[xiv]...another side of the picture, which qualifies that impression ["that the modern world faces a future without hope"] and suggests that western civilization may yet generate the moral resources to transcend its present crisis. ......
[xv]
What looks to political scientists like voter apathy may represent a healthy skepticism... A distrust of experts may help to diminish the dependence on experts that has crippled the capacity for self-help.
[xv] The inadequacy of solutions dictated from above now forces people to invent solutions from below.Quite a provocative thesis actually, even/especially now. Do even today's most vocal anti-experts grant the potential for "hope" (or even "healthy skepticism"?!) so readily and explicitly?
[xv] ...a way of life that is dying—the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation of the self.My note says:
Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any criticism of contemporary
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society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.
... Many radicals still direct their indignation against the authoritarian family, [etc., etc., ...] and other foundations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself. These radicals do not see that the "authoritarian personality" no longer represents the prototype of the economic man. Economic man himself has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism.
Her preoccupation with the state of her psychic health, together with her dependence on others for a sense of selfhood, distinguish Susan Stern [in her memoir of the Weathermen] from the kind of religious seeker who turns to politics to find a secularized salvation. She needed to establish an identity, not to submerge her identity in a larger cause.Here is a linchpin, it would seem, of the broader narcissism thesis. Certainly seems applicable in many areas of life whether or not narcissism per se is involved. The choice of a sixties activist as an illustration is, nonetheless, probably not an innocent/unmotivated choice and probably doesn't do justice to the earnest beliefs of a great many.
[10] For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.
[15] [Jerry] Rubin claims that the "inner revolution of the seventies" grew out of an awareness that the radicalism of the sixties had failed to address itself to the quality of personal life or to cultural questions, in the mistaken belief that questions of "personal growth," in his words, could wait "until after the revolution." This accusation contains a certain amount of truth. ...Yep. Anytime you're told something seemingly important can wait, expect the wait to be interminable.
[16] Yet...in those years, there was a growing recognition [by the New Left and others]...that personal crisis on the scale it has now assumed represents a political issue in its own right, and that a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish...Yep.
[Subheading:]Confession and Anticonfession The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs allWell, "indispensible" might be a bit strong even for my tastes, but the point stands that a detached and...attached (?) standpoint have vastly different implications for artist and audience alike. We would do well to try to understand those implications as best we can, all while granting that these kinds of implications are not, I don't think, usually having anything at all to do with what motivates or, more sentimentally speaking, what inspires either artists or audiences.
[17]
through American culture; but the best work in this vein attempts, precisely through self-disclosure, to achieve a critical distance from the self and to gain insight into the historical forces, reproduced in psychological form, that have made the very concept of selfhood increasingly problematic. The mere act of writing already presupposes a certain detachment from the self; and the objectification of one's own experience, as psychiatric studies of narcissism have shown, makes it possible for "the deep sources of grandiosity and exhibitionism—after being appropriately aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized—[to] find access" to reality. [Kohut, The Analysis of the Self] Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicated that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensible to art.
Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the private lives of famous people. In Mailer's works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer's own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity....
[19] The confessional form allows an honest writer like Exley or Zweig to provide a harrowing account of the spiritual desolation of our times, but it also allows lazy writer to indulge in "the kind of immodest self-revelation which ultimately hides more than it admits." The narcissist's pseudo-insight into his own condition, usually expressed in psychiatric clichés, serves as a means of deflecting criticism and disclaiming responsibility for his actions....
[20] When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes to The Waste Land, he became one of the first poets to call attention to his own imaginative transformation of reality, but he did so in order to expand the reader's awareness of allusions and to create a deeper imaginative resonance—not, as in these more recent instances, to demolish the reader's confidence in the author.
My note says:
—"When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes..."
he was...a century behind Berlioz, who was at least that far ahead of the aforementioned "confessional" writers.
—"to expand the reader's awareness of allusions"
But it doesn't work that way. Just as he who laughs last doesn't get the joke, so he who must read about the allusions in the "reference notes" has permanently missed the boat.
Already with Berlioz, nearly a century before The Waste Land, we are already thoroughly in "confessional" territory, and it would be just fine to apply the contemporary critique retroactively. Don't excuse the early adopters just because they have since become classics.
[20, cont.] The unreliable, partially blinded narrator is another literary device of long standing. In the past, however, novelists often used it in order to achieve and ironic juxtaposition of the narrator's flawed perception of events with the author's own more accurate view. Today, the convention of a fictionalized narrator has been adandoned in most experimental writing. The author now speaks in his own voice but warns the reader that his version of the truth is not to be trusted. ... Having called attention to himself as a performer, the writer undermines the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. By fogging over the distinction between truth and illusion, he asks the reader to believe his story not because it rings true or even because he claims it is true, but simply because he claims it conceivably might be true—at least in part—if the reader chose to believe him. The writer waives the right to be taken seriously, at the same time escaping the responsibilities that go with being taken seriously. He asks the reader not for understanding but for indulgence. In accepting the writer's confession that he lied, the reader in turn waives the right to hold the writer accountable for the truth of his report. The writer thus attempts to charm the reader instead of trying to convince him, counting on the titillation provided by pseudo-revelation to hold the reader's interest.It occurs here that Lasch is on solider ground in telling us what such work does than where it came from. e.g. here, whether this is actually a matter of "shoring up" seems tough to say for sure, though there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to that effect.
Undertaken in the evasive mood, confessional writing degenerates into anticonfession. The record of the inner life becomes and unintentional parody of inner life. A literary genre that appears to affirm inwardness actually tells us that inner life is precisely what can no longer be taken seriously. This explains why [Woody] Allen, [Donald] Barthelme, and other satirists so often parody, as a deliberate literary strategy, the confessional style of an earlier time, when the artist
[21]
bared his inner struggles in the belief that they represented a microcosm of the larger world. ... The writer no longer sees life reflected in his own mind. Just the opposite: he sees the world, even in its emptiness, as a mirror of himself. In recording his "inner" experiences, he seeks not to provide an objective account of a representative piece of reality but to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self.
[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."
