Naomi, you know I read this quote, and I'm going to specifically comment on it here as well as a note. For anyone reading this in notes, these are Lasch's words, not Naomi's!
"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."
I find that this firms my belief that sentimentality and the big grand emotions found in things like Opera and fairytales are more necessary than ever. Why dissect the little minutiae of every day life where we are boxed in, with emotions kept on a leash to be societally functional, in our fiction/storytelling? When instead we could let out shrieking wails of sorrow that encapsulate how absolutely demented our world has become? Instead of rage, feel other things more deeply and reconnect with your humanity!
At least, that's how I see things... ;D You do wonderful work Naomi, and you have a forever reader in me, of course.
Oooh! Quote reader!!! Wow, you would likely love this book--honestly who wouldn't love it? The intended audience for this book is everybody, because everybody can enjoy these kinds of sentiments.
First-time commenter, so I first want to let you know how much I've been enjoying your essays. A real pleasure. Second, re the quote, I read until the last clause of the first sentence and then, skipping to the bottom, saw your expectant note saying "See? I told you."
Absolutely! As a reader, I clip/save/bookmark these lines. They're like significant moments in the dialogue I'm having with the book. But as someone else's quote? I really do just trust the writer to have not messed up the gist, and they don't hold my interest nearly as much. I hadn't really noticed how much this is so, but it feels very true.
Seeing the comments on this piece, I do think from now on I will include at least one quote. It is good to give a sample of the writing. Maybe I'll do it in a footnote. Definitely nice to have, but too much really interrupts the flow.
Lasch is a pretty important thinker. I first read him because I would go around grumbling about stuff related to politics and liberalism and my dad would go, hey, you should read Christopher Lasch. Then I wouldn't, and then I'd complain about some other thing, and my dad would go, hey, I think you'd really like Lasch. Basically my dad is much smarter than me and when I think I have an original insight, he tells me the person I should read that had the insight before me. So I picked up The Culture of Narcissism and what do you know, he was right, all of those vague feelings and half formed ideas I'd had were then articulated. I'm not saying he doesn't get some things wrong or he shouldn't be taken uncritically, but his critique of liberalism is essential whether you agree with it or not. I also get that some people are wary of him because he's been co-opted by some on the right, but that's selling him short and simplifying his ideas. In the 60's he was considered a Marxist, for example. And yes, I read the quote!
I don't know if he is actually an important thinker. There's a lot of critique, but no solution! He doesn't do the work of thinking--is there actually something better? His answer seems to be "no", but he doesn't say so, which seems a bit dishonest
I see your point, but I guess I'm not expecting him to offer a solution, just to elucidate contemporary society. When I say he's important I mean in the sense that his ideas are still relevant and talked about, both in academia and in popular media.
This is a timely review for me - I'm just starting this book now.
I was actually opening Substack to post a quick note about this book, so I will now leave it here instead, where it is relevant. Lasch wrote, way the hell back in 1979: "Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the 'psychological man' of the twentieth century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Therapists, not priests or popular preachers or self-help or models of success like the titans of industry, become his principal allies in the struggle for composure; he turns to them in the hope of achieving the modern equivalent of salvation, 'mental health.' Therapy has established itself as the successor both to rugged individualism and to religion..."
My point being: we think all the hot takes of the internet about therapy speak or woke or whatever are keeping us up to date on important contemporary cultural trends, but you can read about all of them in books from 40 years ago. Nothing is that new. You don't need to "keep up." Spending time reading on the internet over reading books is not about it being more current, it's mostly just about the addiction algorithms and simulated "interaction" of commenting and liking. Everybody just go read books and talk to your homies about them (he ironically comments on Substack...)
Hi Naomi. I am a complete stranger living in Toronto, and I enjoy your blog! I enjoyed this piece, I recently had a long argument with a Lasch-adjacent friend of mine, which we both found a baffling and frustrating experience, so I enjoyed your insight about how there can be a tension if the reader is expecting a policy prescription, but the writer does not provide one. That very dynamic played out in our conversation. I also recently shared your piece about "should writers read The Great Books" with a writer friend of mine, as a springboard for discussion.
All this is to say that I am enjoying your writing, so if you are wondering why you are doing this I hope that provides some small measure of gratification to you :) (this does of course raise the question of why I am not a paid subscriber, unfortunately if I subscribed for every Substack I read I'd be in for several hundred dollars a month, I've gotten around that by temporarily subscribing to one or another blog that is really floating my boat).
