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queenlua"If social cohesion is impossible without coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion, are we not in an endless cycle of social conflict?" -Reinhold NiebuhrThe True and Only Heaven is a great rambling shaggy dog story at its heart, though instead of being told by some bearded dude over a campfire, it's told by an academic near the end of his life, just kinda going on about The Entirety Of American Populist History, with extensive footnotes and citations.
There is a thesis here, though it's erratically argued. Lasch wants to call attention to what's good and praiseworthy in the ethic and worldview of populism—the worldview, broadly speaking, of the lower-middle class, the petit bourgeoisie, the small-time farmers and independent craftsmen and business owners that loom so large in the American consciousness. He doesn't deny the characteristic vices of this class—how their feelings too often manifest as or get entangled with racism, tribalism, and insularity. But their virtues, he argues, are too often overlooked or trammeled down by the progressive mainstream: their egalitarianism,their respect for workmanship, their respect for loyalty, and their struggle against resentment. In this respect his outlook's very similar to James C. Scott's, in Two Cheers for Anarchism:
It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoisie. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoisie rarely, if ever, speaks for itself. And while capitalists gather in industrial associations and at the Davos World Economic Forum, and the working class congregates at trade union congresses, the one and only time, as near as I can tell, the petite bourgeoisie gathered in its own name was at the 1901 First International Congress of the Petite Bourgeoisie in Brussels. There was no Second Congress.(first h/t there)
Why take up the cudgels for a class that remains relatively anonymous and is surely not, in the Marxist parlance, a class für sich? There are several reasons. First and most important, I believe that the petite bourgeoisie and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies. Autonomy and freedom are, along with mutuality, at the center of an anarchist sensibility. […]
Finally, given any reasonably generous definition of its class boundaries, the petite bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world. If we include not only the iconic shopkeepers but also smallholding peasants, artisans, peddlers, small independent professionals, and small traders whose only property might be a pushcart or a rowboat and a few tools, the class balloons. If we include the periphery of the class, say, tenant farmers, ploughmen with a draft animal, rag pickers, and itinerant market women, where autonomy is more severely constrained and the property small indeed, the class grows even larger. What they all have in common, however, and what distinguishes them from both the clerk and the factory worker is that they are largely in control of their working day and work with little or no supervision. One may legitimately view this as a very dubious autonomy when it means, as a practical matter, working eighteen hours a day for a remuneration that may only provide a bare subsistence. And yet it is clear, as we shall see, that the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world’s population.
And by "progressive mainstream," Lasch means something like neoliberalism. This guy is not bleating hollowly for some return to "family values", absent more serious and radical changes to how society as a whole is structured—he targets Ronald Reagan for a particularly brutal savaging, arguing that the dude exploited the reactionary sentiments of the middle class and duped them into thinking there can be some return to the past with the mere power of "positive thinking," all while he continued to pursue the very policies that further weakened their position against relentless, rapacious corporations. Lasch spends more time critiquing the left than the right, but he's clearly no friend of neocons or big-business republicans.
He's got particular contempt for the "Pollyannaish" tendencies of progressivism—a tendency toward a blind, stupid optimism that things will work out for the best, and a belief that things always get better, paired with utter despair when that proud march toward progress receives any comeuppance whatsoever. (The comparisons to the tenor of the Obama campaign, and the subsequent despair after the Trump election, kinda write themselves.) (it also kind of reminded me of a particular popular-on-Twitter line that's been weirding me out lately: people who say stuff like "I'm not going to have children because I don't want to bring them up in a world that's so obviously going to shit." Like, obviously I'd never encourage anyone to have kids if they don't want them, and I suspect a lot of people saying this also have a half-dozen other, more private reasons for why they don't want to have kids. But if that's the sole thing stopping you? Man, that just strikes me as intuitively so strange and uncomfortable. People have been alive during absolutely awful eras of history, thousands of years of incredibly precarious existence, no modern medicine and no hope of rising out of the peasantry and all that, and yet... they mostly seemed to find life worth it. I'm a fan of progress because I think it represents a better way to live, but it's not the thing that makes being alive good and valuable and important. Life is its own reason. There is something about this particular flavor of fatalism that feels strange to me, and Lasch is right to press on it—advocating hope instead of optimism, a belief that things can be good and valuable that also acknowledges how rotten they actually are.)
But most importantly, way more important than the particulars of Lasch's thesis: this is a book where a dude spends an entire chapter getting Big Mad that people don't like his boy Ralph Waldo Emerson for the right reasons (complete with an extensive close reading of one of Emerson's late, less-famous essays), and also spends a different chapter untangling the writing of Georges Sorel, a syndicalist dude whose writing is apparently so controversial and muddled that he has to spend half the chapter going "ok let me address all the reasons Sorel sucks because he does suck," and also gets SUPER Big Mad about this one chapter Adorno wrote in this one book this one time.
