written instead about some of the critics of capitalism, in the hope that their history would tell something, if not specifically about capitalism, about the peculiarly fragmented character of modern society, and beyond that, about what it means to pursue the life of reason in a world in which the irrational has come to appear not the exception but the rule.

Not only the scope and design of this study but its method needs a word of explanation. I have chosen to approach the new radicalism chiefly by means of a series of biographical essays, although I know that for a social historian to proceed in this way is almost to invite misunderstanding. The connection between biography and history is never altogether clear, and it is especially obscure in the case of social history. The political historian can justify the study of notable men by reference to their influence on events, the literary historian by reference to the intrinsic value of their works. For the social historian such considerations are ruled out from the start.

Well, the social does, in a sense, trump everything else, formal literature and politics included; hence these other historians are not so free as the author here supposes, or not unless they are laser-focused on the parochial, internal dealings of their fields.

His subject is the social structure, the people he writes about are often anonymous, and if he ventures on biography at all, it must be—so it would seem—with the excuse that his subjects are "representative men." By taking this position, however, he lays himself open to the objection that a representative man is a contradiction in terms; for is not a human being, by reason of all that makes him human, something unique?

Well, yes! Another rejoinder duly noted.

Obliquely, the larger point is this: representative conclusions are answers only to very particular questions. The more broadly representative the pretensions, the less interesting and more tenuous such theses tend to become.

And, the point of this point is not simply to dine out on the intractable complexity of contemporary societies or the ultimate uniqueness of individuals. It is, rather, that the kind and quantity of information that a person can make profitable use of is not nearly so variable or complex a question as is psychology or sociology writ large. As complex as people are, we have not changed nearly as much as has "society," most especially in its now-infamous tendency to generate more information than anyone can use.

The subjects of this book were chosen in deliberate violation of the notion that a social historian ought to write about people "typical of their times." One of them was a hunchbacked dwarf, another an extremely neurotic woman with an irregular emotional history, another a counselor to Presidents. All of them were extremely articulate people—a fact which further sets
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them off from the run of humankind. But it is this very fact, though it further distinguishes them, which makes up their value to the study of the history of American society. They articulated experiences which, whether or not they were representative experiences in the sense of being widely shared by others, were nevertheless representative in another sense: they could only have happened at a particular place at a particular time. Some experiences are archetypal: men undergo them simply because they are human, the experiences are inherent in the human condition. But others are closely rooted in a social context, and by listening carefully to what people say about them, one can sometimes learn more about a given society than by more formal sociological analysis.

Compare to W. Stephenson's contention that, even within the realm of formal sociological analysis, he could learn mo-betta from in-depth study of a few subjects rather than relying on the brute force of sample size.

(On which point, from Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism...

[34] Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud's extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.

...

[35, footnote] "On...its home ground," Adorno added, psychoanalysis carries specific conviction; the further it removes itself from that sphere, the more its theses are threatened alternately with shallowness or wild over-systematiztion. If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suffers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province, the relatively autonomous, monadological individual as arena of the unconscious conflict between instinctual drive and prohobition. The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic immanence. Its delusion in doing so is not dissimilar from that 'omnipotence of thought' which it itself criticized as infantile."

)

Incidentally, the elder Freudian Lasch can fairly be said to have dispensed, at one time or another, with all of the caveats raised by his younger self here, to where the weaknesses of The Minimal Self are pointed up rather starkly by the passages above despite bearing the same author's name. If nothing else, this itself points up a further limit of the "psychologizing" turn, of the proffering of psychology as the missing link in the epistemological chain between biography and history: people are complicated and, one might dare say, protean.

Stephenson's "Small-Sample Doctrine"

William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)

[10]

A METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCE

... For over a century social scientists have been concerned with the fundamental problem of what should be the basis of measurement in their science. In physics there are units of weight and length, time and mass, and these suffice for all measurements. In the social sciences, when these units cannot be used, recourse is made to other devices either of an ad hoc nature (different therefore in every study) or else systematically constructed, as scales of intelligence, attitudes... These scales are based on the large-sample theory and the Theory of Error... Psychologists understand this very well, for a branch of their work, called differential psychology, is fashioned upon this methodology. The principle is important: it supposes that if we wish to measure a person's intelligence (for example), a test is made and applied to a large sample of individuals from a parent population. According to the theory of errors, the scores gained by such a large sample, for a suitably constructed test, will tend to be normally distributed. The scores—whatever their units may be—can be transformed to standard scores, which are pure numbers whose mean for the test is 0 and whose standard deviation is 1.0. ...then, any test one cares to make for the parent population of individuals...can be systematically reduced to standard scores, the same pure numbers for everything so measured. ...

Lasch—Penetralia

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

5. "The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs"
(pp. 93-120)

[99] Comparing the new [Boston Public Library] building in Copley Square to European libraries, [Henry] James was struck by its accessibility, its rejection of any suggestion of the mystery or sacred space—"penetralia"—normally associated with a place of learning. A "library without penetralia" struck James as slightly incongruous, a "temple without altars." "The British Museum, the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Treasure of South Kensington, are assuredly . . . at the disposal of the people; but it is to be observed, I think, that the people walk there more or less under the shadow of the right waited for and conceded." The more democratic conception of culture embodied in the Boston Public Library, experienced by James as a "reservation" to his pleasure in the new building, was exactly what commended the place to a young woman from the slums [Mary Antin].

