The Revolt of the Elites

Christopher Lasch W.W. Norton & Co. $22, 276 pp.

It is fitting that Christopher Lasch concludes The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy with an essay on religion, "The Soul of Modem Man under Secularism." As one who knew Lasch and admired his uncompromising critical spirit, I cannot but find it both moving and cautionary that this most skeptical of modem intellectuals came, with the approach of death, to sharpen his sense that the greatest modem temptation lies in the "illusion of mastery." This turn to religion does not constitute a confession of faith, much less a panicky return to the reassuring certainties of childhood prayers in the manner of Roger Martin Du Gard's Jean Barrois. For as Lasch insists, the last thing that religion (properly understood, he might have added) offers is certainty or security. Rather, the turn to religion should probably be read as a final, wry, and becomingly humble reflection upon the sanctimonious certainties that modern intellectuals readily propagate.

Thus, the end, in this instance as in so many others, should be taken as the author's own perspective on what precedes it. In The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch tersely and scathingly attacks the failures of modem society, notably the elites who direct, interpret, and feed off of it--what he calls "the dark night of the soul" through which the whole world seems to be passing. As several reviewers have already defensively noted, Lasch has nothing good to say about our contemporary elites, who owe their promotion to an ideology and practice of meritocracy that, in his view, has drained American society of the last vestiges of true democracy and the human communities from which it emerges.

Lasch charges meritocracy with freeing the elite from social connection and the obligations it entails and substituting a narrow goal of personal advancement as measured by the market. At his most scathing, he dismisses the feminism of the professional and managerial classes for which "female careerism provides the indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes indecently lavish way of life." In the same spirit, he castigates "academic radicals" who are mainly interested "in the defense of their professional privileges against criticism from the outside." They and their kind share a devotion to a careerism, which they celebrate as democracy in action, although it actually "tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience, devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience, and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all."

Here, as throughout the book, Lasch betrays a lingering nostalgia for a world of independent proprietorship, strong families, and vital "third places" (barbershops, comer bars, and other places of neighborhood sociability), which he sees as necessary to an engaged citizenry and a robust democracy. In this and other instances, The Revolt of the Elites suffers from uncertainty about the concepts on which it most heavily relies. If, for example, meritocracy lies at the root of our evils, what would Lasch put in its place? Much of his indictment of modernity might, with scant emendation, be attributed to the antebellum slaveholding elite. Yet neither here nor in his earlier work, does Lasch show much patience for, or much interest in, Southern society or thought. Nor has he ever defended any form of elitism, which he sharply attacks for its tendency to sever the bonds between members of the elite and ordinary people. The Revolt of the Elites is no complacent defense of an organic social hierarchy in which everyone accepts an ordained place, nor even a cranky nostalgia for the world of independent farms and shops.

We should, I think, miss the point, were we simply to focus upon Lasch's inconsistencies and occasionally intemperate outbursts, for the core of this book lies elsewhere. True, Lasch might have welcomed the return of a world without television sets and shopping malls, but he did not believe that the clock could be set back, nor would he have settled for a world without public schools and transportation, much less a world without seat-belts, air bags, or modem medicine. The focus of Lasch's attack remains, as it has always been, the excesses of a market that increasingly penetrates and appropriates not merely the business of everyday life, but the most intimate personal relations, and that is inexorably eroding our last vestiges of civic virtue and shared morality.

The problem for us, as for our early twentieth-century predecessors, remains "whether the virtues of proprietorship could be preserved, in some other form, under economic conditions that seemed to make proprietorship untenable." And for Lasch the virtues of proprietorship necessarily include a sense of personal responsibility, which he views as inherently antithetical to the current deplorable "privatization of morality." Although Lasch does not fully develop the connection, he suggests that privatized morality represents the ultimate triumph of the market, which is intrinsically incapable of establishing ethical standards, much less sustaining serious moral reflection. Personal responsibility requires the internalization of values and obligations that do not specifically reflect one's immediate self-interest. Privatized morality may too easily slip into the rationalization of one's immediate self-interest as in the cases of abortion, euthanasia, and murder undertaken in anticipated self-defense.

As throughout his distinguished career, Lasch offers more diagnosis--what some would call indictment--than prescriptions for cure. Ending where he began as the direct heir of the Progressive intellectuals he both admires and criticizes, he embodies the talents of the social critic rather than the politician or policy wonk. Thus, he reserves his harshest criticism for his fellow intellectuals, especially the academics whom he charges with abandoning not merely the life of the mind but the needs of most students. He scathingly dismisses the so-called compassion that leads many of his colleagues to refuse to impose standards upon others as "the human face of contempt"--a cynical acceptance of a double standard that does not expect others to attain what one expects of oneself. Such a meritocracy can only end in contempt for ordinary people, who are condemned to struggle with a dangerous and alienating world. No wonder they have lost faith in a democracy that no longer engages them in serious debate, that denies the validity of their experience, and that strips them of minimal respect.

The intellectual elite is not likely to take kindly to Lasch's parting jeremiad, which many will turn aside as evidence of bad temper or romantic attachment to a world that has gone beyond recall. Yet it is Lasch himself who writes, as if self-critically, "Disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modem pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets." And, in so writing, he acknowledges his kindredship with those he most harshly calls to account, thereby calling himself to account as well.

The Revolt of the Elites has nothing in common with the new wave of "confessional criticism" in which intellectuals turn to their own experience to amplify and confirm their academic judgments. Lasch does not expose his personal experience, much less offer it to us as emblematic. Even his final evocation of religion refrains from proposing it as a panacea for current ills. Yet it embodies an extraordinary, if muted, example of the quintessential virtue of humility, if only by linking himself to those whose illusion of mastery he deplores. And his closing thought that the future of that illusion is "more problematical, certainly, than the future of religion" places the significance of secular intellectuals, including his own, in a sobering perspective.

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