The Culture of Narcissism

This fairly lengthy article is look back at a 1979 book by Christopher Lasch called The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch was a conservative critic of what he saw as over-protective, over-medicating, over-indulgent, over-therapeutic parents. Some of the themes addressed in the book and the article are current hot-button issues-- day care vs. stay at home moms; the decline of the family unit; ritalin/hyperactivity vs. discipline. A lot of the trends Lasch saw in 1979 have become mainstream, and many (e.g. TV and grade inflation and parent-child relations) have become worse.

The article's author, one Christine Rosen, adds a few non-Laschian ideas to the mix; my favorite was the idea that today's self-contained, theatre and TV-lined mega-mansions insulate families from communities and discourage real-world involvement. This is a very interesting read, even if you don't agree with everything the writer and reviewer have to say. You don't have to be a conservative or liberal or a blogger or a luddite to worry about these things.

At its heart, the article reminded me of a few paragraphs of one of my all-time favorite essays, Neil Stephenson's 1999 "In the Beginning Was the Command Line," which is nominally about computer operating systems but it actually about metaphors. Because it is tough to link to the exact part I'm thinking of, I will quote it here:

"Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless* human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.

On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.

In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.

And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have."

Here is a link to the entire Stephenson essay; here is a link to the subpart that contains the quote above. You can even buy the essay from amazon, although it is freely available on the web.

** Oxford American Dictionary: "unthinking and irresponsible"