[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.
Sure. But 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? Isn't there always something like rugged instrumentalism available as a rejoinder to such assertions as this one?
The point is more than incidental. Rather, it shades over into the general question of human variability, bearing therefore on the breadth (or narrowness) of viable structurings of art, employment, built environment, etc., and therein how to accommodate as many and oppress as few individuals as possible. Lasch's view of many things suffers greatly from this kind of essentialism, the kind that appears only in the rationalization stage and not (always) as the epistemological cause. The epistemological cause here would, I think, more properly be labelled consequentialism...a motivated consequentialism perhaps.
Perhaps normative templates are more useful the better equipped we are to make use of them. But that is, truly this time, an elitist thought and as such requires careful handling.
The elite in this scenario would be right-brained people who aren't inclined to take anything quite so literally, not even a normative concept of developmental stages; the oppressed would be left-brained people who can only take such things literally and seriously.
I first had this kind of thought working with musicians who write rhythms incorrectly, whose music is much more challenging to play than that of musicians who don't read or write music at all. The hard-won ability to abstract from notation to sound is turned against the music-reader when, now, they are seeing one thing on the page and hearing another thing in the ensemble. It would be better to write just the pitches, which are usually laborious to teach by ear, whereas the rhythms alone usually can be taught by ear much more quickly and reliably.
A stretch perhaps, but the scenario Lasch fixates upon seems analogous: the dissonance between the normative schedule and the reality of childrearing feels that much more uncomfortable because the schedule is so neat, precise, clear, abstract; real-life deviations need not be so extreme, then, in order for extreme panic to set in.
Ditto the previous page, re: the medical doctrine of
eternal watchfulness and the early detection of symptomsand the notion, in TOH, that restrictions on smoking are just another misguided conceit to "progress." [[[Find this. Perhaps also relevant to Chomsky post]]] Surely there is a danger of stress and worry themselves causing health problems...but like, does he want people to die or something?
[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 an 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.