(and yes I did read the quote at the end, but your exhortation to read it probably played a part :)
Lol do not worry one bit about not being a paid subscriber. I do not prioritize getting those subscriptions, so I think you are likely responding accurately to the fact that it's not that important to me and I don't really need the money :)
I read the first part of the quote, then skimmed the rest. I guess I felt like I got the idea — as you say, this sort of thing is all over Substack and media outlets.
What is the emotional weight that you think Lasch carries with your friends? You didn’t explain that, and I’m curious!
They think he's associated with Christian nationalism, essentially. Like, people who like Lasch also often advocate for efforts to make America more explicitly Christian and to use the legal system to enforce Christian values.
Well written! Christopher Lasch is a bit of an enigma. He at once argues for decentralization and democracy but also seems to frequently make un-elaborated upon assertions that are contrary to his broader points. First of all, I agree that decentralization and democracy are effective, Proof of their power can be found in within United States history: when looking a the history of the United States: the Populist Era and the Progressive Era were highly populist periods. These eras utilized democratic governance structures, such as mass member parties, to design and construct public policies in a decentralized manner. Various elements across the country acted independently and often without central coordination, leading to the creation of policies that were broadly beneficial and highly successful. During these periods, populist movements managed to design and construct reformatory public policies in areas such as business regulation, scientific research organizational reform, labor rights, public health, and education, these multidecadal and highly populist eras prove the potential for populism to operate within democratic frameworks and yield positive outcomes.
I don’t know what to make of Christopher Lasch, this is because while he says much I agree with he then (or an editor?) drops these sorta suspicious and highly dubious self refuting points that come straight out of the propaganda book of those the rest of the book is arguing against. For example: on page 227 of “The Culture of Narcicissm” he writes: “It goes without saying that such solutions do not commend themselves to members of the policy-making establishment. Measures of this kind are too closely associated with populism, local- ism, and residual resistance to centralized progress. They have become doubly objectionable, and for reasons the force of which even enemies of the establishment must acknowledge, in the wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battle of the late sixties, when " community control " degenerated into reverse racism and education into racial propaganda.” This is a very dubious statement, the assertion that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict degenerated into "reverse racism" and "racial propaganda" is deeply reductive and completely misses the multidimensional nature of the event, the legit grievances and goals of the local community, the broader socio-political context in which it occurred, and most importantly the positive outcomes and changes that were obtained through community control.
In another book (I forget where) he says populists when he wrote it have no program, only the same “nostrums” about the money supply. What “nostrum” are these he won’t say. There were many groups of populists during the Populist and Progressive Eras, was the monetary policy ideas of the ONLY ones he ever seems to refer, the different agrarian ones of the second half of the 19t century, because if so, their desire for bimetallism made a lot of sense for them and I would argue for the rest of the country given that the USA was in a multidecadal period of deflation WHILE having wam bam productivity growth, in its later phases this deflation had become very constraining. But whether one agrees or not, its certainly not a “nostrum”. OR, since he was writing that in the late 1980s, was he talking about the people from the mid west who wanted money supply in the early and mid 1980s? Because if so, well they had just gone through the worst and most economically damaging heat wave in US history (to this very day) an then a centralized fed constrained money supply everywhere which knocked them (them particularly but the gigantic interest rate hikes of the 80s hurt a lot of other different people) very hard. Which one was it, or was it some other people/idea/whatever that he’s referring to? We can’t know because Lasch simply wouldn’t say.
Also, why does he only mention some specific agrarian ones when most of the instances of populism of the highly populist Populist Era and the highly populist Progressive Era occurred in cities, especially the largest ones like Chicago and NYC?
And he several times would drop (again undefended one liners) statements of to the effect that you can’t have any decentralization in a modern econmy, but it could be argued its actually EASIER in the key ways to have that now. I would bet big against small that the contemporary world can have political and economic decentralization without every local area being a true autarchy (which I'm guessing Lasch was referring to? Or he believes in things related to economies of scale and how those economies distribute across various sectors and their subcomponents, which he holds quite dearly? It wouldn't be desirable to make the world very disconnected anyway) and have far more economic and scientific redundancy than we do now, enough to far more widely spread opportunity and empowerment and thus opportunities for innovation and progress and chances for peace and civilizational progress. Since no place would be autarkic and, despite the political and economic shielding that made this possible, they would still be in both competition and cooperation with each other, and as such, the whole world could benefit from the far, far greater amounts of innovations and advancements that emerged across art, science, engineering—everything really. But would Lasch have even been willing to debate it, I’m open to being wrong.