The notion of penetralia, or at least the word itself, seems potentially useful in the ongoing culture war over formality in art and music. No doubt the populist impulse is to do away with it, as here...but note that the substance and orientation of the institution has, in the above anecdote, been scrupulously maintained; rather, it is the ornamental touches (literal ornaments in some cases) which have been carefully reformulated or eliminated while what might be called the content remains heavy-duty and unapologetically formal(istic).

Notwithstanding the above, the fact remains that no penetralia can make you feel inferior without your permission. Hence, for the lack of pretense to commend a place (or not) is really no improvement but merely indicates a caucusing with the antielite side of the aisle and the continuation of the culture war du jour. It is but a stone's throw from here to full-on reverse snobbery. Amenities assuredly at the disposal of the people are as much as we're allowed to demand of our society, perhaps of life in general. Meeting our needs in substance is a right, and in style a luxury; morally, that is, but certainly pragmatically too, because style is divergent and substance convergent.

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. ...
[134]
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—Reform as Productive Work

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

5. "The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs"
(pp. 93-120)

[94] It is this undifferentiated image of the old days that I want to call into question—the impression that women's lives used to be taken up entirely by the demands of housework and motherhood. In reality, full-time motherhood—the rejection of which touched off the latest wave of feminist agitation in the sixties—was something new and historically unprecedented. It was largely a product of the rapid growth of suburbs after World War II, and the feminist revival initiated by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique originated as a direct response, often a very self-conscious response, not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul. Only later did the feminist movement come to understand the condition it sought to change—the division of labor that confined women to the home—as a "patriarchal" system that could be found, with minor variations, in all times and places. In the popular mind, the division of labor that prevailed in postwar suburbia thus came to be identified—with a corresponding loss of intellectual clarity—with the division of sexual labor in general.

All societies distinguish between women's work and men's work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that "woman's place" has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household. The modern home, which presupposes a radical separation of domestic life from the world of work, was an invention of the nineteenth century. The decline of household production and the rise of wage labor made it possible—made it necessary—to conceive of the family as a private
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retreat from a public world increasingly dominated by the impersonal mechanisms of the market. The image of the family as a haven in a heartless world helped Americans to manage the ambivalent emotions evoked by the new industrial order. ... By assigning custody of "feelings" to the family, people tried to reassure themselves that values rooted in "ascription," as the sociologists say—recognition of persons that does not have to be earned but is merely bestowed—would continue to have a place even in societies governed by the principle of competitive achievement.

The nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, as historians have come to call it, revolved around a new glorification of motherhood. But the rhetoric of motherhood and domesticity cannot be taken as an accurate or complete description of women's lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Housework and child care by no means exhausted women's energies. On the contrary, both housewives and single women threw themselves into a variety of activities that took them out of the home. They organized benevolent societies, female reform societies, and foreign missions. They put together a vast network of temperance societies. They took up charities and philanthropies of all kinds. Many of them enlisted in the antislavery crusade, the peace movement, prison reform, and of course the movement for women's rights. ...
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For historians as for everybody else, work is understood as something dignified by a salary or a wage. Uncompensated activity, though it enters the historical record under the heading of "reform," is seldom recognized as a form of productive work, even when it brought women into the public world in great numbers. The impression that nineteenth-century women were confined to the domestic "sphere" thus remains undisturbed by the record of their active participation in the "world's work," as they themselves liked to refer to it.

Women's voluntary participation in the public world probably reached its high point in the years between 1890 and 1920, the so-called progressive era, which also coincided with the campaign for woman suffrage. "Between 1890 and 1920," wrote the historian Mary Ryan, "women built a rationalized organizational network that was nearly as sophisticated in its own way as the corporate business world. ...
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The progressive era was the age of "social housekeeping," when women aspired "to make the whole world homelike," in the words of Frances Williard of the WCTU. Women demanded the vote on the grounds that maternal "influence" should not be confined to their reforming efforts; nor were they handicapped by the lack of it. Indeed there is reason to think that women were more active citizens before getting the vote than afterwards, in part because they had so much at stake in proving that they could act responsibly in the public realm. ...

Social reform was the most visible but by no means the exclusive or even the most important contribution made by women to public life. Their work as volunteers sustained a vast array of public services—libraries, hospitals, nursery schools, social settlements, parks, playgrounds, concert halls, museums.

...

[101] It took more than satire...to drive women out of the public forum, but satire must have played some part in their postwar retreat from civic causes and campaigns. In the twenties, club women, do-gooders, "upbuilders," and cultural missionaries became symbols of Victorian repression or, at best, figures of fun. The flapper, not the feminist, now served as the prototype of the emancipated woman; the battle of the sexes shifted from the lecture circuit to the bedroom; and the assertion of women's equal right to sexual pleasure absorbed energies formerly devoted to social reform and civic improvement. The professionalization of these activities further contributed to the decline of voluntary public service. Settlement houses were taken over by professional social workers, charities by professional administrators. ... Women now had to choose between a home and a career,
[102]
and the choice had become so familiar that people soon forgot that there had ever been any other.

