Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
[91]
"For the Romantic poets in general, innocence was "valuable for what it might become," as Peter Coveney aptly puts it. With the Victorians, however, the emphasis shifted "toward the state of innocence itself, not as a resilient expression of man's potential integrity, but as something statically juxtaposed to experience, and not so much static as actually in retreat.
"This retreat found its definitive symbol in the deathbed scene, increasingly obligatory in novels aspiring to any sort of popularity, in which a child neglected, oppressed, or shamefully deserted by those who should have served as its protectors expires without a word of reproach—itself the ultimate reproach... In the world of Victorian and post-Victorian melodrama, innocence had only one role: to die as heartrendingly as possible. ...
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...it was Marie Corelli, in The Mighty Atom (1896), who most fully revealed its significance when she asked "whether for many a child it would not have been happiest never to have grown up at all." She advised her readers not to "grieve for the fair legions of beloved children who have passed away in their childhood," since "we know, even without the aid of Gospel comfort, that it is 'far better' with them so." The idea that children are better off dead casts an unexpectedly lurid light on the nineteenth-century cult of childhood, which held children up to adoration but denied them any compellingly imagined possibility of development, in which early experience would continue to inform adult perceptions. An impoverished view of adulthood, this ostensibly sympathetic view of childhood also falsified the very thing it purported to celebrate, attributing to children Peter Pan's wish "always to be a boy and have fun," a wish that only jaded, embittered adults could have conceived."
p. 122—
Our twentieth-century experience of imperial rivalries, international competition for markets, and global wars makes it hard for us to share the Enlightenment's conviction that capitalism would promote world peace. The comsopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive. "Benevolence," moreover—the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice—presents itself to us as a singlularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion. We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand—[123]
my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind"—leaves us a little cold.
It is important to remind ourselves, therefore, that cosmopolitanism and "benevolence" commended themselves, in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the fierce partisanship now blamed for two hundred years of religious warfare. Religious tolerance may have reflected a growing indifference to religion, but at least it held out the hope of peace.
p. 123 (footnote to above)—
Burke attacked "these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration," just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. "That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity."
p. 148—
ambivalence was a more appropriate response to progress than unyielding opposition or wholehearted approval. Indeed it was the only appropriate response, when progress was identified so closely with fate; and there is a certain heroism in the classical sociologists' determination to face unflinchingly facts that could not be altered, in their view, and to "bear the fate of the times like a man," as Weber put it. Weber's conception of the scientific vocation may have conceded too much to the view that science demands a rigorous abstention from moral judgment, but his warning against "academic prophecy" remains indispensable. "In the lecture rooms of the university," Weber insisted, no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity." It is impossible not to acknowledge the force of this, even for those who have seen Weber's ideal of heroic detachment degenerate into the familiar academic accommodation with political power that sides with the status quo, in effect, while disclaiming any intention of taking sides. "Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either.
p. 154—
The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital-
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ism in the West now has to be seen not as a stage in a rigid sequence of developmental stages—as it was seen not only by Marx but by the nineteenth-century sociologists as well—but as the product of a particular history, a unique conjunction of circumstances unprecedented elsewhere in the world and not likely to be repeated. A growing awareness that modern capitalism rests on a "particular history of political victories and defeats," in the words of Roberto Unger, and that these victories and defeats can no longer be dismissed as the mere enactment of a preestablished design," has generated growing dissatisfaction with "deep-structure social theories" in general, as Unger calls them, including not only Marxism but classical sociology and its twentieth-century offshoots. The "deeply entrenched necessitarian habits of thought" associated with the sociological tradition have by no means disappeared, as Charles Sabel reminds us; but they have become increasingly hard to defend.
One of the many difficulties that confront structural theories of history is the achievement of "modernization" under conservative direction—for example, in twentieth-century Japan, in later-nineteenth-century Germany under Bismarck, even to some extent in nineteenth-century England under Disraeli. Industrialism, it appears, can take place without a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and political power. Social theorists in the nineteenth century almost all shared the belief, stated in its classic form in Tocqueville's study of American democracy, that the "irresistable" growth of equality had "all the chief characteristics" of a "providential fact," since it was "universal" and "durable" and "eluded all human interference." They argued about whether equality was consistent with order and freedom, but most of them agreed with Tocqueville that "the revolution . . . in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men" was giving rise to a new order in which "great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown"—in short, to a condition of "universal uniformity."
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Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and Western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully-developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocractic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by the right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes
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with a good deal of exaggeration, " . . . runs counter to deeply grooved mental reflexes"; but an understanding of the "characteristic patterns of modernization" forces us to conclude that revolution is the better way.