If you are like me and love the "grumpy academic bangs on about his favorite hobbyhorses" genre, this book will deliver in spades, haha.
Parts of the book that I particularly enjoyed (besides the bits I already mentioned):
* There's a lengthy treatment of Calvinist theology that, for the first time in my life, gave me some appreciation for Calvinism and the Great Awakening ethos generally. In Lasch's reading, these preachers were not banging out these fire-and-brimstone, repent-or-be-damned sermons for the sake of terrifying people into their pews, or to relish the defeat of their enemies, or anything like that. Rather, it was to emphasize everyone's powerlessness against God's wrath, and that only by His grace can someone be saved. It was a reaction against the preening, sophisticated, urban Unitarians, who seemed to resent the idea of being put in a congregation alongside the "real" sinners, and believed strongly in the primacy of good works as part of the road to salvation. Read in that light, those fire-and-brimstone preachers seem to offer a fitting reminder that fate/destiny/God has the final say, and can humble any of us at any time, no matter how refined or fancy you are.
* His section on William James (my dude! my guy!) covers some writing of his I wasn't familiar with, where he frets over the lack of opportunities for heroism and adventure for young people in his time, and advocates something like the "moral equivalent of war"—some kind of peacetime civil service-type-thing that places high demands on enlistees in terms of physical exertion and challenge. It was surprising to me just how old this idea of some kind of mandatory civil service has been bouncing around, and how strong a grip it has on a certain part of the American imagination (it clearly presaged the New Deal's CCC, for instance). I don't particularly relate—I'm a basically pleasant bureaucrat and I'm fine with that; I don't feel a burning need for heroism, just work with doing—but if anyone could make the case for it, it's James. God his writing is always such a delight to read.
* Lasch's coverage of the messy, lively leftist politics of late-1800s early-1900s America (with particular attention to the Populist Party is delightful—I wish it'd gone more in-depth (and really I should read/know more about this era in general), but the tensions between the guild socialists vs the populists vs the social democrats vs the wobblies vs [insert other groups here] were really interested to see illustrated, really cool to see how their coalitions formed or fell apart. Lasch argues that the genuinely populist faction was defeated when the "fell" for the Free Silver Movement, which was bad economics and an electoral loser, and efforts to paint all this movement on the left as the mere precursor of 1920s progressivism is really just eliding that something was actually lost here:
"Are there no calamities in history?” Brownson asked in 1843. “Nothing tragic? May we never weep over the defeated? … Must we always desert the cause as soon as fortune forsakes it, and bind ourselves to the cause which is in the ascendant, and hurrah in the crowd that throw up their caps in honor of the conqueror?” In our day as in Brownson’s, “historical optimism,” as he called it, prevails. We love to side with the winning side.And, generally speaking, the dude feels impressively prescient. The book came out in 1991, but basically everything it touches on feels like it came out of a headline this week—he talks about disinformation campaigns ("if 'disinformation', as it later came to be called, proved eminently marketable, it was because information itself was in pitifully short supply"), the uncomfortable fact that many civil rights victories were achieved via judicial order rather than popular vote, which renders them precarious (dude basically anticipated Dobbs here, and makes a really solid case that you've got to have actual popular support or any decision of this type is going to eventually fall), the shallowness of political debate between the two big parties (without any actual solutions at hand, they best they can do is "exchange accusations of fascism and socialism"), etc... I don't have any firsthand knowledge what The Discourse TM looked like in 1991 but I'm pretty sure most mainstream columnists and such were not thinking on this dude's level.
It's not all bangers, of course.
His analysis of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, is rather mixed. I appreciate his refusal to let MLK only stand for just one thing, or to simplify the arc of the man's thought. And I felt a particular fondness for his treatment of MLK's seminary days—look, I'm a nerd, I love anything that's like "I went and read a bunch of MLK's theology papers and damn let me tell you about his cool analysis of Niebuhr" is my kind of shit, okay.
But his effort to slot MLK's story into an argument for what populism could be and achieve feels hamfisted. He's correct that the techniques used to mobilize resistance in the south had church, community, and the sensibilities of the black middle class as their backbone. The tight network of black churches there were crucial for coordinating boycott/protest actions & raising funds to keep them going. He's correct that those same techniques didn't work when MLK went north, in part because those same institutions didn't exist, their relative poverty was so much greater, and so on.
But his chapter tries mightily to convince you that respectability / appeal to the moral conscience of the common white man / lack of resentment politics is the core thing that mattered for overcoming segregation in the south, and man, I just don't buy it. He even brushes against this, briefly, when he discusses how canny the bus boycott organizers were, how they would patiently explain to younger radicals that their preoccupation with national press coverage was not simping but strategy: you don't have the collapse of segregation in the US south without mass media, without public shaming from elite progressives outside the south. But this implies something uncomfortable for Lasch's thesis—implies that this victory came not solely due to their own power and moral authority, but by progressives and populists working together in uneasy tandem—so it's brushed aside rather than dwelled upon.