Volunteer work commended itself to women, in the age of its efflorescence, in part because it was easily combined with domestic responsibilities, unlike the inflexible schedules imposed by paid work. Those responsibilities, moreover, were themselves less burdensome than they subsequently became, since most women were able to count on help from domestic servants, in-laws and relatives, and their own children. ... Household tasks, including child care, were typically shared by a network of women who were in a position to make claims on each other's good will. It was precisely because this system relied on mutual trust that it worked as well as it did, according to
[103]
Howell [Helping Ourselves: Families and the Human Network]; but it was this same element of trust and mutual obligation, in all likelihood, that eventually discredited the barter system of domestic management in the minds of people who came to experience any form of personal obligation primarily as a limitation on their own freedom. To depend on others puts us under obligation to them, whereas the impersonal mechanism of the market enables us to satisfy all our obligations by the simple act of payment. The desire to escape obligation, even more than an exaggerated respect for professional expertise, explains the professionalization of domestic services formerly carried out informally and without payment. ...

As urban sociologists have often pointed out, close-knit neighborhoods, often based on a strong sense of ethnic identity, preserved some of the features of village life in the midst of large cities. ... The "isolation of the nuclear family"—another theme of urban sociology—was qualified by neighbors' dependence on each other for all kinds of domestic services. "Isolation" was a better description of the suburban than of the urban family; and it was the rapid expansion of suburbs, beginning
[104]
in the 1940s and 1950s, that finally destroyed the social patterns I have tried to sketch in here—the informal system of collective self-help that made it possible, together with the availability of domestic servants, for women to take an active part in civic culture—and inaugurated a new era in the history of women and the family. Suburban life, organized around the shopping mall rather than the neighborhood, eradicated the last vestiges of reciprocal obligation, neighborly or familial; and it is important to see that this is precisely what made it attractive. It was not just the lure of green lawns and open spaces that drew people to the suburbs but the dream of perfect freedom, of a world in which the demands of your relatives and neighbors would be vastly reduced (if not eliminated altogether) and your time would be entirely your own.

It is often said that people went to the suburbs in search of "community," as an alternative to urban anonymity. I think it was just the other way around. What they craved was complete privacy... Suburbs appeared to institutionalize the principle of free and unlimited choice. They were designed to exclude everything not subject to choice—the job, the extended family, the enforced sociability of the city streets.

pp. 105-107—support for this interpretation from Friedan's The Feminine Mystique


pp. 107-108—synchrony between Friedan and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd

[111] Child rearing may be an honorable calling, but many women clearly found it increasingly unsatisfactory in the fifties and sixties... Her own [Friedan's] explanation was quite consistent with Goodman's account of the corruption of work, although she made no reference to it. She pointed out that housekeeping and child care had themselves taken on many of the tell-tale characteristics of make-work. ... Like much of the work men performed in the marketplace, these duties appeared to have no other purpose than to keep
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women busy.

Stray thought: it seems clear enough from observing people today that these duties are also a form of keeping up, of conspicuous consumption, of various kinds of signaling, etc. They have become competitive status markers vis-a-vis other parents and other families, as has the mere (f)act of having a kid in and of itself. Even more clearly than the issues raised here (which do seem important), the keeping up aspect suggests that contemporary child-centeredness is in fact evolving/merging into a broader Debordian spectacle per which the needs of the children themselves are incidental, perhaps even inconvenient, and thereby giving lie to (among other things) the conceit of parenthood to betoken maturity, or perhaps actually to define the transition from adolescence to adulthood, from self-absorption to absorption in the nurturance of another and an investment in society. N. Sammond's ponderous Disney study eventually lands on this same point, seen through the lens of Media Effects research: "the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making."

Just as patriarchy does not actually mean a great time for the vast majority of men, so the child of filiarchy may rule its subjects without gaining any real privilege whatseover, and in too many cases suffering outright abuse and neglect in spite of its place at the proverbial center of its parents' universe. In researching for Totem and Taboo, Freud found anthropologists of his day reporting that tribal kings-to-be were often pummeled nearly or even fully to death as a matter of course before officially ascending to the throne. The empty-nester sarcasm by which recently-emancipated children become known as "the prince[ess]" thus suggests a difference in degree rather than kind between post-industrial and pre-industrial societies.

Child care, moreover, was important only if it was connected with larger public purposes. Goodman himself conceded the substance of this point when he noted—though only in passing—that when adults devoted themselves exclusively to the child's world, "there isn't much world for the child to grow up into in the next stage." In order for a father "to guide his growing son," it was "necessary for him to have a community of his own and be more of a man." But the same thing was surely true of women. That this obvious point should have escaped attention until Betty Friedan made it inescapable shows why the feminist revival was necessary in the first place. ...

But Friedan's analysis was one-sided in its own right without the kind of corrective provided by Goodman. His account of the world of work should have forewarned women that they would not gain much simply by entering the work force and achieving equality with men. Once women had rejected the "feminine mystique," it was tempting to think that professional careers would solve all their problems. ... [They] began to demand access to the allegedly "creative," "fulfilling" work enjoyed by men. ... They expected professional careers to bring them emotional fulfillment. If Goodman was right, however, they would find no more meaning than men did in careers the structure of which was governed largely by the requirements
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of commodity production. Goodman's point was not the conventional one that most jobs involved too much drudgery and routine and thus provided an inadequate outlet for "creativity." His point was that they did not produce anything of importance and were therefore dishonorable and demoralizing. From this point of view, a career as a highly paid lawyer, advertising executive, broadcast journalist, or college professor was even more demoralizing, if it served only to maintain the "organized system," than a job...which did not even pretend to be useful. This was an argument women very much needed to hear; otherwise they too would fall into the careerist trap. They needed to be reminded that good work was useful work, not glamorous or "stimulating" or "creative" work, and that its usefulness, moreover, could not be measured by a wage or salary.