That this conclusion rests on a tortured reading of history should be obvious at a glance. Early modern revolutions encouraged the growth of democracy, but the same cannot be said of the twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and other developing nations. The more we learn about these matters, the less we are likely to believe in "characteristic patterns of modernization." If there is such a pattern. it is surely western Europe whose history deviates from the norm. The Bolsheviks thought of themselves as modern-day Jacobins, but their revolution did not reenact the revolution in France. It was no more democratic than the autocratic programs of development instituted in Germany and Japan. Theirs too was a "revolution from above," as was Mao's revolution in China and Castro's in Cuba. If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above. Even in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, it was seldom greeted with enormous popular acclaim. On the contrary, it was greeted with enormous popular suspicion and often with open resistance.
Nor was this resistance—usually dismissed as mindless opposition to progress—necessarily misconceived. The subsequent history of industrial societies does not justify complacency about their capacity to assure an equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. The relationship between industrialism and democracy looks more and more tenuous and problematical. If we insist on a law of historical development, we might be justified in concluding that "societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly . . . hierarchical over time," in the words of Lawrence Goodwyn. "Supporting evidence is so pervasive," Goodwyn adds, "that this may now be taken as law"—a "direct counter-premise to the idea of progress."
p. 162—
The concept of modernization no longer dominates the study of economic development in the non-Western world; but the conceptually seductive images with which it is associated still color the West's view of its own history. ...
Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of
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the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions . Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state's dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry. Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family . The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systematic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.
Christopher Lasch on Orestes Brownson:
p. 185—"He conducted his self-education in public, in the pages of magazines written entirely by himself."
Yet another reminder that internet users did not invent such things but rather have been gifted more potent (not to say better) tools with which to pursue them.
(If these tools are in fact worse, perhaps it is because they seduce us into pursuing certain things at the expense of other things, whether this is good for us or not; and perhaps *this* is multiply determined both by emergent properties and by conscious+intentional design decisions by our new techbro overlords.)
No doubt the public performace element is itself Janus-faced and enigmatic. It is necessary, I think, to compel one to do one's best work, yet it also threatens the dissolution of the entire effort in self-styling and social pressure to conform; that is, in communication rather than exploration.
p. 208 (footnote)—
The growing acceptance of wage labor is only one indication of the narrowing of political debate in the twentieth century. Another indication is the narrowing of the kind of questions asked about work. In the nineteenth century, people asked whether the work was good for the worker. Today we ask whether workers are satisfied with their jobs. A high level of "job satisfaction" then serves to refute those who delpore the division of labor, the decline of craftsmanship, and the difficulty of finding work that
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might leave workers with a sense of accomplishment. The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want . Even so, investigations of "job satisfaction" and worker "morale" are hardly encouraging. The dream of setting up in business for yourself, even if it means long hours and uncertain returns, remains almost universally appealing.
p. 256 (footnote)—
if inner peace is the issue, then it will be objected that [Jonathan] Edwards's "angelic" morality, though it may not be irrelevant to all human concerns, remains irrelevant to social and political concerns. From a political point of view, we need to know what makes it possible for human beings to live together without cutting each other's throats, not what makes them happy. It was not Edwards, however, but Thomas Jefferson, that exemplar of eighteenth-century enlightenment, who introduced the question of happiness into our founding political charter... If it can be shown that Edwards had a deeper understanding of happiness than Jefferson did, that judgment has political implications of great importance. Perry Miller presumably had something like this in mind when he compared Edwards to another illustrious contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, and observed that "although our civilization has chosen to wander in the more genial meadows to which Franklin beckoned it, there come periods, either through disaster or through self-knowledge, when applied science and Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth seem not a sufficient philosophy of national life." Is it necessary to belabor the point that our own times, the closing decades of the twentieth century, are such a period?
p. 264—
This rugged little essay [Emerson, "Fate" (1860)], notwithstanding its Machiavellian view of fate and its Darwinian view of nature, ends in a conclusion worthy of Edwards: freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity. In this context, the more recognizably "Emersonian" elements in the essay take on an appearance quite different from anything we are led to expect by the standard picture of Emerson as a nineteenth-century Pangloss, doggedly trying to convince himself that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. The statement that "evil is good in the making" does not deny the existence of evil; what it denies is the possibility that we can abolish it. It is our refusal to admit limits on our freedom that makes limits evil in the first place, and the "beatitude" that finally enables us to accept those limits dissolves their power to dominate us and thus turns evil into good. The statement
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that fate "is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought" carries much the same meaning. The statement, finally, that "what is" not only "must be" but "ought to be" distinguished stoical resignation from joyous submission to an order of things that we can recognize even though it was not designed for our convenience or even for our edification, as "best" in some final sense. Emerson's completion of this pregnant phrase by the addition of "ought" to "is" transforms fate into providence.
