#christopher lasch

It’s no accident that slogans like “speak your truth” dominate our discourse. When every truth is personal, no truth is public. Power thrives on that. A thousand private “truths” make no threat to the single bureaucratic order that quietly manages them all."

Poetic Outlaws :: @OutlawsPoetic

In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment.

"La démocratisation de la culture, si l’on en croit cette opinion dominante, exigerait au préalable un programme éducatif ou un processus social (ou les deux) capable d’arracher les individus à leur contexte familier, et d’affaiblir les liens de parenté, les traditions locales et régionales, et toutes les formes d’enracinement dans un lieu. Aux Etats-Unis en particulier, la liquidation des racines a été considérée comme la condition essentielle du développement et de la liberté. Les symboles dominants de la vie américaine, la "frontière" et le melting pot, incarnent, entre autres choses, cette croyance selon laquelle seuls les déracinés peuvent accéder à la liberté intellectuelle et politique."

In questa cultura la libertà consiste nella possibilità di scegliere tra un marchio e l’altro, che di fatto sono indistinguibili, ma all'apparenza sembrano concorrenti, come effetto della pubblicità che dà l’illusione di una varietà invitante, la quale, in ordine alle scelte di vita, si esprime in amanti intercambiabili, amicizie intercambiabili, lavori intercambiabili. Là infatti dove i rapporti personali seguono lo schema dei prodotti pubblicizzati, che irradiano intorno a sé scenari di possibilità illimitate, la scelta non implica più impegni e conseguenze, perché tutto, dalla scelta di un amico a quella di un amante o di una carriera, può essere suscettibile di una cancellazione immediata, non appena si presentino opportunità al­l’apparenza più vantaggiose. "

* Ch. Lasch, The Minimal Self (1984); tr. it. L’Io minimo, Feltrinelli, Milano 1985, p. 24.

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not [as] the promise of a secular utopia that would bring history to a happy ending, but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at all. The expectation of indefinite, open-ended improvement, even more than the insistence that improvement can come only through human effort, provides the solution to the puzzle that is otherwise so baffling-the resilience of progressive ideology in the face of discouraging events that have shattered the illusion of utopia.(20)

Americans talk about progress with an odd kind of reverence. Progress is the unstoppable force pushing human affairs forward. And it's a religion with a simple premise: Except for the random detour, civilization instinctively changes for the better. And it's up to us to get on board or get out of the way; to be part of the change or to get run over by history if we try to obstruct it. Hence we Catholics are routinely warned that we're on the wrong side of history. Critics tell us that our view of human nature, especially human sexuality, will one day be treated with the same enlightened scorn as the so-called scientific racial theories of a century ago.

Of course, such voices tend to gloss over the fact that it was "progressives" who pushed those racial theories-theories that led to massive suffering abroad and vulgar bigotry here at home. In the name of progress, activists like Margaret Sanger vigorously promoted contraception and eugenics. In order for the world to improve, their logic went, we need the wrong kind of people-people from the wrong kinds of races-to stop having babies. Sound familiar?

This idea of progress does have its appeal. As the economist Sidney Pollard put it: "The world today believes in progress because the only alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair."(21) We might go a step further: Clinging to a belief in progress is actually a product of despair, generously seasoned by sloth. History is cruel, social change is difficult, and a relationship with God involves a lot of unpleasant truth-telling-especially about ourselves. Better to just shift the burden of living in a flawed world at an imperfect time onto some positive force that will bring about the change we want "some" day.

It's a heartwarming delusion. But that's all it is: a delusion. A brief glance at the twentieth century destroys the myth. In just a few decades, "progressive" regimes and ideas produced two savage world wars, multiple murder ideologies, and the highest body count in history. And yet, as Christopher Lasch noted, people still cling to the religion of progress long after the evidence wrecks their dream.

The cult of progress is the child not only of despair, but also of presumption. It's a kind of Pelagianism, the early Christian heresy that presumed human beings could attain salvation by their own efforts without the constant help of grace. Hence the philosopher Hans Blumenberg says that what separates the progressive idea of history from the Christian one is "the assertion that the principle of historical change comes from within history and not from on high, and that man can achieve a better life 'by the exertion of his own powers' instead of counting on divine grace."(22)

While we can and should work for social improvement—an obviously worthy goal—we're too riddled with sin to ever build paradise on earth. As Benedict XVI put it, authentic progress doesn't come automatically. In every age, human freedom must be weaned over to the good.(23) And because our freedom can be used for good or evil, progress is always ambiguous:

Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil-possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (see Eph 3:16 and 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.(24)

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(19) Quoted in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 43.