... One of the surprises in store for anyone who returns to Friedan's best-seller today is how little she was inclined to identify the work women ought to be doing with highly paid professional careers. No doubt she was too quick to characterize the kind of work she had in mind as "creative,"

Well, you know...anybody could make that mistake.

...but at least she did not confuse "creativity" with payment. ... What mattered was a "lifelong commitment," not a career as such—a commitment to "society" at that.

...

[114] Because the women's movement—the movement Friedan helped to launch—has repudiated volunteer work as the very epitome of female slavery, it is easy to miss her emphasis on citizenship and "commitment." In the sixties and seventies, this way of talking about women gave way to an ostensibly more radical, hardheaded idiom. Women could never be free, feminists argued, until they were able to compete with men in the job market, and successful competition appeared to require institutional reforms...that went far beyond the modest reforms advocated by The Feminine Mystique. ... In light of the subsequent radicalization of the women's movement, [this book] is usually read (when it is read at all) as the first halting step down the road since traveled by an army of more militant women. But it may make more sense to read it, alongside Goodman's book, as an attempt to mark out a road that was later abandoned.

...

[115] Perhaps the most revealing commentary on the new order of the suburbs, an order based on a strict separation between the home and the workplace and a strict division of sexual labor, was that each sex envied the lives led by the other. Men envied the domestic security supposedly enjoyed by their wives; women envied the exciting careers supposedly enjoyed by their husbands. As for their children—supposedly the ultimate beneficiaries of suburban life, whose needs the whole system was intended to serve—their aimless, pampered existence had come to be regarded as a national scandal.

...

[117] The feminist movement, far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own. Its relentless propaganda against the "traditional" family is of a piece with the propa-
[118]
ganda of commodities, which encourages the consumer to discard arrangements that are still serviceable only because they are said to lag behind the times. Like the advertising industry, the women's movement has taken "choice" as its slogan... In fact, however, the movement recognizes only one choice—the family in which adults work full-time in the marketplace.

Indeed, I have often gotten the impression that the "choice" in "pro-choice" is not if but when to have kids. The still serviceable arrangement of childlessness is not served at the buffet of choice.

[120] By rejecting "progress," of course, it [feminism] would put itself beyond the pale of respectable opinion—which is to say, it would become as radical as it now merely claims to be.

7. "The Mismeasure of Man"
(pp. 137-152)

[146] The "colonization of the life-world," as Jürgen Habermas calls it, meant that nothing was to be exempt from pedagogical or therapeutic mediation. Informal, customary and morally regulated conduct was to be organized on a new basis and administered by experts equipped with the latest technologies of the self. If the "life-world" represents the "totality of what is taken for granted," in the words of Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, then the determination to take nothing for granted, least of all the "socialization" of the young, exposed it to the steady encroachment of organized expertise in the irresistible form of money and power.

These developments undeniably expanded the horizon of human understanding and fostered a critical spirit, but in everyday life they were more likely to be experienced as a subjection to routines that drained the joy out of work and play and wrapped everything in a smothering self-consciousness. Surely it was this feeling of suffocation, much more than the need to prove something about masculinity, that explains the idealization of the strenuous life at the turn of the century: the attraction of imperialism and war, the long-
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ing for wide-open spaces, the new interest in the primitive and exotic, the nostalgia for simplicity and lost innocence.

Men were not alone, after all, in their dissatisfaction with a social order in which everything was organized down to the last detail. The rationalization of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery.

Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[197] In theory, it should be possible for feminists to advance beyond the present stage of sexual recrimination by regarding men simply as a class enemy, involuntarily caught up in the defense of masculine privilege and therefore exempt from personal blame. The symbiotic interdependence of men and women, however, makes it hard to attain such intellectual detachment in everyday life. The "class enemy" presents himself in ordinary existence as a lover, husband, or father, on whom women proceed to make demands that men usually fail to meet. According to the feminists' own analysis of the way in which the subjection of women damages women and impoverishes the emotional life of men, men cannot possibly meet the full erotic demands of women under the existing sexual arrangements; yet feminism itself gives
[198]
those demands the strongest ideological support. It therefore intensifies the problem to which it simultaneously offers the solution.

...

[205] Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand—

Hmm...once again this seems like the colloquial misconstrual of patriarchy as men ruling over women, though Lasch himself has not actually used the p-word here...

intimidated, emasculated—appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one. When even Mom is a menace, there is not much that feminists can say to soften the sex war...

...well no, because really patriarchy is a very few men ruling over all the women and over the vast majority of the other men too. So, the explanation for the above is (deceptively?) simple, and also some long ways short of deeply irrational: the vast majority of the other men in fact control zero power and wealth; they hardly have any control over the course of their own lives, let alone someone else's; and they couldn't get a mate's attention if they literarlly donned peacock's plumage and strutted around in public. Dare I say this is indeed fertile ground for resentment.

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.

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
[387]
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—What Ought To Be

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

[208, footnote]
The growing acceptance of wage labor is only one indication of the narrowing of political debate in the twentieth century. Another indication is the narrowing of the kind of questions asked about work. In the nineteenth century, people asked whether the work was good for the worker. Today we ask whether workers are satisfied with their jobs. A high level of "job satisfaction" then serves to refute those who delpore the division of labor, the decline of craftsmanship, and the difficulty of finding work that
[209]
might leave workers with a sense of accomplishment. The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want. Even so, investigations of "job satisfaction" and worker "morale" are hardly encouraging. The dream of setting up in business for yourself, even if it means long hours and uncertain returns, remains almost universally appealing.

