Christopher Lasch's books are great (if you enjoy feeling superior to other people)

For years, nobody read my blog aside from friends and family, so I wrote about every writer with the same gee-whiz “Look what I came across” tone.

Nowadays, when it comes to certain authors, I’ve learned to put in some caveat’ing at the beginning. Because there are writers who other intellectuals think are genuinely dangerous. It’s not a big list, but it includes, say, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.¹ I don’t really think Lasch is on that list, or should be on it, but he’s definitely a writer that reactionaries and Christian Nationalist types could conceivably like (though I’ve no idea if they do). Certainly when I mention him to my friends, I get the kind of muted, wary response that makes me think his name carries a lot of emotional weight that goes beyond what’s actually in his books.²

Anyway, Christopher Lasch is a man who lived in the 20th-century. He wrote a number of books. The most famous one is The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations. This book came out in 1979, and I recently read and quite enjoyed this book, but I’ve struggled with how to talk about it.

Here’s the thing: when it comes to Christopher Lasch, I feel like the ideas themselves aren’t particularly original or well-conveyed. But…the books are extremely entertaining!

I don’t think they’re dangerous. And, I think you should read them as, well, entertainment. Because it’s fun.³ And if you haven’t encountered these ideas before (which perhaps some of you have not), then this is a fairly good introduction to them.

The Culture of Narcissism is a polemic. It’s doom and gloom stuff about how modern society has turned people into the shells of human beings.

The book is a Freudian analysis of the way that liberalism, with its dissolution of sources of value, has affected the human psyche. Because our society is unable to come to firm conclusions on which human choices are good and which ones are bad, human beings are left adrift. Their super-ego, which is in charge of moderating the impulses of their id, remains unformed. According to Lasch, the superego then takes on an extremely violent, self-lacerating quality, and human beings become riven by shame and self-hatred. The result is that people are at war with themselves—their only desire is to escape the shame they feel, but because they have no firm sense of value, they don't quite know how to do that, so instead they seek external acclaim and applause. But, because all they want is for others to value them, they are never satisfied, because there is no inner self for other people to truly know!

The culture of narcissism arises from this desire on the part of contemporary human beings to stop experiencing the pain of being ignored. The book is a description of the way that contemporary human beings seem to have an empty quality, where they engage in a lot of activity and say a lot of stuff, but their only purpose seems to involve getting other peoples’ attention.

This feels very much like things we've heard before! It's an argument quite similar to that in David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, which came out in 1950—a book Lasch cites quite frequently.

I find myself somewhat convinced. Lasch's aim is largely to demonstrate that this culture of narcissism is not just a condition of the sixties or the seventies or the eighties—it's not something that will rise and then recede. It's something that is inextricably tied up with how we live now.

In the middle of the 20th century, the new guy on the block was the corporation. People were just starting to accept that large numbers of Americans would be employed by these immense organizations that really don't value skill or enterprise, where the main way of getting ahead is through interpersonal politicking. At least in previous eras, you might succeed by mastering some new skill and building something—by starting a business, by gaining an education, by creating things that indisputably have some value. Nowadays that's become much harder. So it's impossible to feel secure or to feel like you have value. Success in a corporation is all about getting and managing peoples’ attention. You just need to seem like you’re in charge and are doing things.

Lasch believes in small enterprises, artisanship, handicrafts, etc—people making things that they actually need and providing value in a concrete way for other people. But he kind of accepts that these things are dead. So he argues that only in the family can people feel secure in their place in the world. Mothers nurture kids. Dads steer the ship. Kids are told that they’re not in charge. Lasch’s conception of the ideal family is very Freudian—the parent’s job is to form the super-ego, so kids will have the voice of society inside them, guiding them for the rest of their lives. And they can then struggle against that voice and, in doing so, form their individual personality. Lasch writes very disapprovingly of the trend towards egalitarianism in families—the idea that nobody is in charge, and that kids get an equal say, etc. This strikes him as an abrogation of the essential duty of the parent.

He included no policy prescriptions in the two books I read (The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self), but my sense from some cursory googling is that Lasch somehow wanted the family to get rejuvenated.

But...the breakdown of the family is the result of capitalism. It's broken down because...you don't need to rely economically on your family anymore. When families work well, they still do work just as Lasch thinks they should. The question is—how often are families actually working well? And to say we need to reconstruct the family as a bulwark against capitalism seems kinda like saying, well...we need more small business, we need more artisans, we need everything to not be so mechanized and professionalized. You think you're providing a solution, but ultimately you're just describing the problem.

Lasch's ideas have become very popular.

Gnocchic Apocryphon

told me that Lasch actually got these ideas from another guy, Philip Rieff. I don't exactly know the genealogy, but I do know that ideas like those of Lasch appear all over Substack and in lots of influential journals (Compact, Tablet, and The Atlantic are the ones I'm thinking of). They're very interesting ideas. As diagnosis, they do seem to capture something.

Now...what is to be done?

Well, probably nothing. That’s the whole point of these books! These personality changes that Lasch et al find so repellent—they are an adaptation to our current economic system. And this economic system is the source of our prosperity. This economic system is the only reason eight billion people can live on the Earth. So…if there is a pathology is caused by that system, then this pathology will persist for as long as that system endures.

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Now…I question both the depth and breadth of that pathology. I recognize that these tendencies described by Lasch are real, but I do not think they are so widespread or severe that they make life unlivable.

It's nice to read Lasch, but I personally do not identify with the portrait he's painted of the modern psyche. I imagine most of his readers don't either! Like...I have beliefs. I have values. I definitely want praise and success, but I am also in touch with something timeless: the Great Books. I know that my stewardship of these books is valuable in itself.

When I look at my friends, most of them also seem to be in touch with something deeper than themselves. Something that they feel is worth living for.