And, yeah, there's also portions where you just wanna tell this Lasch guy to get a damn grip. There's a memorable bit from the prologue, where he laments that "none of my own children, having been raised not for upward mobility but for honest work, could reasonably hope for any conventional kind of success." So I looked up his kids and... idk, man, she looks pretty damn successful!
Or when he's taking up his defense of the anti-busing movement, and he opens with a quote from... someone bitching about the existence of bilingual signs in the neighborhood... and man, who gives a shit. Bitching about bilingual signs always feels to me like complaining about having to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk when you're driving a car—like, people have a right to cross the road, sorry if this very mildly inconveniences you. And when he further goes on about how anti-busing folks wanted to preserve neighborhood character and such... I mean, more obvious objections aside, it was striking to me how much this could be generalized to modern NIMBYist policy, which has been a disaster for the very things Lasch claims to care about. He's distressed that young people have no path to homeownership, that they seem to become culturally desiccated without any access to adventure or daring or worthy opportunities, and buddy I can tell you for sure there is nothing more culturally desiccated than some bay area suburb where no one's been allowed to build a damn apartment for four decades.
So, y'know. There's parts like that :P
* and also there's a lot of little points he kind of throws out with examining them further... like there's a bit where he argues part of the reason why war is more bloodthirsty and vicious than it was in the past is because liberalism erodes the sense of honor/glory/worthy-enemies, or something, and it's like... what??? both of those points need some supporting evidence, and also, i kind of think you can point at the raw destructive power of modern technology as a way more parsimonious explanation for this allegedly phenomenon, rather than some sort of weird loss of valor? but he only spends like a paragraph on this so it doesn't even make sense to argue against it, like, he's not even really making the case, just shooting out some vibes lol
I had two big takeaways from the book, though I've no idea if they're the takeaways Lasch intended or not:
* To steal a description I heard on the Know Your Enemy podcast (which is what got me curious enough to pick up the book in the first place): for progressives, I think the book serves to illustrate that Bad Things are often parasitic on Good Things. I could imagine a reader of this book who's just willing to bite the bullet entire—you could say that these virtues are outdated and outmoded, and liberalism is uncomplicatedly better, or else push for a vision of worker control (as opposed to independent producerism). But assuming you've still got some attachment to some of the values Lasch describes, it's worth taking his critiques seriously, rather than dismissing all complaints as reactionary and such.
And I think the book does a good job of making the case without excusing ugliness or racism or tribalism. Like, there was this whole weird genre of journalism right after the 2016 election, right, where fancy reporters would fly into random shitty Rust Belt towns and try to get at ~what real America thinks~ and ~why did they vote this way~ and ~what's the matter with Kansas~ and such, and the coverage was so often a weird mixture of condescension and simping? Like, it was either "uwu we should listen to these poor people uwu" or "well, guess we need to understand what these morons are banging on a bit, since they're relevant in elections now," and neither of those lenses seemed particularly, uh, productive. Lasch has a very specific vision of the good, and he's making the best case possible for it. That's a different approach—one that may or may not persuade, but at least it's trying to persuade openly and honestly, rather than leaning on appeals to pathos and such.
* I think the irrevocable tension between populist and progressive values manifests in all kinds of weird behaviors, particularly in people who moved from e.g. a lower-middle-class background to an upper-class background over the course of their lifetime, and it makes a lot more sense with this framing in mind.
I found myself dwelling over this interview with a working-class housekeeper for a while, because—I recognized a lot of the housekeeper's attitudes in my own mother. She's complained before that my father's family is weirdly conflict-averse, that she doesn't understand why they tiptoe around things when they could just yell about something and be done with it—and, yeah, that's absolutely a difference between the two families, and they have the different backgrounds you'd expect. And my mom was also deferential to various authority figures, especially teachers, in a way that cynical-teenage-me found absurd and frustrating. Imagine my shock when I wound up going to a Very Fancy College, and I found out my peers there mostly had parents who had no such deference—who had no problem pulling their kids out of class if they weren't learning anything, who had no problem calling an obviously-incompetent teacher a moron, who generally had no problem working the system to ensure their kids had the best possible opportunities. I mean I didn't even know you could do the kinds of things they did; they were all things that my mom would've told me were, y'know, putting on airs and getting too big for their britches.
(But my mom had absorbed enough of liberal culture that, for instance, she didn't think it absurd of me at all to apply to said excessively fancy college, and she was an advocate of my careerist tendencies in other ways... like I said, the tension kind of manifests in a muddle sometimes. Made me think about things a little differently, anyway.)