As Melville understood, more clearly than most of Emerson's critics, this is "theology," Calvinist theology at that; but what Melville intended as a reproach might better be taken as a compliment. Emerson retains the moral realism of his ancestors, while discarding their anthropomorphic conception of God. If God is pure being, he can no longer be adequately characterized as a "sovereign," much less a "father." But neither can he be dispensed with. Only the acknowledgement that "what is must be and ought to be, or is the best," overcomes the tyranny of fate.
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
p. 286—
it would not be an exaggeration to say that the pragmatic test of truth first suggested itself to [William] James in the form of the familiar religious principle that the quality of belief makes itself known in its effects on the conduct of life.
And so, today, some health care workers won't get vaccinated. This pretty clearly evinces a low "quality of belief" in their own profession!
There are a few different conclusions one could draw from this. To my mind, the one which is most plausible, most salient, and least affected by the caveat that these medically initiated resisters are few in number, is this: cashing a paycheck and professional buy-in have become completely divorced from each other. "Plausible" because it is widely observable elsewhere; and "salient" because it is more parsimonious than a full-on conspiracy theory while carrying (this is my long-winded point) all of the same implications for the rest of us.
This is to say nothing about the wisdom or folly of these resisters. It is to say, rather, that as is so often the case, a proper conspiracy is superfluous here. One might conclude that these workers know something, from the inside as it were, that is driving their resistance. This I doubt in fact while nonetheless suspecting that the "divorce" alluded to above is functionally equivalent to it.
(I myself have felt very little anxiety about getting these particular shots; my anxiety is about the precedent that has been set by both the formal and informal mandates, and the fact that in my own case there was all-but-literally no choice; this owing entirely to non-government decision-makers who are functionally unaccountable to their marks. People who think this was all good and proper policy because it seems like the right thing to do this time have a lot of history to catch up on. Starting with this book would be a kind of shock treatment, probably unpleasant but ultimately very effective.)
p. 289—
The scientific worldview, he argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. The longing for deliverance from doubt, enshrined in the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy as the distinction between certitude and mere "opinion," had to be regarded not as the beginning of wisdom but as the product of a "weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can." Science, at least as it was construed by the Cartesian tradition of philisophy, had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. It betrayed an "excessive nervousness" in the face of possible error. Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. "Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer's exact position." It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life. The "agnostic rules for truth-seeking" laid down by "scientific absolutists" betrayed a timorous state of mind, an unwillingness to act, a suspension of judgment that ignored the whole field of religious experince and its testimony to the power of faith.
p. 311—
Sorel criticized Napoleon for introducing a merit system into the army, thereby weakening its revolutionary ardor. Such devices sapped heroism at its source.
[footnote to above]—
Note the religious parallel. Reformation theology, of the kind that influenced Edwards and Pascal (and ultimately Sorel himself, by way of Pascal), insisted that true virtue lay in indifference to rewards, celestial or otherwise. Religious liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to argue that God hands out rewards in strict conformity to merit. Meritocracy appeared to furnish the only rational principle of justice.
p. 312—
Sorel's idea of revolutionary violence bore little resemblance to the ideas advanced by later theorists of violence like Franz Fanon and Jean Paul Sartre, who stressed the purifying force of hatred. Sorel understood that although "hate is able to provoke disorder, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions, . . . it produces nothing." Like Emerson, a writer he probably never read, he believed that virtue alone makes something new. In the passage castigating Napoleon's ill-conceived army reforms, he added this eminently Emersonian thought: "The striving towards perfection, which manifests itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and proportional reward,
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constitutes the secret virtue which assures the continued progress of the world" (his italics). He found this virtue in soldiers, in inventors, in artists and craftsmen, and also in exemplary religious figures, whom he extolled with a fervor that may seem surprising in the author of Reflections on Violence.
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
p. 336—
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
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pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.
While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.
European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
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spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution.
***art+activism***
The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater . Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.
Similarly (if more mundanely), Cage saw the theatrical possibilities in existing musical performance conventions. But isn't noticing the theatrical possibilites in public life kind of like noticing that the forest or the lake or the Grand Canyon would make a great landscape painting?