[43] The narcissist comes to the attention of psychiatrists for some of the same reasons that he rises to positions of prominence not only in awareness movements and other cults but in business corporations, political organizations, and government bureaucracies. For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in
[44]
bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem. ... The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of intricacies serves him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than "visibility," "momentum," and a winning record. As the "organization man" gives way to the bureaucratic "gamesman"—the "loyalty era" of American business to the age of the "executive success game"—the narcissist comes into its own.
[49] Our overorganized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes modeled his state of nature....
[49] The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain.File with the fight-or-flight post. Is this ever such a cut-and-dried case of "promot[ing]" a very specific "view of life"? Or, mustn't it be granted that individuals will process/respond differently even to such a supposedly rigid "normative concept" as the developmental schedule?
[50] Narcissism appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring our narcissistic traits that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone. ... The modern parent's attempt to make children feel loved and wanted does not conceal and underlying coolness—the remoteness of those who have little to pass on to the next generation and who in any case give priority to their own self-fulfillment. The combination of emotional detachment with attempts to convince a child of his favored position in the family is a good prescription for narcissistic personality disorder.
[66] The Apotheosis of Individualism The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties—that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and "low-pressure socialibility"—appears in retrospect to have been premature. ... It is true that "a present-oriented hedonism" [Riesman]...has replaced the work ethic... But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative...; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. ... It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone.
[74] The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, "You've come a long way, baby," and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. ... The "education" of the masses...emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority...only to subject them to a new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.If the first part seems harsh on women, perhaps recall that Lasch, in such terms, does not really favor the "emancipation" of anyone in particular, at least not specifically from the communitarian ethic. In any case, the synchrony between "emancipation" and consumerism is undeniable, whether or not either the patriarchs or the admen have conspired to make it so.
[74, footnote to above] Family life according to Nystrom, inherently tends to promote custom, the antithesis of fashion. ... On the other hand, "the conflict of youth with convention" encourages rapid changes in dress and styles of consumption. In general, Nystrom argues, rural life, illiteracy, social hierarchy, and inertia support custom, whereas fashion—the culture of consumption—derives from the progressive forces at work in modern society: public education, free speech, circulation of ideas and information, the "philosophy of progress."
[74]Truth and Credibility The role of the mass media in the manipulation of public opinion has received a great deal of anguished attention. Much of this commentary assumes that the problem is to prevent the circulation of obvious untruths; whereas it is evident, as the more penetrating critics of mass culture have pointed out, that the rise of mass media makes the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information.
...
[76] In propaganda as in advertising, the important consideration is not whether information accurately describes an objective situation but whether it sounds true. It sometimes becomes necessary to suppress information even when it reflects credit on the government, for no ther reason than that the facts sound implausible. ... Truth has to be suppressed if it sounds like propaganda. "The only reason to suppress a piece of news," says an Allied handbook used in World War II, "is if it is unbelievable."
It is true that propaganda subtly appeals to the emotions.
[77]
Ellul notes that propaganda uses facts not to support an argument but to exert emotional pressure. The same thing is true of advertising, however. In both cases, the emotional appeal remains muted and indirect; it inheres in the facts themselves; nor is it inconsistent with the "honest desire to be informed." Knowing that an educated public craves facts and cherishes nothing so much as being well informed, the modern propagandist avoids using high-sounding slogans; he rarely appeals to a higher destiny; he seldom calls for heroism and sacrifice or reminds his audience of the glorious past. He sticks to the "facts." Propaganda thus merges with "information."
[78] the substitution of symbolically mediated information for immediate experience—of pseudo-events for real events—has not made government more rational and efficient, as both the technocrats and their critics assume. On the contrary, it has given rise to a pervasive air of unreality, which ultimately befuddles the decision makers themselves.
[81] Radicalism as Street TheaterIs this because theater is ultimately unreal no matter how topical it might aspire to be? This is a curious remark in any case, since a few pages later the author finds in Radical theater an inability to tolerate artifice and, therefore, evidence again of a narcissistic and/or survivalistic turn.
...
[82] By deliberately provoking violent repression, it [the New Left] hoped to forestall the co-optation of dissent. The attempt to dramatize official repression, however, imprisoned the left in a politics of theater...—a mirror-image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask.
Theoreticians of the cold war saw the tactics of "escalation" as a means of impressing "relevant audiences" with the nation's stregth of purpose; the strategists of the left, equally obsessed with appearances, believed that gestures of escalating opposition would eventually bring the establishment to its knees. ...
The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards. ...
[83]
...these radicals had so few practical results to show for their sacrifices that we are driven to conclude that they embraced radical politics in the first place not because it promised practical results but because it served as a new mode of self-dramatization
[85] Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, "often admire some hero or outstanding individual" and "experience themselves as part of that outstanding person." They see the admired individual as "merely and extension of themselves." ... [The narcissist] seeks to warm himself in their reflected glow; but his feelings contain a strong admixture of envy, and his admiration often turns to hatred if the object of his attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance. The narcissist lacks the confidence in his own abilities that would encourage him to model himself on another person's exalted example. ...Perhaps this indicates the difference between naturalism and realism.
[86] A narcissistic society worships celebrity rather than fame and substitutes spectacle for the older forms of theater, which encouraged identification and emulation precisely because they carefully preserved a certain distance between the audience and the actors, the hero worshipper and the hero.
Narcissism and the Theater of the Absurd At the same time that public life and even private life take on the qualities of spectacle, a countermovement seeks to model spectacle, theater, all forms of art, on reality—to obliterate the very distinction between art and life. ...
[87] Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. ... Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. Even a rational understanding of the techniques by means of which a given illusion is produced does not necessarily destroy our capacity to experience it as a representation of reality.
The urge to understand a magician's tricks...shares with the study of literature a willingness to learn from the masters of illusion lessons about reality itself.Sure. But in neither case did previously naive people attend their first magic show or read their first novel thinking explicitly to themselves that there was such a rational goal to be achieved. The rationalization always comes last, as any good Freudian ought to be able to see. And the etiology of this particular rationalization is something the later, political Lasch, at least, might have noticed: it is nothing less than the "instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity" which he so rightly identified as "one of the disinctive features of the industrial worldview."