Yes, some people in contemporary society do seem a bit empty, and I very much enjoy feeling superior to these people—It is this enjoyment that really what powers the appeal of a book like this. You read this book and think, "Yes, this book describes certain tendencies that I recognize as being true. But...I have overcome them. Obviously other people haven’t, and I am better than those people." And then you feel good! It's great. It's a lot better than all these self-help books that purport to actually help you improve your life. Lasch doesn't do that. You just read him, and you immediately feel great about yourself. No self-improvement needed!⁴

But still...that's why I'd classify the books as very sophisticated entertainment. I could provide quotes, but they're what you expect.⁵ The moment you start reading, you're like, I know what this is, and it's great. It's a wild ride, and I'm fully strapped in.

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I almost feel bad recommending these books because...are they really worth your time? It's not like when I read Leo Strauss, where even though he was controversial, and many of my readers disagreed with me, I felt confident in recommending Natural Right and History because I experienced the book as a fascinating revision of the typical story story about the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism. Strauss was so interesting because he seemed so sure of himself! So sure liberalism as we understand it was a false off-shoot, not at all related to Greek conceptions of liberty, and that contemporary liberalism should be discarded.

I disagreed with Strauss, but it didn't feel like mere entertainment.

With Lasch, the ideas do feel a bit insubstantial. I guess what's valuable is that Lasch is so insistent that what he calls 'narcissism' is not a temporary phenomenon. It's an inescapable part of modern life. I think that's true, and it's a good reminder.

So you might ask, “If it’s so insubstantial, why is Naomi even writing about this random mid-century book?” The answer is that I was feeling a lot of anxieties related to this Substack—just very typical social media stress where I worried this blog wasn’t getting enough attention and then felt bad for wanting more attention, which made me wonder why I was putting so much effort into what seemed at times like an empty, vainglorious exercise. So I was like…is there any book that can help me with this? Somehow I came across this book: The Culture of Narcissism. And it definitely did help me realize that, actually…what I do here is valuable in itself. Yes, it makes me feel like an empty clout-chaser, etc, but I am actually not that. I have integrity. This blog also has integrity.

This book helped me realize that! I truly mean what I say: The Culture of Narcissism is much superior, in terms of making you feel better about yourself, to any self-help book or spiritual tome. And I assume this ability to reassure the reader is precisely why the book has had some enduring success.

1. I wrote about Leo Strauss here.

Carl Schmitt was a political philosopher who became quite an active part of the Nazi regime. Earlier this year, I read his 1922 book The Concept of the Political. I’ve mentioned his work a few times in passing, but I don’t think I ever wrote about the book in depth. The funniest thing about this book is that it hinges on the idea that a liberal society won’t be able to convince anyone to fight for it. But…in truth, liberal societies are quite good at using the most powerful force in modern times (nationalism) to convince lots of people to fight on their nation’s behalf. Still, it was an interesting read, and I do think the core argument is somewhat true. Liberalism’s victory in the war of ideas was underpinned, at least in part, by its ability to hold its own on the battlefield.

2. At some point in this book review, I probably should’ve given you a lot of details about Christopher Lasch the man, but…I don’t know those details. He lived in the 20th-century. He was at some point a professor at the University of Rochester. He didn’t see fit to put a lot of personal biographical data in his books, and that stuff honestly doesn’t seem that germane to this post.

3. I’ve only read Minimal Self and Culture of Narcissism. He has another well-known book, Revolt of the Elites, which is all about how there’s this trans-national rootless cosmopolitan elite, with no sense of place, no loyalty to country, etc. I tried to read it, and I got about seventy pages into it, but the book didn’t really feel true to me, to be honest. I belong (if anyone does) to this class of people, and most of the people I know are very firmly rooted in a place (San Francisco), and we have very strong opinions about how this place ought to be run. We certainly do not feel some instinctive sympathy with some similar set of elites in, say, Taiwan or South Korea or India, etc. Those other elites might be great, but…we don’t really know them. We have very few opinions about them. Certainly we do not instinctively trust them. I dunno, the whole vibe of the book was off. Like…it just didn’t seem true! With Culture of Narcissism, you read it and you’re like…hmm...this seems true. With Revolt of the Elites, it didn’t.

4. Lasch doesn’t necessarily say some group of people is more or less narcissistic than others. The general vibe, too, is not that there’s any one group of narcissistic people—we are all narcissistic. We all share in this culture. But, as I said earlier, I don’t think Lasch (or any of his fans or readers) truly believe that we are all equally affected by these neuroses.

5. I went back and forth on whether to provide quotes in this piece, but I’ll be honest—contemporary book reviews are full of quotes, and I mostly skip them. A quote is mostly there for the purposes of providing receipts. A quote is a sign of diligence on the part of the reviewer—that they’ve done the work of actually finding something in the book that supports the supposition they’re making about it. But…the reader doesn’t actually read the quotes, because it’s very hard to actually understand and experience these quotes when they’re ripped from the context of the book as whole. Ultimately, you’re always trusting the reviewer that this book says what they claim it does.

Anyway, since I read mostly ebooks it’s quite easy for me to clip reams of quotes, and my file for The Culture of Narcissism is full of great ones. Here is a quote that encapsulates the book’s ideas and tone:

Twentieth-century peoples have erected so many psychological barriers against strong emotion, and have invested those defenses with so much of the energy derived from forbidden impulse, that they can no longer remember what it feels like to be inundated by desire. They tend, rather, to be consumed with rage, which derives from defenses against desire and gives rise in turn to new defenses against rage itself. Outwardly bland, submissive, and sociable, they seethe with an inner anger for which a dense, overpopulated, bureaucratic society can devise few legitimate outlets.

Did you actually read this quote? Or did you skip it? Please let me know.