Haven in a Heartless World, by Christopher Lasch
Miller, Stephen
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Haven in a Heartless World, by Christopher Lasch" smith once plied his trade. A piano was placed in this room as well. ("When The Saints Go Marching In" became the house song.) Finally, the menu was enlarged to include what are now the house...
...Given Lasch's tendency towards verbal inflation—in one book he spoke of the "agony" of the American left—it is easy to see why this book borders on the hysterical, for the family is a subject that gives a fever to all but the hardiest investigators, a subject that causes a slew of writers—from weekend pundits to child psychiatrists—to wring their hands in dismay...
...London] Daily Telegraph Join the thousands of thoughtful people who read The American Spectator—the magazine Time magazine has called "one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion...
...Hareven, moreover, does not accept the notion that the family always should be seen as a victim of social forces beyond its control...
...A prosecutor bent on convincing the jury that capitalism is the villain, Lasch is impatient with the niceties of historical disquisition...
...If Lasch's book lacks analytical depth, it is also provincial in its scope...
...Though he spends most of his time excoriating the state for its domination of the private as well as the public realm, he begins his book with a plea for "a new form of society, in which collective needs rather than private profit determine the form and content of production...
...has seized the torch dropped by the late H.L...
...Despite lengthy debate, to this day no one is quite certain what prompted an enraged individual to embed two silver dollars in the floor by the front bar...
...And we all know, of course, that in such collectivist societies as the People's Republic of China or the Republic of Cuba the state refrains from dominating the people...
...Preposterous, yet if one believes Lasch's argument, it is but a small step towards believing this argument...
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...Lasch, of course, need not agree with these conclusions, but anyone writing on the family in the modern world must take them into account, which Lasch doesn't do...
...Presumably, in this new society the withering away of the helping professions will begin immediately...
...And anyone writing on the family must take into account the problematical nature of the field...
...John Demos, another American historian, made much the same point in an article that appeared in the American Scholar several years ago when he said that the family often manages effectively to resist those bent on "social engineering...
...The New York Review of Books, we should keep in mind, has always come down hard on the counterculture...
...Essentially antinomian in its clamor for personal liberation, the counterculture, unlike the left-wing political culture, was only marginally interested in politics...
...not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination...
...Lasch's work, which has centered on 20th-century American intellectual history, often suffers from verbal inflation, but thisbook surely cops the Verbal Inflation Prize of the Year, ending as it does with an Orwellian vision of the state's controlling "not merely the individual's body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt...
...Especially good is his attack on a panoply of therapists and would-be experts whom he labels "Doctors to a Sick Society"—those who would understand everything, including political conduct, in psychological terms...
...But you would be hard put to find an argument over which species is the most faithful...
...It comes as no surprise, then, that Christopher Lasch, whose writings have often appeared in the New York Review of Books, attacks the counterculture in his latest book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged...
...11:1 BOOK REVIEW Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged Christopher Lasch / Basic Books / $12.95 Stephen Miller noth the friends and the enemies of the B sixties often forget that the adversary culture which flourished then was composed of two overlapping yet distinct parts: a left-wing political culture and what has been commonly called the counterculture...
...If they have done it unknowingly, and if such efforts have enabled them to stay in power, then capitalism works in such mysterious ways that even Lasch himself might be an agent of capitalist control—the resident nay-sayer whose fulminations indirectly preserve the status quo...
...it is another to say that they are agents of "capitalist control...
...Leaving aside the question of what work meant for pre-industrial laborers, it is impossible to evaluate this generalization because we do not know to what class it applies...
...or the very popular former mayor of Louisville, Charley Farnsley...
...The left-wing political culture, on the other hand, has been very influential...
...It is also quite plausible that very few of Cunningham's patrons have read Rudyard Kipling, but most would readily agree that "A woman is only a woman...
...He argues, for example, that as a result of capitalism "work came to be seen as merely a means to an end—for many, sheer physical survival...
...Even Lasch admits that the so-called " 'helping professions' positioned themselves in the vanguard of the revolt against old-fashioned middle-class morality...
...Yet this dubious popular wisdom recently has been subjected to the scrutiny of several American historians, and they deny its validity...
...Writing in a recent issue of Daedalus that was devoted to the family, Tamara K. Hareven denies that "American society has been experiencing breakdown and diversification in family organization...
...In any case, Lasch gives noevidence to support his contention that the "governing classes" actually encouraged the helping professions in the hope that their ministrations would mystify workers and thereby render them incapable of combating capitalism...
...Perhaps because it looked down on traditional intellectual inquiry, the counterculture produced little of lasting influence, as witness the fate of the works of Charles Reich, the most popular countercultural guru...
...What Lasch offers us in this book, to put it bluntly, is a common species of radical criticism whereby, as Joseph Epstein has put it, "capitalism is like snake oil in reverse: instead of curing, it causes every illness...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 PLEASE PRINT ^ New subscription Name Address City ^ Renewal ^ One year (ten issues) $10 ^ Two years $18 ^ Three years $25 State Zip ^ Payment enclosed X71 ^ Please bill me The American Spectator April 1978 27 would be excessive even if Lasch were alluding to the People's Republic of China...
...surely work had less meaning for the industrial working class than it had for the entrepreneurial middle class...
...But those on the far right are at least consistent in their uniform hatred of the state, whereas Lasch decidedly is not...
...Happy" Chandler...