But a complete indifference even to the mechanics of illusion announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice, reality and illusion. This indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.This provocative but ultimately dubious. When P. Roth, e.g., laments that reality is constantly outdoing the talents of the novelist, and when Lasch draws from this remark conclusions similar to the above, I find it hard to discount the possibility that what is being mourned is not the loss of boundaries between the self and the outside world but rather the cutting of the novelist down to size, the knocking of the literary high priests off of their ill-gotten pedestals.
[88] Nineteenth-century realists understood that verisimilitude depended in part on the artist's ability to keep a distance between the audience and the work of art. This distance...paradoxically enabled the spectator to observe events on stage as if they were scenes from real life. ...
As art abandons the attempt to weave illusions around the audience and to present a heightened version of reality, it tries to
[89]
close the gap between audience and actors. Sometimes it justifies this procedure by invoking theories tracing the origins of drama to religious ritual, orgiastic communion. Unfortunately the attempt to restore a sense of collective worship cannot restore the unity of belief that once gave life to such forms. The merging of actors and audience does not make the spectator into a communicant; it merely provides him—if it does not drive him out of the theater altogether—with a chance to admire himself in the new role of pseudo performer, an experience not qualitatively different (even when clothed in the rhetoric of the avant-garde) from that of the studio audience at television performances, which dotes on images of itself periodically flashed across the monitors.
[94] Ironic Detachment as an Escape from Routine ...Well...see [name of coworker-bandmate redacted], and to a lesser extent [name of another coworker-bandmate redacted].
When jobs consist of little more than
[95]
meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the worker...seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. ... He takes refuge in jokes, mockery, and cynicism. ... By refusing to take seriously the routines he has to perform, he denies their capacity to injure him. Although he assumes that it is impossible to alter the iron limits imposed on him by society, a detached awareness of those limits seems to make them matter less. By demystifying daily life, he conveys to himself and others the impression that he has risen beyond it, even as he goes through the motions and does what is expected of him.
[Ch. V, "The Degradation of Sport"]A crucial distinction which deserves to be taken seriously.
[100] Like sex, drugs, and drink, they [sports] obliterate awareness of everyday reality, but they do this not by dimming awareness but by raising it to a new level of concentration.
The uselessness of games makes them offensive to social reformers, improvers of public morals, or functionalist critics of society like Veblen, who saw in the futility of upper-class sports anachronistic survivals of militarism and prowess. Yet the "futility" of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal... Games quickly lose their charm when forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement.Yep.
[104] the common complaint that modern sports are "spectator-oriented rather than participant-oriented." ... At a higher level of mastery, the performer no longer wishes merely to display his virtuosity—for the true connoisseur can easily distinguish between the performer who plays to the crowd and the superior artist who matches himself against the full rigor of his art itself—but to ratify a supremely difficult accomplishment; to give...
[105]
pleasure; to forge a bond between himself and his audience, which consists in their shared appreciation of a ritual executed flawlessly, with deep feeling and a sense of style and proportion.*
[footnote, 105] *This does not mean that virtuosity is the principal component of sport. In implying a comparison, here and elsewhere, between athletic and musical performances, I wish to make just the opposite point. A performer who seeks merely to dazzle the audience with feats of technical brilliance plays to the lowest level of understanding, forgoing the risks that come from intense emotional engagement with the material itself. In the most satisfying kind of performance, the performer becomes unconscious of the audience and loses himself in his part. In sport, the moment that matters is what a former basketball player describes as the moment "when all those folks in the stands don't count." ... Rejecting the simple-minded radicalism according to which "commercialization" has corrupted sports, he says: "Money [in professional sports] has nothing to do with capitalism, owners, or professionalism. It's the moment in some games where it doesn't matter who's watching, all that counts is that instant where how you play determines which team wins and which team loses."
If virtuosity were the essence of sport, we could dispense with basketball and content ourselves with displays of dunking and dribbling. But to say that real artistry consists not of dazzling technique but of teamwork, timing, a sense of the moment, an understanding of the medium, and the capacity to lose oneself in play does not of course mean that games would have the same significance if no one watched them. It means simply that the superior performance has the quality of being unobserved.
[105] The players not only compete; they enact a familiar ceremony that reaffirms common values.This reaffirmatory function could be, maybe, in certain people's eyes, considered an avenue via which sports (and the arts) are force[d] into the service of several charm-killing endeavors at once.
Ceremony requires witnesses:Well, then it's obviously totally different from those performances whose especially superior instances hav[e] the quality of being unobserved.
enthusiastic spectators conversant with the rules of performance and its underlying meaning. Far from destroying the value of sports, the attendance of spectators makes them complete. Indeed one of the virtues of contemporary sports lies in their resistance to the erosion of standards and their capacity to appeal to a knowledgeable audience.Good point. But is this really a virtue or is it just a distinction? Is the quality of being resistan[t] to social change in and of itself a virtue? When standards are at issue then resistance to erosion seems commendable. But otherwise?
Norman Podhoretz has argued that the sports public remains more discriminating than the public for the arts and that "excellence is relatively uncontroversial as a judgment of performance."...and now, right on cue, we have lost sight of the distinction. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
[106] The public for sports still consists largely of men who took part in sports during boyhood and thus acquired a sense of the game and a capacity to distinguish among many levels of excellence.Is the sport audience discriminating on the whole? Or are there as few discriminating sports fans as there are art fans, yet sport is able to appeal to both kinds of fan by its very nature whereas art is not?
The same can hardly be said for the audience for artistic performance, even though amateur musicians, dancers, actors, and painters may still comprise a small nucleus of the audience. Constant experimentation in the arts has created so much confusion about standards that the only surviving measure of excellence is novelty and shock value, which in a jaded time often resides in a work's sheer ugliness and banality. In sport, on the other hand, novelty and rapid shifts of fashion play a small part in games' appeal to a discriminating audience.
