The True and Only Heaven
was the first place in which Lasch tried to suggest, with some degree of comprehensiveness, a way out of the regrettable condition he thought the modern liberal view had
left us in. It is much the longest of his books, and it suffers from many of the faults one has come to associate with his work: it lingers pedantically on minor matters and dashes through major ones; it makes much of points almost everyone would concede and ignores obvious objections to its more controversial assertions; and it is written from a position that had hardened into something like dogmatism. Lasch was, after all, a writer who had argued that “all medical technology has done is to increase patients’ dependence on machines and the medical experts who operate [them]”;
21
that “new ideas of sexual liberation—the celebration of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexuality—spring from the prevailing fear of heterosexual passion, even of sexual intercourse itself”;
22
that the reliance on medical intervention during pregnancy “helped women in their campaign for voluntary motherhood by raising the cost of pregnancy to their husbands—not only the financial cost but the emotional cost of the doctor’s intrusion into the bedroom, his usurpation of the husband’s sexual prerogatives”;
23
that the imposition of child labor laws “obscured the positive possibility of children working alongside their parents at jobs of recognized importance”;
24
and that “the prison life of the past looks in our time like liberation itself.”
25
Like all of Lasch’s books,
The True and Only Heaven
was clearly designed to be responsive to contemporary anxieties—in this case, to concern about the ecological dangers that are bound, it seems, to accompany the spread of market economies across the globe. Lasch argued that if we continue to believe, as the religion of progress encourages us to believe, that somehow everyone in the world can be given the standard of living of a middle-class American, the planet will be used up long before we ever arrive at that dubious utopia. He was not the first person to sound this warning, but he did, as usual, sound it in a provocative manner.
By the time of
The True and Only Heaven,
Lasch had come to regard the belief in progress not as simply an interesting paradox in twentieth-century liberal thought, but as the dominant ideology of modern history. It is in the name of progress, he thought, that traditional sources of happiness and virtue—work, faith, the family, even an independent sense of self—are being destroyed; and he began
his book with an analysis of the false values of the modern liberal outlook, proposing, for each value or attitude to be rejected, an alternative. This discussion is filled with references to various thinkers and ideas, as is the case throughout
The True and Only Heaven;
but references to specific policies or social arrangements are scarce, so that the analysis has a theoretical or abstract cast. Lasch’s purpose, evidently, was to establish a vocabulary.
Lasch argued, as he had in his first book, nearly thirty years earlier, that liberals are optimists: they believe in an unlimited ability to provide for an ever-expanding array of human wants. A worthier sentiment, he felt, is “hope”—an acceptance of limits without despair (as he had described it in
The Minimal Self
). Liberals espouse a kind of Enlightenment universalism; they regard their truths as self-evident to all reasonable people, and therefore as applicable to everyone. He recommended instead an emphasis on particularism—a recognition of the persistence of national and ethnic loyalties. Nostalgia, he argued, is progress’s “ideological twin,”
26
since it is a way of thinking about the past that makes it seem irrecoverable, and makes change seem inevitable. He proposed “memory” as an alternative, a way of seeing the past and present as continuous. Instead of the modern conception of people as consumers, working only to provide themselves with the means to satisfy material wants, he suggested a conception of people as producers, working in order to acquire the virtues labor instills—among them independence, responsibility, and self-sufficiency And in place of “self-interest,” which defines the economic man of liberal individualism, he proposed “virtue,” which defines the citizen ready to take an active part in community life.
This much of Lasch’s argument, directed at the mentality that sees no limits to economic growth, and that understands the ends of social and economic policy to be simply the creation and satisfaction of more consumers, had a timely appeal. The collapse of the communist economies was greeted in some quarters, as Lasch in 1962 suggested it would be, as evidence of the inevitable global triumph of liberalism—the theoretically predicted “end of history,” in the catchphrase made popular by Francis Fukuyama. And on these
matters, as Lasch quite rightly pointed out, there is no longer an appreciable difference in mainstream American political thought between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The “New Right,” in this respect, proved a sham: Ronald Reagan was no less a worshiper of progress—no less an optimist, a nostalgist, a global crusader for the American way—than any classic liberal one might name.
Much of the attention Lasch’s book received when it appeared was therefore preoccupied with its attack on the “progressive” worldview; and the general terms that define the substitute worldview the book proposed are plainly attractive. Who would want to defend “optimism” against “hope,” “nostalgia” against “memory,” “self-interest” against “virtue”? So long as the discussion remains at this level of abstraction, there is very little to argue. But Lasch had a broader purpose: he had undertaken to reconstruct a political and moral tradition in which his “alternative” values are rooted. This tradition he called “populism,” and it is not possible to engage his argument in a serious way without confronting the challenges that this tradition makes (or that Lasch understood it to make) to modern liberal assumptions.
Lasch meant by “populism” something more than the late-nineteenth-century political movement the term ordinarily denotes. Indeed, the book contains very little discussion of William Jennings Bryan, for instance, or of the Southern populist leader Tom Watson.
27
The populist tradition Lasch described has been transmitted through an oddly assorted sequence of thinkers. These thinkers all share one attitude, of course: an antagonism to the modern liberal outlook as Lasch had defined it. This may express itself in an appreciation for the “civic virtues”—the virtues derived from personal independence, political participation, and genuinely productive labor; in an acceptance of “fate” (one of the book’s key terms) and of the idea of limits; or in an admiration for a set of characteristics that Lasch identified with lower-middle-class, or “petty-bourgeois,” culture: moral conservatism, egalitarianism, loyalty, and the struggle against the moral temptation of resentment (that is, the capacity for forgiveness).
