The recent issue of Modern Age contains a commemorative essay by Susan McWilliams marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. McWilliams reminds readers that Lasch offers a positive analysis of populism that speaks to the current political malaise. As part of his critique of the cult of progress, Lasch attempted to ground politics in the intuitions of the petty bourgeoisie and the populist tradition that gave life to those intuitions. He saw in petty-bourgeois culture a moral realism that recognized the cost and limits of human existence, reinforcing a healthy skepticism of progress. The “small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen, and farmers” of the petty-bourgeois world were the least likely “to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.”Continue Reading »
The issue of populism in the Evangelical ethos raises a concern for the need to differentiate between pop culture as folk culture and pop culture as mass culture. At its best, Evangelicalism seeks to preserve and foster folk culture and the critics of Evangelical piety need to recognize this . . . . Continue Reading »
Lasch concluded that an emphasis upon mercy is perhaps the most difficult virtue for humans generally, and modern man especially, to sustain. And yet it is a message needing repetition and renewal, even in the face of likely failure. Hope demands nothing . . . . Continue Reading »
I was starting the second year of a Ph.D. program in U.S. history at the University of Delaware when the professor who would direct my dissertation, Guy Alchon, dropped a remarkable book into my mailbox: Christopher Shannon’s Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Lasch has written a “loose, baggy monster” of a hook. He takes on nothing less than “the western human condition,” arguing determinedly and, to my mind, persuasively that the idea of progress has outgrown its time. Lasch even suggests that progress, as the West has encoded it, . . . . Continue Reading »