[106] Yet even here, the contamination of standards has already begun. Faced with rising costs, owners seek to increase attendance at sporting events by installing exploding scoreboards, [etc., etc.]... Television has enlarged the audience for sports while lowering the level of its understanding; at least this is the operating assumption of sports commentators, who direct at the audience an interminable stream of tutelage in the basics of the game, and of the promoters who reshape one game after another to conform to the tastes of an audience supposedly incapable of grasping their finer points....
[107] the significance of such changes [as the violence in hockey] is not that sports ought to be organized, as a number of recent critics imagine, solely for the edification of the players and that corruption sets in when sports begin to be played to spectators for a profit. No one denies the desirability of participation in sports—not because it builds strong bodies but because it brings joy and delight. It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which to measure ourselves.Seems more or less correct. The sticking point, though, is that you can lead a horse to water but can't make them drink. And that's point of the whole study, right? Sports still, even now, furnish the opportunity for what Lasch describes here, but more and more people don't take the opportunity; indeed, they are incapable of it, unaware it exists, etc., more so than they simply decline the offer. It is not enough to merely point it out to them; in fact, it is already too late once this is deemed necessary ("He who laughs last..."), and whatever slim hope remains for them inheres entirely in the dwindling potential for them themselves to make the realization. Pointing it out to them, actually, has greater potential to delay or inhibit such realization rather than hastening it.
By entering imaginitively into their world, we experience in heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity.Stay safe out there kids, it sounds like sport is at risk of being forced into the service of social improvement even by those who have realized the folly in this and given eloquent voice to it in widely-read publications.
An athletic performance, like other performances, calls up a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping unconscious perceptions of life. Spectatorship is no more "passive" than daydreaming, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits an emotional response.This makes good on the Cultural Studies label that a greedy publisher has printed on the back cover of this book. ("Hmm, it says 'culture' on the cover, so...") And so, the same caveat applies here as to the more self-consciously populist wing of Cultural Studies proper: the horse does not always (one is tempted to say does not usually) drink from this magic well of associations and fantasies even after they have been so lovingly led there by the hoof.
It is a mistake to suppose that organized athletics ever serve the interests of the players alone or that professionalization inevitably corrupts all who take part in it. In glorifying amateurism, equating spectatorship with passivity, and deploring competition, recent criticism of sport echoes the fake radicalism of theThere is another offense of the demand for greater participation which ought to be considered here: the notion that everyone needs to participate in everything. In my own time, this has seemed to me at root to be the product of interest groups coopting radicalism and only rarely a product of the true Radicals themselves. In the present context it suffices to say that perhaps sport is not healthy for every body; and if not, then considerations of radicalism, corruption, spectatorship, and identification all are moot. What is more relevant is to consider the source of any given declaration on the fitness or unfitness of sport, music, scrabble, gardening, etc. for any given utilitarian purpose or group of people. The source is usually someone selling sport, music, scrabble, or gardening, and they tend to be apolitical rather than radical.
[108] counterculture, from which so much of it derives. It shows its contempt for excellence by proposing to break down the "elitist" distinction between players and spectators. It proposes to replace competitive professional sports, which notwithstanding their shortcomings uphold standards of competence and bravery that might otherwise become extinct, with a bland regimen of cooperative diversions in which everyone can join regardless of age or ability... In its eagerness to remove from athletics the element that has always underlain their imaginative appeal, the staged rivalry of superior ability, this "radicalism" proposes merely to complete the degradation already begun by the very society the cultural radicals profess to criticize and subvert. Vaguely uneasy about the emotional response evoked by competitive sports, the critics of "passive" spectatorship wish to enlist sport in the service of healthy physical exercise, subduing or eliminating the element of fantasy, make-believe, and playacting that has always been associated with games. The demand for greater participation, like the distrust of competition, seems to originate in a fear that unconscious impulses and fantasies will overwhelm us if we allow them expression.
[108] In the degree to which athletic events lose the element of ritual and public festiv-I'll have to actually read Huizenga eventually, but for now there seems to be some talking past each other. The utilitarian imperative is itself a species of over-seriousness in the sense that it imparts a purpose to play where there otherwise would be none. The purpose is the over-serious part of the undertaking, whether or not the players' own style of engagement with the game is itself serious in the sense of the performer becom[ing]unconscious of the audience and losing himself in his part.
[109]
al, according to Huizenga, they deteriorate into "trivial recreation and crude sensationalism." Even Huizenga misunderstands the cause of this development, however. It hardly lies in the "fatal shift toward over-seriousness." Huizenga himself, when he is writing about the theory of play rather than the collapse of "genuine play" in our own time, understands very well that play at its best is always serious; indeed that the essence of play lies in taking seriously activities that have no purpose, serve no utilitarian ends.
[109] The degradation of sport, then, consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its trivialization. Games derive their power from the investment of seemingly trivial activity with serious intent. By submitting without reservation to the rules and conventions of the game, the player (and the spectators too) cooperate in creating an illusion of reality. ... In our time, games—sports in particular—are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. ...our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the harmless substitute gratifications that formerly provided charm and consolation.There must be a Third Way through this dilemma. Submission to rules and convention, substitute gratification, illusion, etc.,...surely we can do better than all of that while maintaining the function of play.
The rising violence of crowds, routinely blamed on the vio-But this part is incisive and timely, and it reverberates both in the medium-as-message conversation and the extrinsic benefits conversation.
[110]
lence of modern sports and the habit of taking them too seriously, arises, on the contrary, out of a failure to take them seriously enough...
[110] Imperialism and the Cult of the Strenuous LifeOr, we might read between the lines: reformers thought all of this, whether or not the message rather than the medium was, in fact, the message. That this question remains contentious and unresolved suggests that both this moralistic position and the laissez-faire position opposed to it are more ideological than strictly rational or sincere; perhaps also, therefore, that this overweening moralism as well as, again, a certain moral numbness masquerading as libertarianism, both of these things may be more essential than they are contingent. And it is not difficult to see them reflected in contemporary sporting issues, and in all kinds of other issues too.
...
The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie suppressed popular sports and festivals as part of their campaign to establish the reign of sobriety. ...because of their cruelty and because the blocked up public thoroughfares, disrupted the daily routine of business, distracted the people from their work, encouraged habits of idleness, extravagance, and insubordination, and gave rise to licentiousness and debauchery.