Among the social and political critics Lasch regarded as populists are writers who defend small-scale producers (farmers, artisans,
and so forth), who despise creditors, and who oppose the culture of uplift and universal philanthropy because of its disruptive intervention in personal and family life. These sentiments are, he thought, particularly strongly expressed in the writings of Tom Paine; the English radical William Cobbett; the nineteenth-century editor, Transcendentalist, and controversialist Orestes Brownson; and the author of the classic of populist political economy
Progress and Poverty
(1879), Henry George. Two labor-movement theorists from the turn of the century are important to Lasch’s tradition as champions of small-scale producers: the French syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose
Reflections on Violence
(1908) was admired by critics of the Third Republic in France and of liberalism in England, and the British guild socialist G. D. H. Cole. By proposing to restore control over production to the worker, Lasch argued, syndicalism and guild socialism represented genuine alternatives to corporate capitalism. What socialists and the labor movement generally ended up settling for, he felt (and Cole is his example), was a topdown welfare system that turned the worker into a consumer, and left him, though more secure in his job, even more dependent.
This tradition of political and economic criticism is complemented, Lasch argued, by a parallel tradition of moral criticism—and this proposal is the chief novelty of
The True and Only Heaven,
and the key to its creation of an alternative to liberal fragmentation. The major figure is Emerson, whose recognition, in the late essay on “Fate” (1860), that “freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity” Lasch regarded as the philosophical centerpiece of populist thought. Emerson’s fatalism is ignored, he thought, by the Emersonians—“those professional Pollyannas”—and he proposed to restore us to a proper understanding, principally by reading Emerson by the lights of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards. Two other writers, both readily associated with Emerson, are said to share the populist moral vision: Thomas Carlyle, in
Sartor Resartus
(1834) and the essays on heroes and hero worship published in 1841, and William James, in the discussion of the “twice-born” in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902) and in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910).
Lasch traced the course of populist ideals in a group of
twentieth-century American writers: Josiah Royce, Randolph Bourne, Herbert Croly, Waldo Frank, John Dewey, the New Dealer Thurman Arnold, and Reinhold Niebuhr. In some of these cases, he was reconsidering writers whose ideas he had once criticized. Croly, for instance, whose
The Promise of American Life
(1910) Lasch once regarded as a typical example of the progressive’s naïve understanding of the nature of corporate power,
28
was praised for recognizing, in a later book,
Progressive Democracy
(1914), the importance of endowing the worker with a sense of responsibility—and for perceiving that the specialization required by big business and mass production would destroy the possibilities for meaningful work. Niebuhr (one of the heroes of Schlesinger’s
The Vital Center
) was attacked by Lasch in
The New Radicalism in America
for taking an uncritical and Manichean view of the struggle between American liberal democracy and Soviet totalitarianism—for assuming too readily the inherent virtue of the American way and the monolithic evil of Soviet communism.
29
In
The True and Only Heaven
, though, Niebuhr appears as a critic of liberalism. His defense of “particularism”—of the innate desire of groups to protect their difference and autonomy against the liberal inclination to force compromises on competing interests—now seemed to Lasch to make him a misunderstood antagonist of liberal ideology.
Niebuhr is also important to the populist tradition, as Lasch interpreted it, because of his insistence on the desirability of forgiveness, and the futility of resentment, in struggles for social justice; and Lasch’s consideration of this aspect of Niebuhr’s thought leads directly to the only political success story in the book: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the Southern civil rights movement. King succeeded, Lasch believed, by appealing to the populist virtues of lower-middle-class communities in the South—both black and white—and by preaching the doctrine of “a spiritual discipline against resentment.” Blacks in King’s movement did not seek revenge for the injustices they had suffered, since they understood (or King, who had studied Niebuhr as a divinity student, understood) Niebuhr’s teaching that to combat injustice and coercion with more injustice and coercion is only to perpetuate a cycle of
conflict. But, Lasch argued, when King and his associates attempted to mobilize victims of poverty in the inner cities of the North, they could no longer appeal, as they had in the South, to communities of people who understood the value of forgiveness. Resentment against the powerful became instead the motivating emotion of the struggle, with disastrous results.
Lower-middle-class virtues persist, Lasch thought, but as an endangered moral species, preyed upon by the social-engineering schemes of the liberal professional classes. The controversy between suburban liberals and working-class city residents over the busing of school children to achieve racial integration and the argument over abortion rights are, he suggested, recent instances of liberal imperialism. In the Boston busing wars, and in the struggles for open housing in the suburbs of Chicago, lower-middle-class white communities were reviled, and even demonized, by liberals; yet their “only crime,” Lasch said, “so far as anyone could see, was their sense of ethnic solidarity.”
30
The populist solution, apparently, would have entailed an attempt to transform the inner city into a “real community,” rather than to compel people to ignore their ethnic and racial differences—though Lasch was vague about how this transformation would take place.
In the case of abortion rights, one might imagine that pro-choice advocates, because of their insistence that the decision to have an abortion should be left to the individual woman rather than foreclosed by the state, would have had the stronger case for Lasch. But Lasch regarded the procedure of abortion itself as an instance of technological intrusion into the natural process of reproduction, and he accused the proponents of abortion rights of advocating social engineering—of trying to use medical advances to eliminate the “unwanted” in the name of social improvement. (This view of the pro-choice mentality derives mainly from a single sociological study, Kristin Luker’s
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
[1984].) And yet in these cases there is at least some engagement between the classes. In general, Lasch thought, “neither left- nor right-wing intellectuals … seem to have much interest in the rest of American society.”
31
A revived populist tradition, he concluded, would challenge
the ideologues of progress, and help to answer “the great question of twentieth-century politics”:
32
how we are to restore a spirit of civic virtue in our lives.