...But by having a Hoffman House at the front bar of Cunningham's, you are able to rest your elbows on a bar that has served some of the most colorful figures in Kentucky's history...
...It is one thing to dislike these meddlers, who intervene in the affairs of the capitalists' families as well...
...Most of them are gone now...
...and the New York Review of Books, which served as home base for many of its leading writers, has become the most widely read intellectual journal in the country...
...The reasonably penetrating and restrained parts of this book, though, are overwhelmed by Lasch's vitriolic and unfocused attack on capitalism, a word that he uses interchangeably with the state...
...Yet either capitalists have consciously planned to control workers in this way or they have done it unknowingly...
...But the helping professions also succeeded in undermining the work ethic that underlay capitalism...
...The flavor of the conversation that has filled Cunningham's over the years can only be detected by spending an afternoon in this brassy old saloon...
...not merely his outer but his inner life as well...
...With tedious insistence, Lasch argues that capitalists have "extended their control over the worker's private life as well, as doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, child guidance experts, officers of the juvenile courts, and other specialists began to supervise child-rearing, formerly the business of the family...
...in the contemporary world of late-capitalism, they stay in power by socializing reproduction...
...for others, a rich and satisfying personal life...
...That is, capitalists have managed to reduce the family to total dependency, in that way undermining the workers' ability to replace an exploitative system...
...Its dark, revisionist views of American history have become standard fare in the academic-intellectual world...
...but he is speaking, of course, of the United States, where capitalism makes slaves of us all—all, that is, except Lasch and similar like-minded people who have managed to resist the state's invasion—a word Lasch frequently uses—of the private realm...
...In criticizing the medicalization of society it makes sense to question those who purvey an ideology of mental health, but it does not make sense to attack medicine in general, especially the efforts and discoveries of those who did so much to reduce infant and childhood mortality...
...Expressions such as "moderncivilization," "bourgeois mind," "Western marriage system," and "bourgeois family system" fly through the text, unanchored by any clarification or qualification...
...But why bother to be ironic with Lasch...
...In reality, she says, "the major transitions in family roles have been characterized by greater stability and conformity, because of the greater opportunity for generational continuities...
...His shrill animus against the state makes Lasch sound as if he belongs to the woebegone lot of radical libertarians who exist somewhere on the far right...
...Needless to say, Lasch avoids such cross-cultural comparisons altogether...
...famed burlesque queen, Sally Rand...
...Not too many of Cap's friends can beseen holding forth at the front bar these days, but if you are eating in one of the stalls you may well find yourself surrounded by pictures of such luminaries as former governor of Kentucky and commissioner of baseball, A.B...
...He builds his case on the following glib notion: In the heyday of capitalism, capitalists controlled the workers by socializing production...
...It is a shame that Lasch was intent on attacking capitalism, for otherwise he has some good things to say about the dreary stuff that has been peddled as social and psychological theory during the past fifty years...
...Finally, the menu was enlarged to include what are now the house specialties: chili, turtle soup, and hot browns...
...Nothing has been more durable," Demos said, "in the long history of Western family life than its nuclear character...
...capitalist domination...
...28 The American Spectator April 1978...
...Nor is anyone certain whether a gun has ever been fired in Cunningham's,although legend and the holes in the wall by the Fifth Street door suggest that it may have happened...
...But an analysis that examines the ravaging effects of capitalism must, in order to be convincing, take a look at what capitalism did to the family in other countries—in England, or Sweden, or Japan...
...According to Lasch, both the spirit and the preoccupations of the counterculture, which he says have infected the mainstream of American life, are but symptoms of the "pathology of the bourgeois family," which is the victim of Stephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...Yet Lasch throws caution to the winds and sails right into the subject of the family, conjuring generalizations out of thin air...
...The only world he can consider with a degree of equanimity is a world elsewhere...
...Mencken and applied it smartly to every progressive backside in sight...
...Indeed, for someone lambasting capitalism, Lasch is insufficiently Marxist in his analysis, ignoring important questions of class...
...Yet even here Lasch is heavy-handed at times...
...We all know the usual litany—one, surprisingly, that Lasch adopts without inspection: "the family," he says, "has been slowly coming apart for more than a hundred years...
...As another historian writing in Daedalus said, many aspects of family life in the past are "inaccessible to examination" because the evidence currently available for inspection is very skimpy...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell...
...If they saw themselves as mitigating the harshness of rigorous free enterprise, by what sleight of mind can we call them part of the "machinery of organized domination" ? No doubt the helping professions succeeded in part in deflecting towards the individual criticism that might have been directed against capitalism...
...But a cigar is a good smoke...
...Far from breaking down because of "changing modes of domination," as Lasch would have it, the family has been remarkably stable in its essential character...
...And it was also, unlike the left, suspicious of mind, favoring that larger, more nebulous entity—the psyche...
...Though in some places he talks about the "modern family," it is clear that Lasch is only considering the modern American family...
...I Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...The remark "...the ebullient Mr...
...The family, she argues, is very much "an active agent, fostering social change and facilitating the adaptation of its members to new social and economic conditions...
...So full of hatred is he for what he calls the "consumerism," the "organized leisure," and "the calculating, manipulative spirit" of American life that he is probably immune to such rhetorical strategies...
...And it would be wholly impossible to calculate the number of hours spent trying to determine the faster of two species: Kentucky's thoroughbreds or Kentucky's women...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