...

[256, footnote]
if inner peace is the issue, then it will be objected that [Jonathan] Edwards's "angelic" morality, though it may not be irrelevant to all human concerns, remains irrelevant to social and political concerns. From a political point of view, we need to know what makes it possible for human beings to live together without cutting each other's throats, not what makes them happy. It was not Edwards, however, but Thomas Jefferson, that exemplar of eighteenth-century enlightenment, who introduced the question of happiness into our founding political charter... If it can be shown that Edwards had a deeper understanding of happiness than Jefferson did, that judgment has political implications of great importance. Perry Miller presumably had something like this in mind when he compared Edwards to another illustrious contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, and observed that "although our civilization has chosen to wander in the more genial meadows to which Franklin beckoned it, there come periods, either through disaster or through self-knowledge, when applied science and Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth seem not a sufficient philosophy of national life." Is it necessary to belabor the point that our own times, the closing decades of the twentieth century, are such a period?

...

[264]
This rugged little essay [Emerson, "Fate" (1860)], notwithstanding its Machiavellian view of fate and its Darwinian view of nature, ends in a conclusion worthy of Edwards: freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity. In this context, the more recognizably "Emersonian" elements in the essay take on an appearance quite different from anything we are led to expect by the standard picture of Emerson as a nineteenth-century Pangloss, doggedly trying to convince himself that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. The statement that "evil is good in the making" does not deny the existence of evil; what it denies is the possibility that we can abolish it. It is our refusal to admit limits on our freedom that makes limits evil in the first place, and the "beatitude" that finally enables us to accept those limits dissolves their power to dominate us and thus turns evil into good. The statement
[265]
that fate "is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought" carries much the same meaning. The statement, finally, that "what is" not only "must be" but "ought to be" distinguished stoical resignation from joyous submission to an order of things that we can recognize even though it was not designed for our convenience or even for our edification, as "best" in some final sense. Emerson's completion of this pregnant phrase by the addition of "ought" to "is" transforms fate into providence.

As Melville understood, more clearly than most of Emerson's critics, this is "theology," Calvinist theology at that; but what Melville intended as a reproach might better be taken as a compliment. Emerson retains the moral realism of his ancestors, while discarding their anthropomorphic conception of God. If God is pure being, he can no longer be adequately characterized as a "sovereign," much less a "father." But neither can he be dispensed with. Only the acknowledgement that "what is must be and ought to be, or is the best," overcomes the tyranny of fate.

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
[163]
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.

Lasch—Tolerance and Indifference

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

[122]
Our twentieth-century experience of imperial rivalries, international competition for markets, and global wars makes it hard for us to share the Enlightenment's conviction that capitalism would promote world peace. The comsopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive. "Benevolence," moreover—the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice—presents itself to us as a singlularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion. We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand—
[123]
"my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind"—leaves us a little cold.

It is important to remind ourselves, therefore, that cosmopolitanism and "benevolence" commended themselves, in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the fierce partisanship now blamed for two hundred years of religious warfare. Religious tolerance may have reflected a growing indifference to religion, but at least it held out the hope of peace.




[123—footnote to above]
Burke attacked "these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration," just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. "That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity."

...

[148]
ambivalence was a more appropriate response to progress than unyielding opposition or wholehearted approval. Indeed it was the only appropriate response, when progress was identified so closely with fate; and there is a certain heroism in the classical sociologists' determination to face unflinchingly facts that could not be altered, in their view, and to "bear the fate of the times like a man," as Weber put it. Weber's conception of the scientific vocation may have conceded too much to the view that science demands a rigorous abstention from moral judgment, but his warning against "academic prophecy" remains indispensable. "In the lecture rooms of the university," Weber insisted, no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity." It is impossible not to acknowledge the force of this, even for those who have seen Weber's ideal of heroic detachment degenerate into the familiar academic accommodation with political power that sides with the status quo, in effect, while disclaiming any intention of taking sides. "Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either.

Two Thoughts on Woke Casting

(1) A special complication arises from the conceit to establishing vocational role models by showing the target audience actors who "look like them" in those roles: flooding film and TV with Black actors also reinforces the message that entertainment careers are more open to Black people than are other kinds of careers, which is one of the oldest and most pernicious "messages" American culture has been sending to Black people this whole time.

(2) Casting is and was always inherently unfair. Woke casting is not more or less fair than casting ever was. What's different about woke casting is not its fairness or unfairness but the fact that it is talked about openly and virtuously, even in the eye of the hurricane. For those thus located, this makes it divisive on a day-to-day, person-to-person level. (I am relating past and ongoing experience here, not conjecture.) So, whatever new society we're birthing this way, it seems the talent won't be sharing in it. Seemingly arbitrary acceptance or rejection is, as it turns out, a far stronger basis for esprit de corps. Arbitrariness is a kind of rugged equality, hardly the ideal kind, but closer to it than what is unfolding right now.

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. ...

[193]
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?

[194]
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-
[195]
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
[197]
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
[198]
colorful proliferation of "life-styles" with the underlying reality of class domination.

Lasch—Nationalism, Survivals, Advancement

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)

[119] the civil rights movement, in its Southern phase, rested on the indigenous Negro subculture which has grown up since the Civil War under the peculiar conditions of Southern segregation—a culture separate and unequal
[120]
but semiautonomous and therefore capable of giving its own distinctive character to the movement for legal and political equality.

...

[121] The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent.

Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals
[122]
has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people. Herskovits himself explicitly acknowledged a desire "to give the Negro an appreciation of his past" and "to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have." The same purpose animates many of his present admirers. It is no service to black nationalism, however, to pretend that it grows out of an African heritage; nor is it even necessary to the argument that Negro culture in America ought to be preserved. If the defense of that culture rested only on appeals to the African past, it would not be worth defending.

...

[124] Some of [Oscar] Lewis's critics...argue that the concept of the culture of poverty implies a "value judgment" and a "cultural smugness" resting on ignorance of the accomplishments of this type of culture, especially of black culture. Thus Todd Gitlin, a spokesman of the New Left, advises those who write about the ghetto to "listen to Otis Redding, B.B. King, the Impressions, etc. etc." and to
[125]
read Charles Keil's Urban Blues, which he says shows "the richness of ghetto culture."

These remarks betray a very common misunderstanding of the culture of poverty and of the concept of culture itself. Oscar Lewis is not making a "value judgment" when he says that the culture of poverty is a "thin culture." This statement has nothing in common with the cliché that Negroes are "culturally deprived"—the standard view to which Gitlin rightly objects, but which he confuses with Lewis's view. When teachers in ghetto schools say that black children are "deprived," "disadvantaged," and "unteachable," they do show a "cultural smugness" which makes them unable to talk to the children or to listen to what the children are saying. The schoolmarm's view of "culture" assumes that poems, for instance, should conform to certain rigid standards of grammar, meter, and sentiment. Thus a poem about "The Junkies," as Herbert Kohl notes, is dismissed as "the ramblings of a disturbed girl," whereas the same teacher praises "Shop with Mom" for its "pleasant and healthy thought." Similarly with music: some people can't hear jazz, blues, gospel, or "soul" because it doesn't live up to their arbitrary expectations of what "good music" should sound like.

These are "value judgments" with a vengeance. But Lewis is trying to understand the culutre of poverty, not in the narrow sense of the term culture but as a design for living. (Gitlin confuses the two meanings of "culture." And what Lewis discovered in the Puerto Rican ghetto applies—urban blues notwithstanding—to the black ghetto as well: "The low aspiration level helps to reduce frustration,
[126]
[and] the legitamization of short-range hedonism makes possible spontaneity of enjoyment," but "there is a great deal of pathos, suffering and emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty." To cite a book on the urban blues in refutation of these conclusions misses the point. The question is not whether Negro music provides a "rich" record of suffering, the question is whether the ghetto subculture gives much support to its members. It is precisely because the chief characteristics of the ghetto culture are despair and self-hatred that black nationalism has arisen as a radical cultural therapy for the ghetto.

The contrast between the comparative vitality of Negro culture in the South and the poverty of the culture of poverty explains why nationalist sects like the Nation of Islam, which have never made much headway in the South, find the Northern ghetto a fertile soil; while the civil rights movement, on the other hand, has become progressively weaker as the focus of the Negros' struggle shifts from the South to the North. The civil rights movement does not address itself to the question of how Negroes are to acquire a culture, or to the consequences of their failure to do so. It addresses itself to legal inequalities. Insofar as it implies a cultural program of any kind, the civil rights strategy proposes to integrate Negroes into the culture that already surrounds them.

Now the real objection to this is not the one so often
[127]
given by the advocates of black power—that black people have nothing to gain from integrating into a culture dominated by materialistic values. Since most black people have already absorbed those values, this is a frivolous argument—especially so since it seems to imply that there is something virtuous and ennobling about poverty. What the assimilationist argument does overlook is that the civil rights movement owes its existence, in part, to the rise of a Negro subculture in the South, and that the absence of a comparable culture in the ghetto changes the whole character of the race problem in the North. American history seems to show that a group cannot achieve "integration"—that is, equality—without first developing institutions which express and create a sense of its own distinctiveness. That is why black nationalism, which attempts to fill the cultural vacuum of the ghetto, has had a continuing attraction for Negroes, and why, even during the period of its eclipse in the thirties, forties, and fifties, nationalism won converts among the most despised and degraded elements of the Negro community in spite of the low repute in which it was held by Negro leaders.

...

[134] Black power proposes, or seems to propose, that Negroes do for themselves what other ethnic groups, faced with somewhat similar conditions, have done—advance themselves not as individuals but as groups conscious of their own special interests and identity. A comparison with other ethnic minorities in American history—the Irish, for example—is instructive. When the Irish first came to Boston, they were "the lowest of the low, lower than the Germans or Scandinavians or Jews, or even the Negroes, who had come earlier and edged a bit up the economic ladder. Irishmen were lucky if they could find part-time work on the dock or in the ditch; Irish girls hoped at best to get work as maids in hotels or in big houses on Beacon Hill. . . . The people from Ireland were a proletariat without machine
[135]
skills or capital. Their sections of Boston were the land of the shanty Irish." [Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile] ...the Irish were also the target of vicious ethnic stereotypes. ... Moreover, the Irish were papists and hence presumably loyal to a foreign power. Nor did they speak good English.

In the face of these disadvantages, how did the Irish escape from their shanty-town ghettos? The myth is: by individual initiative, which demonstrated ability, they overcame barriers to advancement through the usual avenues of social mobility, which eventually led to their assimilation. These commonly held assumptions about the nature of American mobility can easily be tested against a familiar case, that of the Kennedy family, which of all examples ought most nearly fit the myth of America as a society open to individual initiative.