You write so smoothly that I cruised right through a piece about a book I've already tried to read and couldn't because . . . I don't know why, just too abstract and theory-heavy and doesn't hold my interest. I earnestly tried to read these kind of books in college at the height of my intellectual power. (I'm quite dumb now).
But I do read quotes and like them in fiction reviews, or reviews of history books or other non fiction. But you're right I could not get through that particular quote at the end.
The book is very Freudian! If you haven't read Freud and aren't into this framework, it might not be the right book. Other writers say the same stuff but use different angles, like Riesman coming from a sociology angle. But also...this is all stuff we already know! From reading the Atlantic! So is it really essential? Who can say?
I wrote my gymnasium thesis on The Culture of Narcissism and Egil Skallagrimson's Saga. My point was that Egil actually have many of the traits of a modern narcissist (he is very occupied with how others see him, he is often seething with rage, he is in conflict with the norms of his society and he cares so little about for his own family that he buried his accumulated treasures instead of allowing his relatives to inherit them). The old Icelanders saw a tragic hero in such a person, in the modern world he becomes a character we can look down on since he will never have to face true mortal dangers because of his character flaws.
Oooh that sounds like a good thesis. I find the family sagas are the most contemporary feeling of the pre modern books. A lot of things in the sagas feel very similar to the psychology of the modern person (for instance the depression in Harvard's saga)
Interesting quote about emotion, especially the lack of passion (!). I’m reading bell hooks on love, from 2001, and it feels like an equally strange jump in time and emotion.
Naomi, this is interesting, but your headline (which is funny, a little snarky) seems completely at odds with your conclusion (which strikes me as rather original). " The Culture of Narcissism is much superior, in terms of making you feel better about yourself, to any self-help book or spiritual tome." That's not about feeling "superior to other people."
Naomi, you know I read this quote, and I'm going to specifically comment on it here as well as a note. For anyone reading this in notes, these are Lasch's words, not Naomi's!
"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."
I find that this firms my belief that sentimentality and the big grand emotions found in things like Opera and fairytales are more necessary than ever. Why dissect the little minutiae of every day life where we are boxed in, with emotions kept on a leash to be societally functional, in our fiction/storytelling? When instead we could let out shrieking wails of sorrow that encapsulate how absolutely demented our world has become? Instead of rage, feel other things more deeply and reconnect with your humanity!
At least, that's how I see things... ;D You do wonderful work Naomi, and you have a forever reader in me, of course.
Oooh! Quote reader!!! Wow, you would likely love this book--honestly who wouldn't love it? The intended audience for this book is everybody, because everybody can enjoy these kinds of sentiments.
First-time commenter, so I first want to let you know how much I've been enjoying your essays. A real pleasure. Second, re the quote, I read until the last clause of the first sentence and then, skipping to the bottom, saw your expectant note saying "See? I told you."
That's what I thought! But if you read this book, you would love this quote. It's just different to read a whole book, right?
Absolutely! As a reader, I clip/save/bookmark these lines. They're like significant moments in the dialogue I'm having with the book. But as someone else's quote? I really do just trust the writer to have not messed up the gist, and they don't hold my interest nearly as much. I hadn't really noticed how much this is so, but it feels very true.
Seeing the comments on this piece, I do think from now on I will include at least one quote. It is good to give a sample of the writing. Maybe I'll do it in a footnote. Definitely nice to have, but too much really interrupts the flow.
Lasch is a pretty important thinker. I first read him because I would go around grumbling about stuff related to politics and liberalism and my dad would go, hey, you should read Christopher Lasch. Then I wouldn't, and then I'd complain about some other thing, and my dad would go, hey, I think you'd really like Lasch. Basically my dad is much smarter than me and when I think I have an original insight, he tells me the person I should read that had the insight before me. So I picked up The Culture of Narcissism and what do you know, he was right, all of those vague feelings and half formed ideas I'd had were then articulated. I'm not saying he doesn't get some things wrong or he shouldn't be taken uncritically, but his critique of liberalism is essential whether you agree with it or not. I also get that some people are wary of him because he's been co-opted by some on the right, but that's selling him short and simplifying his ideas. In the 60's he was considered a Marxist, for example. And yes, I read the quote!
