The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Norton, New York, 1979 (250 pgs)

Whenever you find your society in a muddle, it makes sense to look back to what the last generation was warning about. You can plot that data point, then go back to the previous generation, and so forth, until you have a curve. Christopher Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism" demonstrates where we are on this curve, and leaves it to us to connect the dots, which suits his audience.

America -- or maybe we should say the industrialized world -- fragments into several streams of reality. People act on what they know and become defined by it, so each stratum of reality separates itself by a different worldview informed by different sources. At the broadest level, there's the big newsmagazines and cable news; then there are armchair thinkers; then academics and paid intellectualls; and finally, insiders to the political, economic or social infrastructure.

Lasch aims his book solidly at the armchair thinkers, who come from the middle class and professions and seek to find a narrative of their time above all else. They want to know where they are in history, how to define themselves to fit their status, and finally, some practical knowledge for dodging the coming pitfalls. Lasch hits them with a simple theorem of complex implications: our culture has become narcissistic, and as a result, lowers its standards.

Unlike most books that critique our current society, The Culture of Narcissism does not find an external enemy to demonize. Instead, it hammers home time and again that the enemy is us, or more precisely, attitudes we have adopted that create a situation in which narcissism is not only rewarded, but expected. From the root of this narcissism, Lasch traces two cycles -- the introversion of the individual, and the consequent lowering of quality of our infrastructure.

While much of Lasch's thesis separates the new narcissist from the older model, the "competitive individualist," he later expounds upon the limits of individualism and its tendency to lead toward narcissism. For all conservatives and libertarians and anarchists who think natural selection/social Darwinism and a free market would solve human problems, competitive individualism seems like a boon from the gods -- but he addresses the limitations of that later in the book.

Like many analytical books, The Culture of Narcissism moves around nodal points in which it either introduces or summarizes concepts, and then follows them with exposition that is both supporting data and a discussion of the raw archetype as it shows up in different disciplines. First, a definition of the modern narcissist:

The narcissist differs also, in the tenuous quality of his selfhood, from an earlier type of American individualist, the 'American Adam' analyzed by R.W.B. Lewish, Quention Anderson, Michael Rogin, and by nineteenth-century observers like Tocqueville. The contemporary narcissist bears a superificial resemblance, in his self-absorption and delusions of granduer, to the 'imperial self' so often celebrated in nineteenth-century American literature. The American Adam, like his descendants today, sought to free himself from the past and to establish what Emerson called 'an original relation to the universe.'

{ snip }

The contemporary American may have failed, like his predecessors, to establish any sort of common life, but the integrating tendencies of modern industrial society have at the same time undermined his 'isolation.' Having surrendered most of his technical skills to the corporation, he can no longer provide for his material needs. As the family loses not only its productive functions but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.

Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on other to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience, His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his 'grandiose self' relfected in teh attentions of others, or by attaching himself tot those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design. (excerpted from pages 8 to 10)

From this kernel of an idea, Lasch unites all of the modern dysfunctions not in the bureaucracies (government, media, academia) that guide our lives, but in the attitudes we take toward life that create this bureaucratic mindset, which then produces bureaucracies that produce even more of that mindset. This is where his book breaks with both the revolutionary mindset of the left, which looks for oppression, and the "freedom" and patriotism rhetoric of the right: he looks into the design assumptions that create our social infrastructure.

"Narcissism appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring out narcissistic traits that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone. These conditions have also transformed the family, which in turn shapes the underlying structure of personality. A society that fears it has no future is not likely to give much attention to the needs of the next generation, and the ever-present sense of historical discontinuity -- the blight of our society -- falls with particularly devastating effect ont he family." (50)

As the book progresses, Lasch branches into every area of society to show this common pattern. An attitude of me-first, he postulates, creates an inner void that must be filled with external affirmation, which in turn makes the individual dependent on these external affirmers. This produces the modern narcissism that is both self-affirming and self-denying, and the institutions that fill the void are the bureaucracies that our inner narcissist wants to revolt against.

One of his most promising chapters concerns the effects of narcissism on education and our expectations of our students. As almost two-thirds of the book is this kind of technical analysis, but in different areas, threads emerge and Lasch ties them together with witty, insightful section titles that sometimes create spontaneous, painful laughter. One example is how, in a proto-Unabomber analysis, the author picks apart the influence of technology.

