Taken as a whole, [Christopher] Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the economic, social, and cultural tendencies Lasch deplored. While small businesses have collapsed in record numbers and average families have found themselves destitute, the major tech companies and retail conglomerates like Amazon have reaped massive profits and the stock market has soared; in response, the political class has delivered aid packages that blatantly favor the interests of the latter. As Alex Gutentag recently argued, “the pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history.” Lasch’s work suggests that the roots of this crisis extend far back into the last century, during which both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, became increasingly indifferent to the degradation of average people’s lives and livelihoods. He offers us no easy alternatives, but his writings reveal the scale of the problems anyone attempting to look beyond the failings of liberalism must confront.
Over the past 250 years we have gone from nation of yeoman farmers to a nation of industrial workers to a nation of white-collar workers in technology, government, and the non-profit sector. With each transformation, the sense of being able to determine our own fate declines, and the sense of dependence on those with concentrations of wealth and power increases.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
– Pablo Neruda
But, don’t forget to have your dog spayed or neutered.
The procedure itself is barbaric, but we do it for utilitarian reasons and there is widespread bi-partisan support for it.
The poem is in the past tense. The dog is dead. There will be no more joy in Mudville ever. The dog’s corpse will be neutered repeatedly in countless vile and repulsive ways. Homer is banned.
RIP. Heartfelt condolences to Pablo and the rest of the family. I would love to send along a note…what were the dog’s preferred pronouns (so that I can address things properly)?
BTW – there is absolutely nothing wrong with a post mortem spay/neuter. Much less barbaric than making them live without estrogen/testosterone for a decade plus while living.
While there’s a lot to wring one’s hands about, this excerpt is the usual mostly vague whinging that convinces no one but the already disaffected. I agree that government and some companies have gotten too big, but when in US history wasn’t that happening? People have been complaining about everything from Big Oil to the Railways to AT&T and IBM for the last century or two. These were real problems but Schumpeterian change dispensed with them all eventually. Whenever anyone starts talking about caring about the middle class or “average people’s lives and livelihoods,” it has always been a con man looking for the largest group to grift, ie the fattest part of the bell curve, the middle, whether it was FDR or Nixon or Trump. Compared to all of history, people in the US these days have an idyllic existence for the most part and that is spreading to other countries too. The same weakening of families and communities now means people aren’t tied down in a small town ruled by a preacher’s religion or the neighborhood scold’s gossip. I wonder what Lasch had to say about that.
Things have definitely been lost, but they need to be concretely discussed and weighed against the gains. If you prefer that past, there are pockets like the Amish out there: nothing stops most from going back, yet nobody does.
To address the post’s central points about 20th century centralization, commodification, and specialization eroding family and people’s independence, it is ironic that Geoff writes this right when the tide has turned. Millions of people work when and how much they want because of apps like Lyft or DoorDash, and I’m continually exposed to new independent bloggers, podcasters, or Youtubers online. Yes, Big Tech is still a significant component of that highly decentralized marketplace, but how long do you think that’s going to last in this age of decentralization?
The truth is the 20th century was the age of mass tech, everything from factories to broadcast TV, while the 21st is a swing of the pendulum back to the age of the yeoman, creatives now, all collaborating online. Big Tech, big government, and other retrograde movements are just ancient thinking ruling over the present, showing how difficult it is to enter any new era, as everyone’s minds are still captured by the old one.
“The same weakening of families and communities now means people aren’t tied down in a small town ruled by a preacher’s religion or the neighborhood scold’s gossip.”
People who work in cubicles will still gossip and be the subject of gossip. Office gossip. Campus gossip. Big city apartment building gossip. And internet gossip is forever. Now you can be scolded by people on the other side of the earth.
The open plan office is a smaller, more cramped version of the proverbial small town. Twitter is an enormous little village populated almost exclusively by scolds.
From the Atlantic: “When a recent Pew Research Center survey asked about the secret to happiness, most Americans, of all ages, ranked ‘a job or career they enjoy’ above marriage, children, or any other committed relationship. Careerism, not community, is the keystone in the arch of life.”
Which is strange because most Americans, of all ages, will inevitably end up unfulfilled if that’s what they’ve convinced themselves is really important and meaningful in life.
Work will not make them happy. Meetings and memos and KPIs and promotions are not where happiness or satisfaction or contentment comes from.
Of course, nobody is saying these eternal human problems have disappeared, only that they have somewhat lessened and other forms or new problems have appeared. Whether that modern balance of problems is worth it is up to the individual, but the world population is increasingly moving to the cities and that modern existence, so the revealed preference is for the weaker office gossip, that is easier to exit by working in a different company, rather than the farm gossip who could poison your whole hamlet against you and which was more difficult to leave.
I do think that problem was greatly lessened in the 20th century, as it was impossible for the city gossip to keep track of the many more interactions possible when so many more people were flitting about her neighborhood and the broadcast media didn’t have the bandwidth to carry more than the gossip of a few celebrities. Obviously that has changed now on the internet’s bathroom wall, twitter, but there are ways short of lawsuits to mitigate the harmful versions of that with better software (just as the first factories were the least efficient and most polluting, our current social media is the first and worst version of what is to come).