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
p. 386—
Social theories derived from the Enlightenment, which assume that scientific mastery over nature ought to "exorcise" fear and awe and thus to make people feel more secure, cannot explain why so many of them feel more insecure than ever and find it tempting, therefore, to think of themselves as helpless victims of circumstances. Nor can such theories explain why the most effective resistance to the prevailing sense of helplessness, in recent years, has come from the very people having the best reason of all to identify as victims, namely the black people of the South, oppressed first by slavery and then by peonage, political disenfranchisement, and a vicious system of racial segregation. Culturally backwards by [Harvey] Cox's [a "Christain realist"] enlightened standards, Southern blacks lived in a culture full of "tribal residues"; yet they showed more confidence in the
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goodness of things—in the "existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness," in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.—than those who enjoyed fuller access to the fruits of scientific enlightenment.
The obvious conclusion here is that we just can't handle reality and need the fiction of religion just to equilibriate. i.e. Honesty and adjustment are themselves opposed, much like equality and liberty are opposed and irreconcilable in the liberal-tarian account of Western democracy. This is not too helpful...unless it's actually true.
Their experience in the South gave little support to a belief in progress; yet they seemed to have unlimited supplies of hope. They had every reason to sink into cynicism and despair, to accept exploitation passively, or on the other hand to throw themselves into a politics of resentment and revenge. Yet it was in the civil rights movement, launched by Southern blacks in the 1950s, that the "spiritual discipline against resentment" flowered in its purest form. Social theories that equate moral enlightenment with cosmopolitanism and secularization cannot begin to account for these things.
In his analysis of nonviolent coercion, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr predicted, with uncanny accuracy, that the "emancipation of the Negro race probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy." The world waited for "such a campaign with all the more reason and hope," he said, "because the peculiar spiritual gifts of the Negro endow him with a capacity to conduct it successfully.
Doesn't this contradict what immediately precedes it? How is it that the "adequate development of this kind of strategy" owed nothing whatsoever to "Enlightenment" thinking? The fallacy of incomplete evidence once again?
Niebuhr did not stop to analyze the source of those "spiritual gifts." If he had, he might have discovered additional evidence against the enlightened view that "organic unities of family, race, and nation" were "irrational idiosyncrasies" destined to be destroyed by a "more perfect rationality." The history of the civil rights movement indicates that the gifts Niebuhr admired originated in a way of life distinctive to Southern blacks. The movement's discipline against envy and resentment began to weaken when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to mobilize blacks in the North, where that way of life had broken down . It was precisely the "idiosyncrasies" of racial and regional identity, expressed in a highly idiosyncratic form of the Protestant religion (however "irrational" in comparison with more liberal versions), that sustained the spiritual resources—courage, tenacity, forgiveness, and hope—on which the movement drew so heavily. When civil rights agitation moved into the Northern ghettos, it had to address a constituency that was no longer shaped and disciplined by the culture black people had made for themselves in the South. Uprooted from its native soil, the movement withered and died.
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
p. 418—re: early 1920s series on the states by The Nation:
Condemnation of Southern backwardness, in a liberal weekly, might have been expected. More surprising was that a series conceived as an exploration of diversity so often ended by holding up a uniform standard of cultural progress, one measured by great works of art and notable achievements in science and technology. None of the contributors asked whether a new order in the South would not have to rest on traditions indigeneous to the region. None showed much interest in the requirements for a vigorous civic life, as opposed to the number of orchestras, art galleries, libraries, and universities. The implication was that "civilization," if it was ever to come to the South, would have to come from outside.
p. 419—
That states as different as Iowa and Massachusetts could prompt the same kind of disparagement suggests that the conventions underlying this disparagement had acquired a life of their own. The equation of civic culture with progress and enlightenment made it difficult to see anything but arrested development even in a state like New York, depicted by Charles F. Wood as a benighted region dominated by "fear and suspicion" of the modern world. ... "Resistance to change is their most sacred
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principle."
Right becomes left! Cultural Relativism is the inevitable destination of the populist. "Traditions indigenous to the region" may not be impugned! Actually, the problem is that they may not be specifically enumerated, at which point the possibility of "change" is seen to have been foreclosed from the outset by the prescription of "indegenous"-ness. Of course CL has a good point that imposing change top-down cannot be effective or just. But that leaves only one solution: peoples with incompatible "indigenous" traditions cannot live justly under a common government. They need to breakup. Sovereignty must dawn again. This seems to be the conclusion, at least, of much of the presently resurgent nationalism in the world.