Norman Birnbaum on Christopher Lasch

Gratitude and Forbearance: On Christopher Lasch | The Nation


" ... The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994) was the last book Lasch would complete before dying of cancer. (He refused chemotherapy because he had concluded that it would not save his life and would destroy his capacity to write.) It was a work with two messages. The most obvious was his denunciation of the moral isolation of the nation’s elites, their sense of superiority and justified privilege, their claim that they represented a triumphant modernity, the universal acceptance of which was delayed by the philistine shortsightedness of the less educated and less fortunate. The second message was that hope for a different life had to begin with an affirmation of ordinary life—the business of living, the rhythms of the life cycle—and not from the endorsement of a metahistorical project dispensed from on high. In his last years, Lasch, notwithstanding his lack of religious belief, traded intellectually with theologians. He decided that they were using concepts like being, suffering and redemption to describe the permanent structures of human existence that he had approached empirically. He was drawn to the Protestant existentialists, whose hero was the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rather than to the Catholic visionaries, with their exalted notions of community. Perhaps that was an oblique tribute to his familial origins, and to the American past."