[111] The spirit of early bourgeois society was deeply antithetical to play. ...[moralism aside, games also] contained an important element of pretense, illusion, mimicry, and make-believe. The bourgeois distrust of games reflected a deeper distrust of fancy, of histrionics, of elaborate dress and costume....
[113] By this time [of D. MacArthur, e.g.]...the cult of the strenuous life was as obsolete as the explicit racism which once informed imperialist ideology. MacArthur himself was an anachronism... As American imperialism allied itself more with liberal values, the cult of "manly arts" survived as an important theme only in the ideology of the far right....
[114] Left-wing critics of sport have made such [right-wing] statements the focus of their attack—another sample of the way in which cultural radicalism, posing as a revolutionary threat to the status quo, in reality confines its criticism to values already obsolescent and to patterns of American capitalism that have long ago been superseded. ... [e.g., the thesis that] sport is a "mirror reflection" of society that indoctrinates the young with the dominant values. In America, organized athletics teach militarism, authoritarianism, racism, and sexism, thereby perpetuating the "false consciousness" of the masses. [etc., etc.] ... For all these reasons, organized competition should give way to "intramural sports aimed at making everyone a player" [etc., etc.] ...This is all an excellent counter to Lasch's view of modern art.
[115] This indictment, offensive in the first place in its assumption that cultural radicals understand the needs and interests of the masses better than the masses themselves, also offends every principle of social analysis. It confuses socialization with indoctrination and takes the most reactionary pronouncements at face value, as if athletes automatically imbibed the right-wing opinions of some of their mentors and spokesmen. Sport does play a role in socialization, but the lessons it teaches are not necessarily the ones that coaches and teachers of physical education seek to impart. The mirror theory of sport, like all reductionist interpretations of culture, makes no allowance for the autonomy of cultural traditions. In sport, these traditions come down from one generation of players to another, and although athletics do reflect social values, they can never be completely assimilated to those values. Indeed, they resist assimilation more effectively than many other activities, since games learned in youth exert their own demands and inspire loyalty to the game itself, rather than to the progams ideologues seek to impose on them.
[116] the general erosion of organizational allegiance in a society where men and women perceive the organization as an enemy, even...one is tempted to say especially...
the organizations in which they work....
[118] Bureaucracy and "Teamwork" The prevalent mode of social interaction today is antagonstic cooperation (as David Riesman called it in The Lonely Crowd), in which a cult of teamwork conceals the struggle for survival within bureaucratic organizations.These last two nuggets bear heavily on TEOM. The "teamwork" thing isn't even real much of the time.
[123] The appearance in history of an escapist conception of "leisure" coincides with the organization of leisure as an extension of commodity production. The same forces that have organized the factory and the office have organized leisure as well, reducing it to an appendage of industry. Accordingly sport has come to be dominated not so much by an undue emphasis on winning as by the desperate urge to avoid defeat. ...the managerial apparatus makes every effort to eliminate the risk and uncertainty that contribute so centrally to the ritual and dramatic success of any contest. ... Prudence, caution, and calculation, so prominent in everyday life but so inimical to the spirit of games, come to shape sports as they shape everything else.i.e. We create what we need.
While he deplores the subordination of sport to entertainment, [Michael] Novak takes for granted the separation of work and leisure that gives rise in the first place to this invasion of play by the standards of the workaday world. He does not see that the degradation of play originates in the degradation of work, which creates both the need and the opportunity for commercialized "recreation." As Huizenga has shown, it is precisely when the play element disappears from law, statecraft, and other cultural forms that men turn to play not to witness a dramatic reenactment of their common life but to find diversion and sensation.
At that point, games and sport, far from taking themselves too seriously, as Huizenga mistakenly concluded, become, on the contrary, a
[124]
"thing of no consequence." As Edgar Wind shows in his analysis of modern art, the trivialization of art was already implicit in the modernist exaltation of art, which assumed that "the experience of art will be more intense if it pulls the spectator away from his ordinary habits and preoccupations." The modernist esthetic guarantees the socially marginal status of art at the same time that it opens art to the invasion of commercialized esthetic fashion—a process that culminates, by a curious but inexorable logic, in the postmodernist demand for the abolition of art and its assimilation to reality.
[[###]] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.
[132] Beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, the immigration of politically backward elements, as they were commonly regarded, sharpened the fear...that the United States would regress to a hated old-world pattern of class conflict, hereditary poverty, and political despotism. ... From this time on, the problem of acculturating the immigrant population never wandered far from the center of the American educational enterprise. ...[hence] the American school, in contrast to the European, placed heavy emphasis on the nonacademic side of the curriculum. The democratic aim of bringing the fruits of modern culture to the masses gave way in practice to a concern with education as a form of social control. ......
[133] The differences between American and European systems of public education [however] should not be exaggerated. ... Both systems from the beginning thus combined democratic and undemocratic features; as the political objectives of public education gave way to a growing preoccupation with industrial objectives, the undemocratic features became more and more pronounced.
...
[134] Manpower training bore the same relation to "industrial discipline" in Veblen's sense that political indoctrination—"training for citizenship," as it now came to be called—bore to political "initiation." Both innovations represented debased versions of democratic practice, attractive to those who resented what they regarded as the school's overemphasis on "culture." Both reforms belonged to a broader movement to make the school more "efficient." [e.g. especially] In response to a public outcry about the high rate of academic failure in the schools, an outcry that swelled to a chorus around 1910...
[135] Protests against genteel culture, overemphasis on academic subjects, "gentleman's education," and the "cultured ease in the classroom, of drawing room quiet and refinement," frequently coincided with an insistence that higher education and "culture" should not in any case be "desired by the mob."
[135] Under favorable conditions, the school's emphasis on "Americanism" and its promotion of universal norms had a liberating effect, helping individuals to make a fruitful break with parochial ethnic traditions. Recent criticism of the school [which]...partakes of the prevailing sentimentality about ethnicity...deplores the disintegration of folk culture and pays no attention to the degree to which disintegration was often the price paid for intellectual emancipation. When Randolph Bourne...extolled cultural pluralism, he had in mind as a model not the intact immigrant cultures of the ghettos but the culture of the twice-uprooted immigrant intellectuals he met at Columbia....