I don't know if he is actually an important thinker. There's a lot of critique, but no solution! He doesn't do the work of thinking--is there actually something better? His answer seems to be "no", but he doesn't say so, which seems a bit dishonest
The True and Only Heaven is something like Lasch's "last word"... anyway iirc it was his final book
I see your point, but I guess I'm not expecting him to offer a solution, just to elucidate contemporary society. When I say he's important I mean in the sense that his ideas are still relevant and talked about, both in academia and in popular media.
Skipped the quote. Went back to read it. Preferred reading your summary of the book. For me, it was a good decision to relegate it.
This is a timely review for me - I'm just starting this book now.
I was actually opening Substack to post a quick note about this book, so I will now leave it here instead, where it is relevant. Lasch wrote, way the hell back in 1979: "Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the 'psychological man' of the twentieth century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Therapists, not priests or popular preachers or self-help or models of success like the titans of industry, become his principal allies in the struggle for composure; he turns to them in the hope of achieving the modern equivalent of salvation, 'mental health.' Therapy has established itself as the successor both to rugged individualism and to religion..."
My point being: we think all the hot takes of the internet about therapy speak or woke or whatever are keeping us up to date on important contemporary cultural trends, but you can read about all of them in books from 40 years ago. Nothing is that new. You don't need to "keep up." Spending time reading on the internet over reading books is not about it being more current, it's mostly just about the addiction algorithms and simulated "interaction" of commenting and liking. Everybody just go read books and talk to your homies about them (he ironically comments on Substack...)
Hi Naomi. I am a complete stranger living in Toronto, and I enjoy your blog! I enjoyed this piece, I recently had a long argument with a Lasch-adjacent friend of mine, which we both found a baffling and frustrating experience, so I enjoyed your insight about how there can be a tension if the reader is expecting a policy prescription, but the writer does not provide one. That very dynamic played out in our conversation. I also recently shared your piece about "should writers read The Great Books" with a writer friend of mine, as a springboard for discussion.
All this is to say that I am enjoying your writing, so if you are wondering why you are doing this I hope that provides some small measure of gratification to you :) (this does of course raise the question of why I am not a paid subscriber, unfortunately if I subscribed for every Substack I read I'd be in for several hundred dollars a month, I've gotten around that by temporarily subscribing to one or another blog that is really floating my boat).
(and yes I did read the quote at the end, but your exhortation to read it probably played a part :)
Lol do not worry one bit about not being a paid subscriber. I do not prioritize getting those subscriptions, so I think you are likely responding accurately to the fact that it's not that important to me and I don't really need the money :)
Excellent work, Naomi—I'm very glad you tackled this book, which more people should know about.
Yessss, read the quote/through to the end :)
“No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate.”
Emphasis on veracity and odious.
I read the first part of the quote, then skimmed the rest. I guess I felt like I got the idea — as you say, this sort of thing is all over Substack and media outlets.
What is the emotional weight that you think Lasch carries with your friends? You didn’t explain that, and I’m curious!
They think he's associated with Christian nationalism, essentially. Like, people who like Lasch also often advocate for efforts to make America more explicitly Christian and to use the legal system to enforce Christian values.
Well written! Christopher Lasch is a bit of an enigma. He at once argues for decentralization and democracy but also seems to frequently make un-elaborated upon assertions that are contrary to his broader points. First of all, I agree that decentralization and democracy are effective, Proof of their power can be found in within United States history: when looking a the history of the United States: the Populist Era and the Progressive Era were highly populist periods. These eras utilized democratic governance structures, such as mass member parties, to design and construct public policies in a decentralized manner. Various elements across the country acted independently and often without central coordination, leading to the creation of policies that were broadly beneficial and highly successful. During these periods, populist movements managed to design and construct reformatory public policies in areas such as business regulation, scientific research organizational reform, labor rights, public health, and education, these multidecadal and highly populist eras prove the potential for populism to operate within democratic frameworks and yield positive outcomes.
I don’t know what to make of Christopher Lasch, this is because while he says much I agree with he then (or an editor?) drops these sorta suspicious and highly dubious self refuting points that come straight out of the propaganda book of those the rest of the book is arguing against. For example: on page 227 of “The Culture of Narcicissm” he writes: “It goes without saying that such solutions do not commend themselves to members of the policy-making establishment. Measures of this kind are too closely associated with populism, local- ism, and residual resistance to centralized progress. They have become doubly objectionable, and for reasons the force of which even enemies of the establishment must acknowledge, in the wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battle of the late sixties, when " community control " degenerated into reverse racism and education into racial propaganda.” This is a very dubious statement, the assertion that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict degenerated into "reverse racism" and "racial propaganda" is deeply reductive and completely misses the multidimensional nature of the event, the legit grievances and goals of the local community, the broader socio-political context in which it occurred, and most importantly the positive outcomes and changes that were obtained through community control.