As cogent and suggestive as the ensuing passage is, this basis for elevating a single high-profile example to the status of representativeness is quite flimsy! No particular event ought to most nearly fit any given thesis!

The career of Joseph Kennedy, founder of the present dynasty, does conform in many ways to the class entrepreneurial pattern. What is instructive about Kennedy, however, is that even by the 1920s entrepreneurial opportunities existed only on the fringes of American capitalism. By that time the normal avenue of business advancement lay in the corporate bureaucracies—and these, it is important to realize, had become increasingly the last refuge of the old American elite. As one historian has noted: "Once it became clear that political control of the
[136]
big cities would inevitably pass into the hands of the immigrant groups, Big Business came to be regarded as a new preserve of the older Americans, where their status and influence could continue to flourish." The result was that "the social patterns established within Big Business bureaucracies at the turn of the century helped to close off key areas of the economy and to keep them virtually impenetrable to even the most gifted outsiders. For one without the background, etiquette, and personal appearance to 'fit in,' and without sponsors to smooth his way, a career in one of the major corporations would be more like scaling a high wall than climbing a ladder." [Rischin, The American Gospel of Success (1965)] The corporate bureaucracies readily adapted themselves to the purposes of ethnic exclusiveness because success in the bureaucratic career, by its very nature, depends on the accumulation of educational advantages, on family connections, and on other signs of social status. A study of 185 business leaders between 1901 and 1910 shows that while fourteen per cent had either founded or bought the business in which they now occupied the top positions, twenty-seven percent inherited their positions, while all the rest "climbed the bureaucratic ladder, not infrequently, of course, after their family status, education, and other social endowments helped them get the proper start." [Miller, Men in Business (1952)]

Endowed with several advantages at the start of his career, notably a Harvard degree and marriage into the powerful Fitzgerald family, Joseph Kennedy was president of a
[137]
small bank in Boston by the time he was twenty-five. "But many a Yankee banker still could not wholly accept Joe Kennedy. It was alright for Irishmen to run little East Boston banks and handle immigrants' remittances, they felt, but not to crash the central citadels of finance. So Kennedy, disgusted, began to operate more and more in New York and Hollywood." [Burns] His successful speculations on the West Coast, followed by even more spectacular operations on Wall Street in the early twenties, testified to Kennedy's financial genius but also to the degree to which the normal bureaucratic career was closed off to ethnic minorities. It is highly misleading to think that in American history those minorities have escaped poverty through the dominant institutions of the surrounding culture. On the contrary, they have succeeded in marginal institutions, a fact that incidentally reveals one dimension of the present race problem—the decline of entrepreneurial capitalism in a mature industrial economy.

Entrepreneurial opportunities, however, are only part of the story, even in the case of earlier minorities. Those opportunities could not have been exploited if groups like the Irish had not already achieved a strong sense of ethnic solidarity. In the case of the Kennedy family, it is important to note that Joseph Kennedy's career rested solidly on the achievement of the previous generation. Both his own fa-
[138]
ther, Patick J. Kennedy, and his father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, had already "advanced far up into the ranks of middle-class respectability" by selling things to other Irishmen (liquor, for instance) and by capturing their votes, "thus stor[ing] up influence to trade in the political arena." Both saloon-keeping and machine politics represented a form of collective self-help in the Irish ghetto; they depended on a sense of Irish solidarity. In effect, the Irish created their own institutions parallel to the official institutions of American society: the saloon, the Irish-American church, above all the political machine. "Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community," Oscar Handlin writes, "the Irish felt obligated to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group . . . became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity." The Irish did not advance as individuals, they advanced as a group, drastically altering the structure of urban politics in the process. Nor did they lose their ethnic character through assimilation into American life; politicians recognize this when they cater to the "Irish vote." As Harold Cruse observes, "Every four years the great fiction of the assimilated American (white and/or Protestant) ideal is put aside to deal with the pluralistic reality of the hyphenated-American vote." The rest of the time this reality is swallowed up in the rhetoric of opportunity and individualism.

The assertion that "the individual in America has few
[139]
rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another" is borne out not only in the case of the Irish but even more clearly in the case of the Jews. Like the Irish, the Jews escaped extreme poverty through the labor movement or through marginal businesses or professions serving a largely Jewish clientele. To a degree that is seldom recognized, Jewish life in America is self-contained. According to a recent study of Jews in a midwestern city, the Jews after three generations still live in "separate but equal" communities "that endure in spite of all sociological predictions to the contrary." [Kramer and Levantman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (1961)] Even Jews who have achieved wealth and status...are "understandably reluctant to sever their remaining ties... The community, and their special relation to it, is, after all, the precondition of their status."

In spite of the decline of overt anti-Semitism, the Jews in this city (Minneapolis?) and elsewhere—except for those in the intellectual community, which is exempt from these generalizations—still live in their own separate and self-sufficient community. They derive important advantages from separation of which Jewish businessmen, for example, are well aware.

"In a period of growing oligopoly, Jewish businesses have survived in the shelter of ethnic segregation. Because Jews are excluded from the dominant business community,
[140]
they are beyond the reach of its informal sanctions. They are 'outsiders,' marginal retail traders, who have no reason to be susceptible to the opinion of gentile colleagues who do not accept them in any case."