[136] As educators convinced themselves, with the help of intelligence tests, that most of the students could never master an academic curriculum, they found it necessary to devise other ways of keeping them busy. The introduction of courses in homemaking, health, citizenship, and other nonacademic subjects, together with the proliferation of athletic programs and extracurricular activities, reflected the dogma that schools had to educate the "whole child"; but it also reflected the practical need to fill up the students' time and to keep them reasonably contented. ...
Educational reformers brought the family's work into the school in the hope of making the school an instrument not merely of education but of socialization as well. Dimly recognizing that
[137]
in many areas—precisely those that lie outside the formal curriculum—experience teaches more than books, educators then proceeded to do away with books; to import experience into the academic setting, to re-create the modes of learning formerly associated with the family, to encourage students to "learn by doing." Having imposed a deadening academic curriculum on every phase of the child's experience, they demanded, too late, that education be brought into contact with "life."
[142] Conflicts over educational policy in the fifties had made it clear that the country faced a choice between basic education for all and a complicated educational bureaucracy that functioned as an agency of manpower selection. The same issue, often clouded by overheated rhetoric, underlay the more bitter struggles of the sixties and seventies. For black people, especially for upwardly
[143]
mobile blacks in whom the passion for education burns as brightly as it ever did in descendants of the Puritans or in Jewish immigrants, desegregation represented the promise of equal education in the basic subjects indispensible to economic survival even in an otherwise illiterate modern society: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Black parents, it would seem clung to what seems today an old-fashioned—from the point of view of educational "innovators," a hopelessly reactionary—conception of education. According to this supposedly traditional view, the school functions best when it transmits the basic skills on which literate societies depend, upholds high standards of academic excellence, and sees to it that students make these standards their own. The struggle for desegregated schooling implied an attack not only on racial discrimination but on the proposition, long embedded in the practice of the schools, that academic standards are inherently elitist and that universal education therefore requires the dilution of standards—the downward adjustment of standards to class origins and social expectations. The demand for desegregation entailed more than a renewed committment to equal opportunity; it also entailed a repudiation of cultural separatism and a belief that access to common cultural traditions remained the precondition of advancement for dispossessed groups.
Thouroughly middle-class in its ideological derivation, the movement for equal education nevertheless embodied demands that could not be met without a radical overhaul of the entire educational system—and of much else besides. It flew in the face of long-established educational practice. It contained implications unpalatable not merely to entrenched educational bureaucrats but to progressives, who believed that education had to be tailored to the "needs" of the young, that overemphasis on academic subjects inhibited "creativity," and that too much stress on academic competition encouraged individualism at the expense of cooperation. The attempt to revive basic education, on the part of blacks and other minorities, cut across the grain of educational experimentation...
[145] In the long run, it does not matter to the victims whether bad teaching justifies itself on the reactionary grounds [of racism]...or whether, on the other hand, pseudoradicals condemn academic standards as part of the apparatus of white cultural control... The whole problem of American education comes down to this: in American society, almost everyone identifies intellectual excellence with elitism. This attitude not only guarantees the monopolization of educational advantages by the few; it lowers the quality of elite education itself and threatens to bring about a reign of universal ignorance.It's awfully tough to track down the real reasons why almost everyone feels a certain way, but this does seem to be true, and so one can't help but wonder if it itself cannot be traced to some lower-order, isolable phenomena. Organic resentment at individual achievement seems a strong candidate! And this is a very much product of individualism per se. An unintended consequence of it, perhaps. So, while I'm hardly ready to dispense with individualism or with democracy, there is even so, I think, a very curious case study waiting to be made here as to whether this antielite resentment (and IS THAT EVER what it is) is inflamed by equal opportunity (as opposed to a true caste system or something) even as a certain justice is better served thereby.
[148] the student movement [which sought, in the 1960s, an "accounting" of the university for itself] embodied a militant anti-intellectualism of its own, which corrupted and eventually absorbed it. Demand for the abolition of grades, although defended on grounds of high pedagogical principle, turned out in practice...to reflect a desire for less work and a wish to avoid judgment on its quality. The demand for more "relevant" courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually un-
[149]
demanding curriculum, in which students could win academic credits for political activism, self-expression, [etc.]... Even when seriously advanced in opposition to sterile academic pedantry, the slogan of relevance embodied and underlying antagonism to education itself—an inability to take an interest in anything beyond immediate experience. Its popularity testified to the growing belief that education should be painless, free of tension and conflict. Those who interpreted "relevance" as a concerted academic assault on racism and imperialism, moreover, merely inverted the expansionism of university administrators. When they proposed to enlist the university on the side of social reform, they echoed the service ideal that justified the imperial expansion of the multiversity in the first place. Instead of trying to hold the university to a more modest set of objectives, radical critics of higher education accepted the premise that education could solve every sort of social problem. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ***make a simple link to previous lasch-ed post(s)*** ==== ***post to A Teaching Philosophy*** Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979) "Beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, the immigration of politically backward elements, as they were commonly regarded, sharpened the fear...that the United States would regress to a hated old-world pattern of class conflict, hereditary poverty, and political despotism. ... From this time on, the problem of acculturating the immigrant population never wandered far from the center of the American educational enterprise. ...[hence] the American school, in contrast to the European, placed heavy emphasis on the nonacademic side of the curriculum. The democratic aim of bringing the fruits of modern culture to the masses gave way in practice to a concern with education as a form of social control." (p. 132) "The introduction of courses in homemaking, health, citizenship, and other nonacademic subjects, together with the proliferation of athletic programs and extracurricular activities, reflected the dogma that schools had to educate the "whole child"; but it also reflected the practical need to fill up the students' time and to keep them reasonably contented." (p. 136) "In the long run, it does not matter to the victims whether bad teaching justifies itself on the reactionary grounds [of racism]...or whether, on the other hand, pseudoradicals condemn academic standards as part of the apparatus of white cultural control..." (p. 145) (more) ==== ***FIND A PLACE to cross-post this!!*** Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979) "The struggle for desegregated schooling implied an attack not only on racial discrimination but on the proposition, long embedded in the practice of the schools, that academic standards are inherently elitist and that universal education therefore requires the dilution of standards—the downward adjustment of standards to class origins and social expectations. The demand for desegregation entailed more than a renewed committment to equal opportunity; it also entailed a repudiation of cultural separatism and a belief that access to common cultural traditions remained the precondition of advancement for dispossessed groups. Thouroughly middle-class in its ideological derivation, the movement for equal education nevertheless embodied demands that could not be met without a radical overhaul of the entire educational system—and of much else besides." (p. 143) (more) ==== ***post to hearing modernity*** Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979) "the student movement embodied a militant anti-intellectualism of its own, which corrupted and eventually absorbed it. ... The demand for more "relevant" courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually undemanding curriculum... Even when seriously advanced in opposition to sterile academic pedantry, the slogan of relevance embodied and underlying antagonism to education itself—an inability to take an interest in anything beyond immediate experience. ... Those who interpreted "relevance" as a concerted academic assault on racism and imperialism, moreover, merely inverted the expansionism of university administrators. ... Instead of trying to hold the university to a more modest set of objectives, radical critics of higher education accepted the premise that education could solve every sort of social problem." (more)
[150] The effective loss of cultural traditions
[151]
on such a scale [as now] makes talk of a new Dark Age far from frivolous. Yet this loss coincides with an information glut, with the recovery of the past by specialists, and with an unprecedented explosion of knowledge—none of which, however, impinges on everyday experience or shapes popular culture.
