The Pursuit of Happiness

By R.Z.Sheppard

THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM: AMERICAN LIFE IN AN AGE OF DIMINISHING EXPECTATIONS

by Christopher Lasch; Norton; 268 pages; $11.95

Like a biblical prophet, Christopher Lasch appears at the gates of our culture with dire pronouncements: "Storm warnings, portents, hints of catastrophe haunt our times ... Defeat in Viet Nam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders ... As social life becomes more and more warlike and barbaric, personal relations, which ostensibly provide relief from these conditions, take on the character of combat ... a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class ... the Protestant virtues no longer excite enthusiasm ... The happy hooker stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success."

Hookers, happy or otherwise, do not necessarily lack the puritan virtues of hard work, thrift and capital accumulation. Nevertheless, Lasch, a history professor at Rochester University, legitimately finds cracks of doom in our sanguinity. His thunderings shrivel our "ironic detachment," his term for a sense of humor.

Professor Lasch is not amused by what he calls a "cultural radicalism": the decadence of American individualism. Its chief symptom: "The pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." The Narcissus of mythology, infatuated by his own reflection, pined away because he could not consummate self-love. Lasch's new narcissist has similar anxieties but feels no guilt. He has drunk the waters of progressive education and popular culture, and has little memory of traditional values and religious beliefs.

The narcissist may appear relaxed and friendly, but inside, claims Lasch, he is desperate for a meaning beyond himself. He is also a pent-up competitor for the approval and rewards of a distant authority figure. To the author, this authority is now vested in the bureaucratic state, which offers neither moral guidance nor philosophical distinctions between good and evil.

Lasch relies on classic psychoanalytic theory to buttress his argument. Boiled down, it might be stated that a once rugged and resourceful America is now seething with a destructive Oedipal rage masquerading as the pleasure principle. But the heart of Lasch's critique is an involved analysis of capitalism that cannot be reduced:

"Having overthrown feudalism and slavery and then outgrown its own personal and familial form, capitalism has evolved a new political ideology, welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance. It has evolved new modes of social control, which deal with the deviant as a patient and substitute medical rehabilitation for punishment. It has given rise to a new culture, the narcissistic culture of our time."

Lasch detects narcissism nearly everywhere, in the buzz words of the "human potential" movements, in the "pseudo needs" created by advertisers for restless consumers, in the adulation of celebrities whose only claim is that they are well known, in business and government that have a greater concern for credibility than for truth. He warns of creeping trivialization that downgrades history as nostalgia, and educators as socializers rather than conveyors of knowledge. Literature is trivialized by absurdists, emotions by promiscuity, and in the locker rooms of professional athletics, Lasch sniffs the odor of terminal degradation. Sport, once the arena of heroes and spiritual renewal, is now a stage for entertainers. The "dictum--'winning isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing,' " says Lasch, "represents a last-ditch defense of team spirit in the face of its deterioration."

The last distinguished academic to pack so much brimstone in his scholarship was Lasch himself in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). The Culture of Narcissism shares that book's formidable intellectual grasp and the kind of moral conviction rarely found in contemporary value-neutral history and sociology. But the book also shares the early work's redundancy and disjointedness.

Attempting to fit something as huge and varied as American culture onto a narrow Freudian couch is bound to strain credulity. Appropriated for sociology, the term narcissism sometimes seems as frustratingly insubstantial as Echo, the nymph who taunted Narcissus by repeating his words. Yet undoubtedly Lasch is on to something quite real. The est-thetes, the self-accredited sex therapists, the purveyors of cosmic consciousness and Buddhamatics, the pathetic zombies of Jonestown are not figments. Narcissism may not be a constant or universal disorder, but it is hard to deny that the horizons of millions of Americans have become the limits of themselves. Perhaps that has always been true, but not with so much legitimacy. Where else has the salutation "Goodbye," short for "God be with you," been replaced by "Have a nice day," and "Enjoy."

--R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt:

"ln order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own 'communities of competence.' Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead. In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody--in the guise of personal 'growth' and 'awareness'--the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse. The will to build a better society, however, survives, along with traditions of localism, selfhelp, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigor. The moral discipline formerly associated with the work ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the defense of property rights. That discipline--indispensable to the task of building a new order--endures most of all in those who knew the old order only as a broken promise, yet who took the promise more seriously than those who merely took it for granted."

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