Book Returns
Near Prophet
Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism
by William Murchison
We might suppose the plight of prophets to be entirely physical. Not by any means. Another kind of danger comes safety-pinned to the prophet’s mantle—that of being dimly understood, if understood at all. Consider Christopher Lasch.
When Lasch’s instantly famous The Culture of Narcissism came out in 1979, I asked our newspaper’s editorial cartoonist to illustrate my editorial page review of it. He produced a sketch of a blonde hunk preening and twittering in the bathroom mirror. It was a cute piece of art that illustrated what readers understood then and still understand by “narcissism”: to wit, self-adoration of the sort by which the original Narcissus came a cropper.
Explaining Jeremiah
In fact, Lasch had launched a sharp attack on the culture of his day: its fixation on therapy, “the banality of the social order,” the breakdown of family, the spread of distrust. And so on. Tom Wolfe, then writing about the “me decade,” had come at the matter from a different, sprightlier angle. The outlook of the two eminent social critics fused neatly enough; their missions—the one scholarly, the other journalistic—stayed distinct.
More than a few reviewers saw Lasch, professor of American history at the University of Rochester, as a modern Jeremiah, howling at the corruptions of the day. (How many had actually read Jeremiah at the time is a topic that might support at the least an M.A. thesis.)
If not a full-fledged, finger-shaking, garment-rending Old Testament type, Lasch was a powerful explainer, and in the 1970s people wanted explanations of the considerable mess the world seemed to have made of itself. People magazine came calling at Lasch’s home, seeking insights.
Jimmy Carter, America’s preacher-in-chief, five years after Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency, was endeavoring to explain to Americans already fretting over stagflation and national decline why they now were waiting in long lines to buy gasoline. He convoked a summit of thinkers and policy leaders, including Lasch, and pumped them dry of insights; these insights and warnings he retailed, not naming names, in his much-ridiculed “malaise” address of July 15, 1979.
“Too many of us,” the president admonished, “tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption”— and, partly to make up for it, ought to “park [our] cars one day a week.” Lasch thought that although Carter made some good points, he leaned too heavily on the country’s most dedicated workers.
The following year, the American Book Award came Lasch’s way. He refused it. “I didn’t like the celebrity status that I had inherited somehow,” he later said, because it “gives priority to commercial success”—which wasn’t the point of the book-writing enterprise.
Lasch somehow survived these varied impositions of fate. He survived, not least, because he had written a solid and thoughtful book. The Culture of Narcissism, though somewhat thick with sociological and psychoanalytic vocabulary, holds up well indeed: certainly better than the works of pop prophecy that abounded in those days, e.g., Charles Reich’s The Greening of America and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.
William Murchison a syndicated columnist, is author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books).
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