The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch
A great book
This is a great book.
Let me repeat it: this is a great book. My justification for this claim? It’s a work of American history (overwhelmingly, but not exclusively) and a work of social and intellectual criticism that addresses a huge topic (“progress”) and ranges over American social and political practice and thought from the eighteenth century to the recent past. It reads as a series of essays—even mini-essays under various section headings—that explore aspects of the American experience that relate to the idea—the hope—and the illusion—of political, social, and economic progress.
I read it in part when I purchased my paperback copy in “August 1991” (inside the front flap). But it’s a fat book—570 pages of text that includes a terrific Bibliographic Essay—and I was short on time and attention (family, law practice, and the seductive allure of other books). Then just earlier this month, I heard it calling to me (metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add) from my bookshelf, where—oh, happy day!—it was not imprisoned in boxes or shelves far away where too many of my other books lie in their Babylonian captivity. But why now? Why this felicitous choice?
If my reading has a theme this year, it’s “What the hell is wrong with American political life? How is it possible that an imposter like Trump—a man whose disqualifications are so well known and too long to list here—was ever elected or considered for election again now?” In exploring this topic, I’ve been resorting to current examinations of this topic, as well as those whose works I explored or was introduced to in the 1970s as an undergraduate and law student at the University of Iowa. (Lasch did a stint at Iowa, but, alas, before my time there.) I don’t recall Lasch being assigned reading in any course, or my reading him until after law school. But I did read his trio of works that gained prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), and The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984). I recall being intrigued and impressed with his arguments in those works, and those responses no doubt led to my purchase of The True and Only Heaven shortly after it was published.
The thesis of The True and Only Heaven is plainly stated by Lasch:
This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (pp. 13-14). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Some elucidation on this theme:
Once we recognize the profound differences between the Christian view of history, prophetic or millennarian, and the modern conception of progress, we can understand what was so original about the latter: not the promise of a secular Utopia that would bring history to a happy ending but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at all. The expectation of indefinite, open-ended improvement, even more than the insistence that improvement can come only through human effort, provides the solution to the puzzle that is otherwise so baffling—the resilience of progressive ideology in the face of discouraging events that have shattered the illusion of utopia. The idea of progress never rested mainly on the promise of an ideal society—not at least in its Anglo-American version. Historians have exaggerated the utopian component in progressive ideology. The modern conception of history is utopian only in its assumption that modern history has no foreseeable conclusion. We take our cue from science, at once the source of our material achievements and the model of cumulative, self-perpetuating inquiry, which guarantees its continuation precisely by its willingness to submit every advance to the risk of supersession.
. . . .
Whatever else we can say about the future, it appears that we can safely take for granted its sophisticated contempt for the rudimentary quality of our present ways. We can imagine that our civilization might blow itself up—and the prospect of its suicide has a certain illicit appeal, since at least it satisfies the starved sense of an ending—but we cannot imagine that it might die a natural death, like the great civilizations of the past. That civilizations pass through a life cycle analogous to the biological rhythm of birth, maturity, old age, and death now strikes us as another discredited superstition, like the immortality of the soul. Only science, we suppose, is immortal; and although the unlikelihood of its melting away can be experienced even more intensely, perhaps, as a curse than as a blessing, the apparently irreversible character of its historical development defines the modern sense of time and makes it unnecessary to raise the question that haunted our predecessors: how should nations conduct themselves under sentence of death?
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (pp. 47-49). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Progress, along with “optimism,” are the primary concerns of Lasch. In Lasch’s view, “hope” is the opposite of “optimism.” And in contrast to “progress,” Lasch preaches enduring values, such as democracy, family, moral responsibility, and limits. Indeed, although not emphasized in his lengthy book, Lasch references the ecological constraints to which all societies are subject. This was in 1991, when our appreciation of the realities and threats of climate change and increasing environmental degradation were just coming into focus (for some).
So what does Lasch do in the rest of the book? In brief sections, he discusses the thinkers and movements that have promoted and challenged the ideas of progress and optimism. The thinkers he examines includes (in an abbreviated) Adam Smith, Henry George, Keynes, Burke, Marx, Tom Paine, Willlam Cobbett, Orestes Brownson, Locke, Thomas Carlyle, Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, William James, George Sorel, G.D.H. Cole, Herbert Croly, Van Wyk Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Josiah Royce, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurman Arnold Gunnar Myrdal, and a host of others. And Lasch, unlike what I just did, was not just dropping names. He explores the implications of their thought and influence in brief mini-essays that I referenced above. As to movements and schools of thought, he addresses Puritanism, nostalgia, cosmopolitanism, the Enlightenment, Marxism, modernization theory, liberalism, republicanism, communitarianism, populism, guild socialism, syndicalism, populism, cultural pluralism, Progressivism, Christianity, the civil rights movement, the new class, the New Right (1980s style), the anti-busing movement, and consumerism—again, just a brief list. And I must emphasize, he just doesn’t mention these topics, he explores them as a part of this overall project. I am awed at his erudition. Each topic he addresses provides an avenue for further exploration, aided by his rich Bibliographic Essay. (How I love a fine bibliographic essay!)
I’m glad that I’ve gotten this far in writing about this book, as the greater the book, the more difficult I find it to write about, as it tends to overwhelm me. I’m always forced to warn any reader that my meager attempt with a few words of praise doesn’t do justice to my subject. So here.
And do I agree with him? Yes, in large measure. When he suggests that he was led into this project by stating the following in the opening chapter on “The Current Mood” circa 1991, we can’t help but to be taken in:
The premise underlying this investigation—that old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action—needs an introductory word of explanation. The unexpected resurgence of the right, not only in the United States but throughout much of the Western world, has thrown the left into confusion and called into question all its old assumptions about the future: that the course of history favored the left; that the right would never recover from the defeats it suffered during the era of liberal and social democratic ascendancy; that some form of socialism, at the very least a more vigorous form of the welfare state, would soon replace free-market capitalism. Who would have predicted, twenty-five years ago, that as the twentieth century approached its end, it would be the left that was everywhere in retreat?
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (pp. 21-22). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
I trust you can appreciate why I found this book so accurately addresses my concerns (and those of many others) in this time of troubles. We can only imagine what Lasch, were he alive today, would say about our plight. (He died too young in 1994, aged 61.) He would have reason to conclude that his early diagnosis has been born out by further events, but I also very much doubt that this conclusion would please him or that it would lead him to lay down his pen in despair. He was not a man of optimism; he was a man of hope. And it’s a sense of hope, against the odds, despite it all, that I take away from this book. If we have some insight, we have some measure of hope, and this is perhaps all that we should expect. Hope allows perseverance, and perseverance is a great part of what we humans are about.