Modern technology has achieved so many dazzling breakthroughs that we now find it difficult to envision any limits to collective human ingenuity. The secret of life itself is within our grasp, according to those who predict a revolution in genetics—in which case it may be possible for us to keep ourselves alive indefinitely or at least to extend the human life span to unheard-of lengths. This impending triumph over old age and death, we are told, is the ultimate tribute to humanity’s power to master its surroundings. The prolongevity movement embodies the utopian possibilities of modern technology in its purest form. In the mid-seventies, Albert Rosenfeld, the movement’s leading propagandist, predicted that “most of the major mysteries of the aging process” would be “solved” by the third decade of the twenty-first century. August Kinzel, former president of the Salk Institute, announced in 1967 that “we will lick the problem of aging completely, so that accidents will be essentially the only cause of death.”
In psychological terms, the dream of subjugating nature is our culture’s regressive solution to the problem of narcissism—regressive because it seeks to restore the primal illusion of omnipotence and refuses to accept limits on our collective self-sufficiency. In religious terms, the revolt against nature is also a revolt against God—that is, against the reality of our dependence on forces external to ourselves. The science of ecology—an example of the “exploratory” attitude toward nature, as opposed to the Faustian attitude—leaves no doubt about the inescapability of this dependence. Ecology indicates that human life is part of a larger organism and that human intervention into natural processes has far-reaching consequences that will always remain to some extent incalculable. Nature retains the upper hand: The very technologies designed to overcome natural limitations on human comfort and freedom may destroy the ozone layer, create a greenhouse effect, and make the earth unfit for human habitation.
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, pp. 289-90).
So in the last few weeks I've reread Lasch's Revolt of the Elties and The Culture of Narcissism (Minimal Self is next) and two things struck me. First, how much his thinking has shaped mine. And, second, how different we are. There's something missing in his sobriety. He's the best sort of Calvinist, but a Calvinist he is, and he often comes across as a cranky scold. And I fear that too often that tone is in my writing as well. The problem with Calvinists isn't that they're wrong, but that they have unrealistic expectations that everyone should recognize how right they are, and if they don't, they must be either stupid or morally corrupt--and they have no problem letting you know about it. So over the years I've had a lot of nasty things to say about Calvinism, and I think I'm right about it, and anybody who doesn't see how right I am must be stupid and morally corrupt.
Ok. You get the point. The problem with Calvinism--and all of us as Americans are Calvinists, no matter what religion or lack of one--is how it is inflated with a delusional sense of righteousness. It lacks humility, and without humility, wisdom is impossible. Knowing that you don't know is the beginning of wisdom, and yet the world always seems to be run by the know-it-alls. It's a universal trait, but it's perhaps most annoying in Americans because they have so much power and influence. And it's why world has always found Americans so annoying. It's not that they are mostly evil, but that they are so naive and ignorant that they have no way of knowing how magnificently naive and ignorant they are.
Since WWII, they have done some good things for the world, but they have also been the bull in the world's China Shop: Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and now Trump and Musk. Whatever else is striking about them, it's their astonishing ignorance and their blithe, hubristic self-assurance that is most dangerous for the well being of the rest of us. There are no two human beings currently alive who more purely represent the pathologies of Narcissism. It's astonishing that such people should be given so much power, and yet it makes sense once you understand how the narcissism that drives them is the narcissism that structures our national character--especially since WWII. That was Lasch's point. He was right in his diagnosis in the 70s, and we're seeing how the disease has progressed to its moment of crisis in Trump 2.0.
Will this narcissistic fever break? Will our delirium pass? It will at some point. It just remains to be seen how violent a slap upside the head the American people need before they regain their senses.
This passage excerpted above comes from the Afterword Lasch wrote in 1991 for his 1979 book. He wrote this and his second best known book, The Minimal Self, to correct how almost everybody misread what he was trying to say about narcissism in 1979 book. I'll have more to say about these Laschian themes another time. But the point I want to make now is that Narcissism isn't mainly about being self-absorbed; it's about the delusions of power and the longing to control the uncontrollable. So the antidote is not to become less self-absorbed , but rather to become less hubristic, that is, more humble, that is, more earthy, that is, more connected to Reality.
And so where this hubris and narcissism are most dangerous to us now is not primarily the political sphere, but in the way it shapes something more fundamental in the American character since WWII. It's the primary driving force in structuring cultural-economic operating system I've been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix and its Transhumanist agenda. This matrix is driven by narcissistic hubris on steroids. My Cathedral Lectures were my attempt to make the case against Transhumanism and that in the long run the only cure is for a broad rejection of the Techno-Capitalism Matrix and its replacement by a new cultural operating system that has a transcendental foundation--that is, a foundation that is not founded on a revolt against God and Nature. This, I recognize, is not an argument that is particularly well timed to the moment, but it was the argument that is cognate with the one that Lasch was making in the 70s and 80s. Maybe someday it will make sense even for most it doesn't now.
But there's another difference between Lasch and me. His antidote is far less ambitious than what I'm arguing for--
The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of “creative, meaningful work” are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of “true romance” puts an impossible burden on personal relationships.
We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. (pp. 294-96).
This is true as far as it goes in its humility. Lasch's Protestant sobriety is one aspect to the antidote to the most toxic aspects of the culture of Narcissism, which is incapable of "coming to terms with the existential constraints" of human power. But it isn't enough. That spirit to transcend limitations is powerful and it cannot be repressed; instead it must be redirected in lawful ways.
The Faustian spirit is so key to understanding what's best and worst about the striving spirit that uniquely animates the Western tradition. It's the restless spirit of self-transcendence that is intrinsic to the human spirit. That 'spirit' should not be repressed, but must rather be channeled in the right way, and in future posts I want to talk about how Goethe and other 18th century German thinkers and poets have some ideas about how to do that. They are not infallible, but they are barking up the right tree. They began something that got lost in the materialist confusion and disruptions of the 19th Century, and I believe that it will be picked up again by the culture's intelligentsia. Charles Taylor and David Bentley Hart are, imo, harbingers of such a shift.
So as much as I feel attuned to so much of what Lasch says, I do not think that the alternative to Narcissistic Transhumanist hubris can be limited to the humble work-and-love ethos he describes above, as important as that is, but must be supplemented by a spirited exploration of the Real. The problem with the Faustian energies as they are directed within the TCM is that instead of exploring the Real, they seek to create an alternative "real" that inevitably will seal us off from what is really Real. We need more humility insofar as it's the virtue that keeps us grounded in the Real, but that doesn't require that it dampen our spirits in a way that quashes a healthy impulse toward self-transcendence.
That, imo, is what's missing in Calvinism and Protestantism in general--its rejection of the eudaimonistic ideal that comes down to us from the Greeks and the early Christian fathers. The result? An obsession with overcoming material limitations rather than spiritual ones. Hence the TCM and Transhumanism.