You don’t mention religion, but the organized, extreme versions have certainly lost most of their power over the last century, while new secular religions have risen to fill that human need, whether the latest Woke religion Arnold is always lamenting or the recent climate apocalypticists, who draw heavily on similar “end times” movements but claim to base it on what they believe to be “science” instead.
As for the survey you cite, you and that writer interpret it as careerism but I suspect most simply want to pragmatically spend the time in the one activity that takes up most of their life, work, doing something they actually enjoy. That doesn’t imply that most are obsessed with scaling the corporate ladder, and indeed that is not what we find of most corporate employees, who balance their work and home life in a moderate fashion.
If anything, the careerists are a small minority, and you will find a much larger group who feel misled into marriage and child-rearing by a society and culture that claimed that was the path to happiness. Obviously it is to many, but my point is that many more are still propagandized to feel that way for starting a family only to find it doesn’t suite their innate nature rather than disappointed careerists.
Ted Kaczynski, 1995
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
Gutentag’s characterization is disingenuous at best. Amazon and the tech companies saw their stock rise because they were there to replace much of the conventional economy that was rendered inoperative by the pandemic. It makes no sense to complain about Amazon ‘making money off the pandemic.’ It made money because the pandemic made its services all the more necessary for daily life. Unless one thinks the pandemic was engineered by such companies to make money, there’s nothing troubling about their success during it.
I agree with your point, though there are some who do believe a weaker version of that conspiracy, that the lockdowns and racial unrest were stirred up by the Bezos-owned WaPo and other such media to make more money for Amazon and Big Tech.
I judge that unlikely, but the version I think did happen is that the left knew they were going to lose with how good the Trump economy was pre-Covid, so once Covid hit these measures were taken to seriously damage his reelection prospects. Considering how close and disputed the final election results were, their fears were certainly realistic though their extreme measures are going to have consequences, as we saw in DC yesterday.
I think it’s more likely a combination of two factors:
1) The Democrats are the female-skewed party. Women are generally more risk-averse than men; the ones I know are much more likely than their men to be working from home and quarantining rigorously.
2) The Democrats were out of power. The party in power has to balance competing interests (health vs. economy in this case), the party out of power has the luxury of criticism. If Obama had been in office, the Republicans would have skewered him for whichever choice he made.
The problem with your reasoning is the lockdowns and then racial protests were contradictory: media and their so-called “experts” were deriding anti-lockdown protestors in April and May as killers for gathering peacefully, then switched on a dime to saying it was fine that everybody was protesting the Floyd incident a month later.
That stark contradiction cannot be reconciled by your two factors- it is irrelevant what the party out of power criticizes, we’re talking here about what they actually did in 2020 in the states they ran- it is easily explained by my pointing out it all hurt Trump.
In some ways, the present-day tech age of 2021 offers much more freedoms: we get extreme freedom of choice of personal issues such as diet, hobbies, work, leisure, and health treatments compared to the past. But simultaneously, dependence on others in increased. And freedom to live like a Yeoman farmer is decreased.
I disagree with Kling’s conclusion that “the sense of being able to determine our own fate declines”. I believe we have more freedom to determine our own fate than the Yeoman farmers or the cave dwelling humans of the past.
I think he’s talking about the relationship between your actions and your lifestyle. On a farm, there’s a fairly obvious relationship between raising chickens and eating eggs. In the modern economy, there are many obscure intermediaries between my completing a bureaucratic task and my eating a bacon cheeseburger. The farm naturally teaches responsibility; what you grow is what you get. I once lost a tech startup job, which I had been doing remarkably well, because of trends in fancy soap use by Mormons*. Any particular worker’s market niche is dependent on the behavior of an incredibly complex, chaotic-in-the-technical-sense market economy.
* Our main investor made his fortune selling that sort of thing in Mormon communities. When his business turned down, he was no longer willing to fund the venture that employed me.
I still have my father’s basketball rim from about 1945 in my possession and it will be with me forever. It is a piece of bent rebar from a salvaged farm wagon. No basketball net except for an occasional leftover rice sack. He grew up without electricity, running water or proper bathing facilities. That is what dry farming outside of Minden, Nebraska was like back in the 1940s.
We visited the farm where he grew up on several occasions back when I was in my youth in the 1980s. I loved the beauty of it (he absolutely hated it) but I would never want to grow up under those conditions. There is very little freedom in that existence.
As of January 2020, just 12 months ago, small business formation was at an all time high. Wages were generally going up, and ex-cons were being hired for the first time in decades due to a tight labor market. This is hardly an indicator of long term decline, Lasch’s or anyone else’s.
Since then, small businesses that rely on in-person services have indeed been devastated. Small businesses that operate on line appear to be doing fine. Families whose principals have kept their jobs are doing fine.
The pandemic recession is absolutely a one-off event.
I agree with you. I think, however, that it’s necessary to expand the last line. Yes, the pandemic recession is absolutely a one-off event, but the politicization of the pandemic is already having terrible long-term consequences, including the high probability that the U.S. economy will never return to its pre-pandemic status.
I interviewed the author Geoff Schullenberger a few months ago: https://youtu.be/xZO0Kr-uVPk