In another book (I forget where) he says populists when he wrote it have no program, only the same “nostrums” about the money supply. What “nostrum” are these he won’t say. There were many groups of populists during the Populist and Progressive Eras, was the monetary policy ideas of the ONLY ones he ever seems to refer, the different agrarian ones of the second half of the 19t century, because if so, their desire for bimetallism made a lot of sense for them and I would argue for the rest of the country given that the USA was in a multidecadal period of deflation WHILE having wam bam productivity growth, in its later phases this deflation had become very constraining. But whether one agrees or not, its certainly not a “nostrum”. OR, since he was writing that in the late 1980s, was he talking about the people from the mid west who wanted money supply in the early and mid 1980s? Because if so, well they had just gone through the worst and most economically damaging heat wave in US history (to this very day) an then a centralized fed constrained money supply everywhere which knocked them (them particularly but the gigantic interest rate hikes of the 80s hurt a lot of other different people) very hard. Which one was it, or was it some other people/idea/whatever that he’s referring to? We can’t know because Lasch simply wouldn’t say.
Also, why does he only mention some specific agrarian ones when most of the instances of populism of the highly populist Populist Era and the highly populist Progressive Era occurred in cities, especially the largest ones like Chicago and NYC?
And he several times would drop (again undefended one liners) statements of to the effect that you can’t have any decentralization in a modern econmy, but it could be argued its actually EASIER in the key ways to have that now. I would bet big against small that the contemporary world can have political and economic decentralization without every local area being a true autarchy (which I'm guessing Lasch was referring to? Or he believes in things related to economies of scale and how those economies distribute across various sectors and their subcomponents, which he holds quite dearly? It wouldn't be desirable to make the world very disconnected anyway) and have far more economic and scientific redundancy than we do now, enough to far more widely spread opportunity and empowerment and thus opportunities for innovation and progress and chances for peace and civilizational progress. Since no place would be autarkic and, despite the political and economic shielding that made this possible, they would still be in both competition and cooperation with each other, and as such, the whole world could benefit from the far, far greater amounts of innovations and advancements that emerged across art, science, engineering—everything really. But would Lasch have even been willing to debate it, I’m open to being wrong.
In short, who really was Christopher Lasch?
I read the quote. I mostly do. When I use them in a reviews it’s typically as flavour text-to give you a sense of the prose etc.
You write so smoothly that I cruised right through a piece about a book I've already tried to read and couldn't because . . . I don't know why, just too abstract and theory-heavy and doesn't hold my interest. I earnestly tried to read these kind of books in college at the height of my intellectual power. (I'm quite dumb now).
But I do read quotes and like them in fiction reviews, or reviews of history books or other non fiction. But you're right I could not get through that particular quote at the end.
The book is very Freudian! If you haven't read Freud and aren't into this framework, it might not be the right book. Other writers say the same stuff but use different angles, like Riesman coming from a sociology angle. But also...this is all stuff we already know! From reading the Atlantic! So is it really essential? Who can say?
oh! I'll check that out.
I wrote my gymnasium thesis on The Culture of Narcissism and Egil Skallagrimson's Saga. My point was that Egil actually have many of the traits of a modern narcissist (he is very occupied with how others see him, he is often seething with rage, he is in conflict with the norms of his society and he cares so little about for his own family that he buried his accumulated treasures instead of allowing his relatives to inherit them). The old Icelanders saw a tragic hero in such a person, in the modern world he becomes a character we can look down on since he will never have to face true mortal dangers because of his character flaws.
Also, I always read quotes, including this one.
Oooh that sounds like a good thesis. I find the family sagas are the most contemporary feeling of the pre modern books. A lot of things in the sagas feel very similar to the psychology of the modern person (for instance the depression in Harvard's saga)
Interesting quote about emotion, especially the lack of passion (!). I’m reading bell hooks on love, from 2001, and it feels like an equally strange jump in time and emotion.
Naomi, this is interesting, but your headline (which is funny, a little snarky) seems completely at odds with your conclusion (which strikes me as rather original). " The Culture of Narcissism is much superior, in terms of making you feel better about yourself, to any self-help book or spiritual tome." That's not about feeling "superior to other people."