Thus Jewish businessmen continue to prefer a flexible price system to fixed prices, thereby performing "considerable economic service as middlemen for inflation-conscious consumers and overstocked manufacturers, at the cost, however, of their social honor in the larger business community." Similarly Jewish doctors serve Jewish patients, Jewish lawyers predominantly Jewish clients. "Exploiting their marginality for their own advantage has been the one means of economic survival consistently available to Jews." One of the marginal opportunities open to Jewish entrepreneurs, it should be added, is the black ghetto. Thus in spite of their services to the civil rights movement, Jews now find themselves singled out as special objects of the wrath of black militants. "It is now widely accepted as an incontrovertible fact that . . . there exists a pronounced anti-Jewish sentiment among the Negro masses in this country."

The history of American ethnic-group pluralism does not support the integrationist assumption that individual initiative has been the traditional mechanism of social mobility. Those who urge Negroes to advance themselves through the "regular" channels of personal mobility ignore the experience of earlier minorities, the relevance of which is obscured both by the tendency to view the history of immigration as a triumph of assimilation and by the individualist
[141]
premises which persistently blind Americans to the importance of collective phenomena and therefore to most of history.

...

[141, footnote] Recent studies do not seem to bear out [the] assertion that "immigrants made sacrifices of present consumption to capitalize their children." One of the interesting conclusions to emerge from Stefan Thernstrom's study of Irish Workers...is that the Irish often achieved "property mobility" at the expense of their children, or at least the expense of "the forms of mobility which required education."

Lasch—The Artists' Road to Serfdom

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left (1969)

Mike Gold, writing in The Liberator in February 1921, issued a call for "proletarian art" in which he attacked The Seven Arts, one of the voices of the Greenwich Village awakening. No "great lusty tree," Gold wrote, could grow in "that hot-house air." Subsequent articles by Gold denounced "the mad solitary priests of Dada" and other purveyors of sterile pessimism and "pure art." "Since 1912," Aaron [Writers on the Left, p. 89] writes, "a polarizing process had been under way which divided the Bohemian from the revolutionary" and forced writers to choose between art and radical politics. But this polarization had not become critical so long as American radicalism remained a broad and inclusive movement devoted, among other things, to creating a better understanding of life under the existing order—something art is supremely equipped to do. Only when the new left wing shattered the Socialist party and substituted for long-term efforts to revolutionize American consciousness a mystique of immediate revolution did art come to be suspect in radical circles. The role of artists then came to be defined as one of dutiful servants of the "revolution"—that is, propagandists for mass culture against the stale and artificial culture of the literati, as it had come to be regarded.
(p. 50)

So, perhaps the conceit to creating a better understanding of life actually protected art and artists against mere servitude to revolutionary pretensions. Really there is a vulgar functionalism at the heart of both of these imperatives; but there is at least something to be said for being one's own propagandist rather than somebody else's.

Partisan Review represented the most ambitious attempt since prewar Village days to fuse radical politics and cultural modernism. From the beginning it tried "to put forward the best writing then produced by the Left," in Rahv's words. Attracted to communism for the same reasons that attracted other radicals of the thirties, because it seemed to represent the best hope of social change, Rahv and Phillips had also been strongly influenced by Eliot, Joyce, James, Lawrence, Yeats, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and other architects of the modernist tradition, and by Edmund Wilson's defense of that tradition in Axel's Castle, published in 1931. Somewhat disconcerted by the fact that much of this literature had been written by political reactionaries, they nevertheless recognized in the modern European classics a powerful statement of the terror and pain of contemporary existence—a revelation, they rightly perceived, that was of infinitely greater value to radicals than the shallow "realism" preached by V.F. Calverton, Mike Gold, and in slightly different form by Granville Hicks. "It is true," Gold sadly observed, "that the intellectual brings into the movement many of his bourgeois hangovers, but they can be controlled." Rahv and Phillips, however, as James Gilbert writes, were not prepared "to bury the culture of the past."
(p. 53)

Lasch—The New Chieftains

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)

[27] The United States of the mid-twentieth century might be better described as an empire than as a community. The state deals with domestic minorities through their official representatives, in much the same way that it deals with client states abroad. These representatives,
[28]
native chieftains, enjoy various pleasures and privileges; they themselves, as a result, are sufficiently integrated into the imperial order to perceive their function to be not so much to present the view of their constituents as to mediate between them and the state—by no means the same thing. Their interests lie in resolving and preventing conflicts rather than in carrying them to a successful conclusion. Their constituents, in turn, sustain these leaders in office not because their leadership is particulatly effective in satisfying the material needs of the people they are supposed to represent (although in some cases undeniable improvements have taken place) but because identification with these spokesmen, who have risen from the ranks of a minority to prominence and prestige, provides vicarious and symbolic satisfactions;

...and nowadays this is not just the result of a certain state of affairs but has in fact become its own justification, via the social psychology of identification with role models who look like you...

and because, in any case, the hierarchical and undemocratic structure of the organizations in question effectively prevents changes in leadership. ...

Even if the system of interest-group politics functioned as it is supposed to function, even if the official minority spokesmen really represented the interests of their constituents, those interests have come to be so narrowly defined, as we have seen, that they imply very little criticism of the status quo. No matter how one looks at the matter, the conclusion is inescapable that constituted leaders of social, cultural, and ethnic minorities have ceased to function as critics of American society.

McLuhan—Wherein the Effect for the Players Themselves is Lost

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio, and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry.

(p. 292)

McLuhan—The Ground Rules

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

Stereo sound...is "all-around" or "wrap-around" sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point in accordance with the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view. The hi-fi changeover was really for music what cubism had been for printing, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in depth, as TV is the visual in depth.

(p. 282)