[161, footnote] Miriam Van Waters [Parents on Probation] wrote: "So much alarming popular literature has been written about defective children that a diagnosis of defect...freezes the parents into despair." Such observations, however, seldom prompted those who made them to question the wisdom of professional teaching, which by its very nature—even when it seeks to reassure—holds up a norm of child development, deviations from which necessarily give rise to parental alarm...Okay, here is where the rubber starts to meet the road re: being made to feel inferior without your consent. In such terms as those, Lasch is saying that consent has been overridden or violated, i.e. by the big, evil, menacing state and the "helping professions." But we could just as well say that such parents in fact do give their consent, NOT in their relationship with the state, with scientific experts, with the "helping professions," etc., but rather with their children, who in this anecdote, as in just about every other situation ever in the bourgeois era, are so much the center of everyone's universe that "despair" of some kind or another is all but assured. It is true that the Progressive tendency is itself behind much of this filiarchal bent, or at least that it has done much to spread it around; but it seems possible to argue that the "helping professions" and bourgeois filiarchy in fact have a common root cause and that this "lethal intensity" (McLuhan) is what needs to be let go; and once it is let go, parents can be empowered to receive, digest, and respond to scientific advice without being "made to feel inferior" by the smallest deviation from the norm. It does seem true that bourgeois parents have a hair trigger for "despair." It does NOT seem true that this is the fault of bureaucrats.
Those who noted that the attack on maternal instinct undermined maternal...and, quoting so more early writers...
[162]
confidence felt no reservations about this development, because in their view the confidence destroyed by medicine rested in the first place on ignorance and complacency.
"...a great complacency which was formerly the young mother's protection..."Right...protection from other bourgeoise.
"Souls full of love also bring heads full of ignorance. . ."Well, yeah. But are the parents under discussion here, the one's whose sense of their own competence rises and falls with external validation, are these parents quite so full of love for the child? Or for themselves? How about this for "narcissism"?! If "narcissism" is to be overcome, might we then find the "helping professions" more helpful? i.e. Because WE are better able to make use of them, not because they have changed to become of more use to us?
[159] these considerations did not prevent Van Waters from arguing that not only broken homes but "normal" homes often produced broken children...This soft-pedaling/elision is significant, since for nature to well adn truly trump nurture would undermine Lasch's case, yet to come here, that changes in family dynamics in fact underlie the new "narcissism."
The
[173]
mother in particular, on whom the work of childrearing devolves by default, attempts to become an ideal parent, compensating for her lack of spontaneous feeling for the child by smothering him with solicitude.
[176] Because these family patterns are so deeply rooted in the social conditions created by modern industry, they cannot be changed by prophylactic or "educational" reforms...Footnote to this paragraph, on the "radical" critique of familial "privatism":
[177]
...[which], by extending the sway of the health and welfare professions, usually do more harm than good. ...the psychological patterns promoted by the family are reinforced by conditions outside the family. Because those patterns seem to find their clearest expression in the pathology of narcissism, and ultimately in schizophrenia, we should not jump to the conclusion that the family produces misfits, people who cannot function efficiently in modern industrial society. In many ways it does a good job of preparing the child for the conditions he will encounter when he leaves home.
this criticism of the nuclear family merely updates and clothes in the latest liberationist jargon an indictment of the family first articulated by social workers, educators, penal reformers... By associating itself with psychiatric criticism of the family, the "cultural revolution" thus reaffirms one of the strongest tendencies in the society it claims to criticize.
[182] The appearance of permissiveness conceals a stringent system of controls, all the more effective because it avoids direct confrontations between authorities and the people on whom they seek to impose their will. Because confrontations provoke arguments about principle, the authorities whenever possible delegate discipline to someone else so that they themselves can pose as advisers, "resource persons," and friends. Thus parents rely on doctors, psychiatrists, and the child's own peers to impose rules on the child and to see that he conforms to them. ... In this way, parents make their own problem—insubordination—the child's. Similarly at school, the child finds himself surrounded by authorities who wish only to help. ... The students themselves, according to Edgar Friedenberg study of the American high school, reject both authoritarian and libertarian measures and regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution."...
[184] ...when everyone speaks his mind; when people listen as well as speak; when disagreements surface without causing "obvious tensions; when the "chairman of the board" does not try to dominate his subordinates; and when decisions rest on consensus. These precepts, which by this time had be-
[185]
come the common coin of the social sciences, summarize the therapeutic view of authority. The growing acceptance of that view, at all levels of American society, makes it possible to preserve hierarchical forms of organization in the guise of "participation." It provides a society dominated by elites with an antielitist ideology. The popularization of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority...while leaving domination untouched.