There's also a bunch of other interesting lil' bits that seem worth mentioning:
* He does a really interesting treatment of nostalgia ("If the idea of progress has the curious effect of weakening the inclination to make intelligent provision for the future, nostalgia, its ideological twin, undermines the ability to make intelligent use of the past."), one that reminded me quite a bit of some of the themes in The Charisma Machine.
* He does a brief treatment of the emergence of the theory of generations in the 1920s, which will be immensely satisfying to anyone else who gets twitchy whenever people start saying "gen X is like this" or "boomers are like that" or whatever. (Unlikely to persuade anyone who isn't already twitchy, though. That's a goofy thing about this book in particular; sometimes he'll bang on about a very specific point for two chapters, in such a way that exhaustively addresses all possible objections, and sometimes he's like "lol let me just eloquently dunk for a couple paragraphs and call it a day," and the length of how long he goes on has almost NO correlation to how important the point is, lol)
* He covers John Maynard Keynes's life briefly, and like, I need to read a proper biography of the guy at some point, but he sounds like SUCH a piece of work haha. An insufferably snobby guy, he abhorred communism not because he thought it was a bad or unjust system but just because exalting the proles is bad in general... as Lasch puts it, ""no other career exemplified the contradictory implications of progressive ideology quite so clearly: its assault on convention and its retrospective defense of convention; its theoretical commitment to democracy and its emotional aversion to democracy; its eagerness to assure the widest possible distribution of the good things in life and its deep-seated suspicion that most people were incapable of appreciated them." (would absolutely go to Keynes's parties tho, those sound lit)
* Lasch truly loathes the puffery and Camelot-ness associated with the Kennedy administration, with such intensity that I feel like I've gotta be missing something. I should read a biography covering that time period or something
* His meditations on the place of the western frontier in the American imagination (choice excerpt) reminded me a lot of this Justin EH Smith essay, which is good I swear (ignore the dumb headline lol) and covers similar themes
* apparently Emerson was a huge baby when it came to public debate and public speaking, and the handful of times he did it, he inevitably managed to stick his foot in it—in particular, apparently he made everyone Big Mad when he gave some address at Harvard talking about how desiccated/fake/shallow/secular the fashionable Unitarian faith had become... and everyone in the audience was like, how DARE you, i am SO christian you don't even know, and emerson was like... bro what??? i thought we all knew this was the case??? i'm just saying the quiet part loud??? and then he pouted and wrote pissy letters to Thomas Carlyle about the whole thing lol. he's just like me fr...
* also i got some "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" vibes from this other emerson bit: "Virtue has to be distinguished, Emerson says, from 'what is commonly called choice.' It issues less from a conscious decision than from the 'choice of my constitution.' It is therefore 'impulsive and spontaneous' [...]"
* There's an examination of John Dewey's vision for the role of public education which reminded me a lot of Freire, actually, and I googled and apparently Freire was in fact a Dewey fan—very cool lil intersection
* i really liked this (decidedly critical) nyrb review of the book, though it's paywalled, boo. hmu if you want the text
Finally, it should be said that Lasch is fantastic at dishing out sick burns. Here's some of my faves:
- "[Thornton] Wilder's famous play[, Our Town]—a triumph of sorts, in its absolute exclusion of any feeling except that of nostalgia—illustrates another convention of the small-town genre..."
- "Thus in 1950, Life magazine—a publication best understood not as a news magazine but as a fashion magazine, one of the first to show how news could be sold as a form of fashion—published a mid-century issue..."
- "This discovery (the novelty of which Lynd exaggerated, being ignorant, like most sociologists, of the history of his own discipline) made it necessary..."
- "The test of 'genuine liberalism' had become so rigorous that only a civilized minority could pass it—a minority of one, if Adorno was taken as the final arbiter."
- The inspirational rhetoric packed into these sentences—"black and white together," "class solidarity," "the thirties," "working-class insurgency," "explosive convergence"—indicates that Ehrenreich has left the land of the living for a visit to the Marxist mortuary, where old revolutionary slogans lie beautifully embalmed."
so yeah that's the book!
check out the tag on my tumblr if you want the highlights/quotes/etc i noted while i was reading the thing~
misc things you reminded me of
Date: 2022-12-13 12:11 am (UTC)Obliquely reminds me of the appeal of cop and medical TV shows, and obliquely of this piece on Trek and The West Wing...
And there is like a page in Jacques Pepin's autobiography "The Apprentice" (I think) about the high-handedness of some of the folks in the incoming Kennedy administration. It's an entertaining and edifying read overall and nearly none of it is about national US politics but there is that one page.
Re: misc things you reminded me of
Date: 2022-12-20 12:37 am (UTC)(and that blog post was super-interesting. star trek / west wing similarity never struck me before, but in hindsight totally makes sense haha)
Re: misc things you reminded me of
Date: 2022-12-21 01:22 am (UTC)