(20) Ibid., 47-48. In a similar way, the French political theorist Pierre Manent describes the way in which we want to be modern but lack a robust conception of what modernity actually entails. This leaves us striving toward a goal that we don't fully understand and never fully determine. See Manent, "City, Empire, Church, Nation: How the West Created Modernity," City Journal, Summer 2012.

(21) Quoted in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 42.

(22) Quoted in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 45.

(23) “Since man always remain free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitely established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise.; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined - good - state of the world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all” (Spe Salvi, no. 24).

By stepping into the Peripshere, a new world would be unveiled to you. Inside, a diorama of a future utopian city was constructed called “Democracity.” It was designed to be inhabited by a million and a half people, covering 11,000 square miles.

Trylon and Perisphere, along with Democracity inside, were the symbolic heart of the Fair. But the branding behind it all was intentional for more reasons than one would initially assume. The idea was created by the Fair’s publicity director, Edward Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s cousin, known as the man chiefly responsible for bringing his psychoanalytic theories to the United States during the 1920s.

While Sigmund himself fell into despondency in Europe after World War I, Bernays became widely successful in the United States. Using ideas of the unconscious, he quickly gained a reputation as someone who could conjure up mass public opinion for products and issues like no one else. While his later critics likened it to “manipulation,” Bernays himself called it “public relations,” a term he coined.

Yet, reading his work, one finds a deeply cynical man. Bernays rationalized his activities by arguing that the management of mass desire was preferable to the alternative—that is, “letting the unconscious run wild” with its repressed urges. If these dark forces were actually unleashed, he believed, they could undo society itself. Consumerism was hence viewed as a bulwark against the primitive mind of the crowd, and managing its desires was rationalized as necessary in saving society against itself. As he stated openly in his work Propaganda (1928), “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” He was therefore one of the first theorists of what can be called "managed democracy."

Whether he really believed in his own rationalization or not, Bernays did become incredibly wealthy from his services. By the late 1920s, he was “living in a suite of rooms in one of New York’s most expensive hotels, where he gave frequent parties.” According to an employee of Bernays, the events were a “who’s who” of the business elite, the arts, media leaders, and the mayor himself. In due time, his clients also included those within politics and the state. He became a "sort of magician" of public opinion, even though he openly viewed this same public with open contempt. Given his reputation, it was unsurprising that Bernays was tapped for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Given that the American public was just coming out of the Great Depression, it was known that the reputation of “big business” in the United States was at historic lows. By framing the World’s Fair through the prism of desire, Bernays sought to rehabilitate this perception by giving Americans an open door—one that they themselves did not even know they wanted. Bernays’s daughter confirms this aspiration of his in an interview with Adam Curtis for his documentary A Century of the Self (2002).

Anna Bernays: To my father, the World’s Fair was an opportunity… Capitalism in a democracy, democracy and capitalism in marriage. It was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went together.

Adam Curtis [continues]: The vision it portrayed was of a new democracy in which businesses responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was a form of democracy that viewed people not as active citizens… but as passive consumers… [which] Bernays believed was the key to control in a mass democracy.

As Curtis makes clear, this thinking reached its symbolic high point at the 1939 World’s Fair. A democratic vision was then constructed by its very own skeptic, someone who viewed democracy as nothing other than a form of social management. Historian of public relations, Stewart Ewen, summarized this view in an interview with Adam Curtis:

“It’s not that the people are in charge, but that the people’s desires are in charge. The people exercise no decision-making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and if you can trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.”

At the end of the century, the consequences of this vision would be criticized by writer Christopher Lasch. Published after his death in 1994, Lasch wondered whether American democracy was now merely living off the “borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism." Lasch was a critic of the kind of managed democracy that began to emerge around Bernays's time. By the 1990s, the consequences had become self-evident: when Lasch was writing, civic participation had sunk to its lowest point since World War II.

Perhaps this long trajectory—triumphantly advertised as a "new horizon" at the 1939 World’s Fair—helps explain why the state’s competency and ability to execute basic functions has deteriorated so badly in our own time. Needless to say, Bernays's model of managed democracy was not exactly resilient and built to last.

Decades later during the 1970s, optimism would dry up amid scandal as institutional trust collapsed, exposing the hollowness of this consumer model of democracy outright for the first time. The fact that the United States has still not recovered from that “crisis of confidence” is not accidental: the ultimate outcome of a Bernaysian model of managed democracy is not renewal amid crisis, but rather an entrenchment of its old managerial ways, because it has so little of an active public to draw upon.