[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... this seems like the colloquial misconstrual of patriarchy as men ruling over women. Really, patriarchy is a very few men ruling over all the women and the vast majority of the other men too. So, the explanation for the above is (deceptively?) simple: the vast majority of the other men in fact control zero "power and wealth." This is fertile ground for "resentment," and it's even "rational" some of the time.
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...
[212] Measuring experience against a normative model set up by doctors, people will find themselves as troubled by departures from the norm as they are currently troubled by the "predictable crises of adult life" themselves.My note says:
[218]
X
Paternalism Without Father
The New Rich and the Old ... Capitalism has severed the ties of personal dependence only to revive dependence under cover of bureaucratic rationality....
[219] Whereas the new rich share the prevailing confusion about the values parents should transmit to the young, the old rich have firm ideas...and do not hesitate to put them into practice. ...[e.g.] the busy round of activities...through which the propertied rich acquire discipline, courage, persistence, and self-possession.Well, some of them certainly think they are acquir[ing] these things by way of such busy rounds, which for Lasch here include music and ballet. But if there are any grounds at all for questioning the reliability of direct transmission here, then various Signaling theories can only gain in explanatory power, and they may even be all that is left if Media Effects skeptics are ever proven right.
In the families of the old propertied elite, parents seem to make more demands on their children than more "modern" parents make, and wealth gives them the power to back up these demands. ... When they have to seek professional advice, they deal with experts from a position of strength.This implies that said "strength" enables these parents to get the real story out of the experts. But is it not equally likely that it cows the expert into saying what the parent wants to hear, thereby obliterating any grain of truth that might inhere in the advice?
They have the self-confidence that comes with success...[hence] they insist not only on their own authority but on the authority of the past. ... In many ways the most important thing they give their children is the sense of generational continuity so rarely encountered elsewhere in American society.A bit of an odd claim, since the old derelict scion trope is not infrequently accorded axiomatic status. But then, if it only takes one heir to assume stewardship of the empire, a mere 50% success rate in "childrearing" has a far better than 50% chance of sustaining the legacy.
[220] Even in decline...it [the "old bourgeoisie" or "entrepreneurial class"] implants in the young a powerful sense of local pride, often tinged with the apprehension that outside influences...are tearing the place apart. ...
[Conversely, the "corporate rich" or "managerial elite"...] Here we find executives always on the move, whose children learn no sense of place.
[228]footnote to above:
Bureaucratic Dependence and Narcissism Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services.
[228] my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. ... But it is not true...that "professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community." [P. Goodman, "The New Reformation"] The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the man-Great points. But more basically, this sounds like a lofty ideal which hasn't ever existed and cannot exist.
[229, footnote cont.]
agerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied...
[Thomas] Haskell writes: "Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone." Haskell does not appreciate how easily "intellectual merit" can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus...
[231] The psychological expression of this dependence [upon "medical authority," "therapeutic points of view," etc.] is narcissism. ... Since modern society prolongs the experience of dependence into adult life, it encourages milder forms of narcissism in people who might otherwise come to terms with the inescapable limits on their personal freedom and power... While it encourages grandiose dreams of omnipotence, moreover, the new paternalism undermines more modest fantasies, erodes the capacity to suspend disbelief, and thus makes less and less accessible the harmless substitute-gratifications, notably art and play, that help to mitigate the sense of powerlessness and the fear of dependence that otherwise express themselves in narcissistic traits.Granted that much of my reason for engaging with Lasch has been to argue against his understanding of art and play , nonetheless this assertion that there is a nexus between dependence (broadly) and accessibility of art (specifically/especially in its capacity as substitute gratification) is an assertion I find more worth entertaining.
Our society is narcissistic, then, in a double sense. People with narcissistic personalities, although not necessarily more numerous than before, play a conspicuous part in contemporary life, often rising to positions of eminence. ... TheOnce again with this last bit, the etiology may be different but the implications are the same as for LRJ's summation, "Expression issued from life and was beauty."
[232]
beautiful people...live out the fantasy of narcissistic success, which consists of nothing more substantial than a wish to be vastly admired, not for one's accomplishments but simply for oneself, uncritically and without reservation.
[234] Studies of progressivism and the New Deal have shown that government regulation of business often arose in response to the demands of businessmen themselves. Regulatory agencies draw most of their personnel from business.Well, in fairness to the conservs, the sane among them have long since disavowed Regulatory Capture, so called...similarly, the nominal left has not exactly fought against the practice; quite the opposite.
Neither the regulatory nor the welfare policies of the state rest on "an implacable hatred of private business and free enterprise," as [Ludwig von] Mises claims. On the contrary, regulation controls competition and stabilizes the market, while the welfare system socializes the "human costs" of capitalist production...and helps to forestall more radical solutions.
[237]Afterword: The Culture of Narcissism Revisited
(1990)
...
[239] The dense interpersonal environment of modern bureaucracy appeared to elicit and reward a narcissistic reponse—an anxious concern with the impression one made on others, a tendency to treat others as a mirror of the self.
The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a "society of the spectacle"...encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone—a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding commitments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose,...[etc., etc.]
Narcissists may have paid more attention to their own needs than to those of others, but self-love and self-aggrandizement did not impress me as their most important characteristics. These qualities implied a strong, stables sense of selfhood, whereas narcissists suffered from a feeling of inauthenticity and inner emptiness. They found it
[240]
difficult to make connection with the world.
[248] Science has not displaced religion, as so many people once expected. Both seem to flourish side by side, often in grotesquely exaggerated form.
More than anything else, it is this coexistence of hyper-rationality and a widespread revolt against rationality that justifies the characterization of our twentieth-century way of life as a culture of narcissism. These contradictory sensibilities have a common source. ...[e.g.] feelings of homelessness and displacement...[and] the contradiction between the promise that [we] can "have it all" and the reality of their limitations.
The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a charatceristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.