"One way to deny our dependence on nature (on mothers) is to invent technologies designed to make ourselves masters of nature. Technology, when it is conceived in this way, embodies an attitude toward nature diametrically oppoed to the exploratory attitude, as Klein calls it. It expresses a collective revolt against the limitations of the human condition. It appeals to the residual belief that we can bend the world to our desires, harness nature to our own purposes, and achieve a state of complete self-sufficiency. This Faustian view of technology has been a powerful force in Western history, reaching its climax in the Industrial Revolution, with its remarkable gains in productivity, and in the even more remarkable advances promised by the postindustrial information explosion." (244)

While this manifests itself in several nodal points, it does not constitute a replacement thesis; unlike later writers, Lasch places the psychology of individualism and externalization before either technology or bureaucracy. He also deals vicious blows to both sides of the political equation for ignoring these somewhat obvious social trends. The left gets excoriated for encouraging the neurosis of individuals in order to make them revolutionaries:

The left has too often served as a refuge from the terrors of the inner life. Another ex-radical, Paul Zweig, has said that he became a communist in the late fifties because communism 'released him...from the failed rooms and broken vases of a merely private life.' As long as political movements exercise a fatal attraction for those who seek to drown the sense of personal failure in collective action -- as if collective action somehow precluded rigorous attention to the quality of personal life -- political movements will have little to say about the personal dimensions of social crisis. (15)

The right, on the other hand, get battered for relying on invisible hand mechanisms to fix a society that instead needs strong leadership. What is significant about this is that Lasch shows us there are no solutions where we can put our brains on autopilot and trust in some overriding principle, because we must instead face common sense. Without a cultural consensus to right our wayward attitudes, we are falling prey to the consequences of those attitudes and looking for external saviors to inward problems.

Studies of progressivism and the New Deal have shown that government regulation of business often arose in response to the demands of businessmen themselves. Regulatory agencies draw most of their personnel from business. Neither the regulatory nor the welfare policies of the state rest on 'an implacalabe hatred of private business and free enterprise,' as Mises claims. On the contrary, regulations controls competition and stabilizes the market, while the welfare system socializes the 'human costs' of capitalist production -- rising unemployment, inadequate wage scales, inadequate insurance against sickness and old age -- and helps to forestall more radical solutions. (234)

Wise enough to cite sources that use terms like "atomizing individualism," (9) Lasch is writing in the grey area between psychology, history and politics, and while his book touches on all of these, his real expertise is in a sociology based in philosophical analysis of the justifications people use to construct narratives in their lives. He sounds a warning midway through the book that shows the scope of what he envisions the effect of narcissism to be:

The effective loss of cultural traditions on such a scale makes talk of a new Dark Age far from frivolous. Yet this loss coincides with an information glut, with the recovery of the past by specialists, and with an unprecedented explosion of knowledge -- none of which, however, impinges on everday experience or shapes popular culture. (151)

As he sees it, at the same moment we begin to need the external to bolster our internal lack of self-esteem, the external is flooding us with abstract data that either concerns distant events or personal events, but never makes the connection between them. As a result, the same loss of narrative that creates narcissism is growing in strength as events get more disassociated because we measure our society in individuals at singular moments, and not in ongoing patterns.

While Lasch comes to us from the left, but has converted to mostly right-wing views because of a frustration with ineffective methods and psychology on the left, this book is not a political hit job; it is a psychological unveiling of the modern mentality and as such, an answer from the common sense philosophers to postmodernism. Where postmodernism bemoans our lack of narrative, Lasch unites viewpoints as diverse as Pynchon and Houllebecq to show us the cause and effects of that condition, and how history has unleashed it through mostly leftist revolutions.

Like all really profound books, this one continues to sell because although it describes a particular time period in a historical cycle -- the life cycle of civilizations from birth to decadence to death -- it also puts a finger on an eternal struggle within humanity, both as individuals and groups, to gather up enough bravery to face our world as an equal and so to squash the inner void that would otherwise make us narcissists, both rebelling against and addicted to the social reality created by a society of other judging, token-making simians.