Jan 25, 2026
I have plenty of disagreement with George Scialabba’s new book — especially on MacIntyre and Taylor so far, which I hope to write more about — but he is so brilliant on Christopher Lasch that I have to just capture this passage (originally from Only A Voice):
Lasch’s work is an extended quarrel with modernity, defined as the advance of an overlapping, mutually reinforcing phalanx of political centralization, mass production, expanded consumption, automation, geographic mobility, the bureaucratization of education, medicine, and family life, moral cosmopolitanism, and legal universalism. Against this barrage of abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale.
The human creature has a specific evolutionary endowment and gestational history. As a result, the human infant has a powerful and threatening fantasy life, which it can only outgrow gradually, through a range of close-up interactions, involving both authority and love, with the same caregivers over many years. The bureaucratic rationalization of work and intimate life plays havoc with this scheme of development, producing a weak self, stripped of traditional skills, tools, and autonomy, entirely dependent on large forces beyond its comprehension, much less control, and crippled by ambivalence toward remote, impersonal authority. What sustained the strong pre-modern self was the virtue of hope; what sustains the weak modern self is the ideology of progress.