Killing the Hippy In Your Head
Killing the Hippy In Your Head
Why Christopher Lasch is popular amongst Millennials
A spectre is haunting Millennial leftist thought - the spectre of moralism.
If you’ve read any prominent “dissident” or “dirtbag” left-wing intellectuals - from Angela Nagle to Amber A'Lee Frost - you’ve probably heard the name Christopher Lasch.
Lasch, a prominent American historian and social critic, who died in 1994, is being drawn upon by a new generation of socialist critics to revitalise thought for the 21st century.
Lasch’s work is a thorough critique of the unfolding of New Left movements regarding self-expression and identity from the 1960s. Lasch documented the evolution of the hippy into the yuppy, and the decline of American culture into atomisation and melancholy.
The following will provide an overview of some of Lasch’s key ideas and why this resonates with the Millennial left.
The ‘Me’ and ‘Now’ Generation
In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Lasch describes post World War II American culture as defined by a narcissistic personality disorder.
What Lasch is describing isn’t mere selfishness or hedonism, but a sense that one’s life is the only one that matters. He writes:
To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.
The countercultural drive to throw off old conventions and conformity has given rise to a sense of hollowness.
To fill this void, (post)modern man runs on a treadmill chasing after the ultimate goal of true self-actualisation and personal growth. He is aided in this goal by institutions of “organised kindness” - from humanist psychologies to “everyone is beautiful” advertising campaigns.
Because the focal point of life is our own brief time on this earth, we have lost our ability to sublimate our flimsy desires for a higher goal. Facts of life like old age, disease and death are experienced as grand tragedies.
Family, nature and our local community feel like constraints in modern culture, to be rejected if they hinder the expression of our authentic self. Institutions and culture must either reflect back our wishes and desires or be rejected wholesale. He notes:
Many young people are morally at sea. They resent the ethical demands of "society" as infringements of their personal freedom. They believe that their rights as individuals include the right to "create their own values," but they cannot explain what that means, aside from the right to do as they please. They cannot seem to grasp the idea that "values" imply some principle of moral obligation. They insist that they owe nothing to "society"--an abstraction that dominates their attempts to think about social and moral issues. If they con-form to social expectations, it is only because conformity offers the line of least resistance.
Lost is any sense of humility that one’s wishes may need to be tempered for the greater good. As Lasch puts it: “we demand too much of life, too little of ourselves”.
Absent also is the capacity for the sublime:
The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.
A New Cultural Elite
In The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1996, Lasch appears to document the rise of populist movements in opposition of to culturally liberal elite.
He notes the development of a new cultural class, existing within but not entirely composed of the economic elite, which is incapable of reflecting the values of the majority of Americans.
This cultural elite consists of the upper middle class who, particularly in Lasch’s time, may have been the first in their family to have gained a university education. They commonly work in journalism, public relations, academia, human resources, public health and government.
Inflicted with the same narcissistic personality flaws as the lower classes, this new elite focuses its attention on the removal of all barriers to advancement of racial and sexual minorities as well as women. For this elite: “democracy can mean only one thing: the defense of what they call cultural diversity.”
Freedom for this cultural elite is not the absence of legal or institutional restriction, but increased capacity to self-actualise. Economic inequality is sometimes discussed, but largely through racial or other identitarian struggles.
The bulk of the country is treated with suspicion for harbouring prejudices which constrain the project of cultural emancipation. In Lasch’s words “compassion has become the human face of contempt”.
The divide within America (and other countries) between cultural elites and the rest of the country is exacerbated by reproductive self selection. The days of bosses marrying their secretaries are over, cultural elites must match with other elites which share their values to instil on the next generation.
Meanwhile, driven by the same narcissistic drive as the elites, everyday citizens assert their wish to self-actualise in opposition to imposed cultural norms. The result, as we have seen recently, is the emergence of a strong populist politics. As Lasch notes:
Because [the cultural elite] equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
Getting Over Ourselves
Angela Nagle has argued that Christopher Lasch appeals to Millennial thinkers because they are acutely aware of “the destruction of popular institutions of social support and family sold as progress and individual freedom.”
We are the generation most beholden to free ourselves from social, religious and sexual constraints of the past. However for many, this liberation hasn’t improved our mental wellbeing.
Rates of anxiety and depression amongst young people are increasing. Indeed, the proliferation of “choices” in career, relationships, lifestyles and chosen families appears to exacerbate distress.
Many long for the old “constraint” of having one steady job over a lifetime as opposed to a proliferation of exciting and creative “gigs”.
The same could be said for our current dating market where finding the perfect match is such an existential burden that people are outsourcing to professional matchmakers or giving up relationships entirely.
We have lost all sense of place both historically and in nature. As Lasch writes:
Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.
Previous avenues for ego-dissolution or self-sacrifice from religious devotion to aesthetic appreciation and the awe of nature are problematised. We are now left with spiritual ‘self-improvement’, the ugly as beautiful and transhumanist fantasies of ‘bodily autonomy’.
Lasch can help us understand our current cultural malaise, allowing for a leftist politics without poisonous liberal culture. He encourages us all to aim higher, and position ourself against the cultural as well as economic elites, as he notes:
Ruling classes have always sought to instill in their subordinates the capacity to experience exploitation and material deprivation as guilt, while deceiving themselves that their own material interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole