[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] Christopher Lasch: “The only morally defensible choice”

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

I was privileged to know Kit slightly at the U. of Rochester. I admired him. --CGE

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> From: Sublunary Sublime <comment-reply at wordpress.com>
> Date: June 1, 2014, 12:01:36 PM EDT
> To: cge at shout.net
> Subject: [New post] Christopher Lasch: “The only morally defensible choice”
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> Christopher Lasch: “The only morally defensible choice”
> by Robbie
>  
> 
> 
> 
> Christopher Lasch would have celebrated his eighty-second birthday today. Despite having passed away twenty years ago, it’s clear that his work still remains “an indispensable aid to bullshit detection” for both left and right orthodoxies, as The Baffler recently noted.
> 
> The problem with Conservatives is easy enough to pinpoint:
> 
> Conservatives assume that deregulation and a return to the free market will solve everything, promoting a revival of the work ethic and a resurgence of ‘traditional values.’  Not only do they provide an inadequate explanation of the destruction of those values but they unwittingly side with the social forces that have contributed to their destruction, for example in their advocacy of unlimited growth. The poverty of contemporary conservatism reveals itself most fully in this championship of economic growth the underlying premise of the consumer culture by products of which conservatives deplore.  A vital conservatism would identify itself with the demand for limits not only on economic growth but on the conquest of space, the technological conquest of the environment, and the human ambition to acquire godlike powers over nature. A vital conservatism would see in the environmental movement the quintessential conservative cause, since environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.  Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, however, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
> 
> The New Left suffers from its own share of cultural myopia:
> 
> Stale polemics, full of moral outrage and theoretical hot air, inadvertently show why the Left has no future.  Unable to explain the persistence of religion, pro-family attitudes, and an ethic of personal accountability except as an expression of false consciousness—as the product of brainwashing or of an irrational attachment to “simple and easy answers” after “two decades of social upheaval”—the Left finds itself without a following. Since it refuses to take popular attitudes seriously, to “pander” to “the existing popular consciousness,” in Lillian Rubin’s curious and revealing phrase, it can hope to reform society only in the face of popular opposition or indifference.
> 
> Lasch recognizes that his rejection of both left and right ideologies (in favor of the old-school radicalism or conservative socialism, it should be noted) puts him in awkward position:
> 
> Readers will find my position confusing only if they persist in thinking that any position not immediately assimilable to left-wing orthodoxy belongs automatically to the Right… “Which side are you on, boys?”  When the sides were more clearly drawn, the question made some sense.  It still makes sense if it means that people who profess a disinterested love of truth and justice ought to be skeptical, on principle, of the claims of wealth and power and predisposed to side with the underdog.  But the Left long ago lost any vivid interest in underdogs.  It is allergic to anything that looks like a lost cause.  Such moral authority as the Left enjoyed in the past derived from its identification with the oppressed; but its appeal to intellectuals, unfortunately, has usually rested on its claim to stand on the side of history and progress.  What added to the thrill of choosing sides was the certainty that in socialism one chose he winning side, the “cooperative commonwealth” lure to prevail in the long run. The only morally defensible choice, however, is the choice of mercy, charity, and forgiveness over the world’s principalities and powers, the choice of truth against ideology.  To make that choice today means to reject Left and Right alike.
> 
> Robbie | June 1, 2014 at 4:01 pm | Tags: Christopher Lasch | Categories: Common Good | URL: http://wp.me/pzOjR-yc
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