http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:00:09 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/10/06/140009.php Tony DalmynFrom the shores of Wascana Creek, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canadian writer Gail Bowen has released the 10th Joanne Kilbourn mystery. I am fond of Ms. Bowen's work. She has a great sense of place; Regina and Saskatoon, windy prairie cities with the pastoral charm and small town spirit of Lake Wobegon and Fargo, plus cold winters, seem like nice places. Bowen writes mysteries around a mature woman - a grandmother - with a life and career that does not revolve on anger and violence. She gets mood and emotional colour, and her characters live ordinary lives, taking care of each other. She is a great advocate of the virtues of taking care of the people you care about, tolerating their foibles and enjoying the rhythms of daily life - the conversations, meals and routines that make up our lives. The Endless Knot has her usual strengths, but also brings some of her weaknesses into focus. The plot is contrived and serves as a platform for politically correct judgmental commentary. An ex-folksinging duo who have since become wealthy, and have met Jesus in a big evangelical church in Calgary, have a transgendered child, who has been interviewed by a cold-blooded bitch of a journalist who empathizes with child in order to get sensational celebrity dirt on the family for a book. Dad is on trial for shooting and wounding the bitch. In this scenario Kilbourn has lots of people to pity and judge - lawyers, fundamentalists, journalists, politicians. The Fundamentalist mom gets particular hell for not supporting her son's gender switch. The Culture Wars are being fought in the Canadian West, and Bowen is clear about where she stands. Bowen does, however, better with lawyers and trials than in her last book, The Last Good Day.Bowen manages to put her finger on another strength and weakness in a bit of dialogue. Joanne Kilbourn tells her lover that an old friend accused her of being a moralist, and her lover replies that she is moral. Kilbourn is an intelligent middle-aged, middle-class woman, sincere but meddling, self-satisfied and condescending. Her inner voice is constantly employed in assessing people against her own wisdom. Joanne herself is contented with her sex life - she has frequent sex with her paraplegic lover, but she is catty about a younger female journalist who "does" too many random guys for the wrong reasons. Kilbourn is a a very real middle-aged woman, interfering in, and judging, her children's and friend's lives, rationalizing her interference as altruism. I can't tell if Bowen has the guts to write her character as multi-dimensional, or if she uses Joanne as a platform to spout pseudo-feminist banality.I have criticisms of Bowen's technique, and arguments with some of her values, but I come back to her amazing, loving sense of place and belief in the importance of family and friends, which wins out. In books about untimely death, that is grace. Books53990@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:00:09 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/10/06/071431.php Tony DalmynJack Reacher, Lee Child's serial hero, savouring an espresso in a cafe in New York, sees a man drive a car away. When he goes back to the same cafe the next day, he is approached and questioned, and allows himself to be drawn into the affairs of a gang of mercenary warriors. The car had been loaded with a $1 million ransom and driven away by the kidnappers who had taken the mercenary chief's trophy wife. By the time it's over, after several sharp plot twists, he's in a gunfight and burying bodies with a backhoe.Child is a skilled writer, without literary pretensions. His novels are all plot and pace, appealing to fans of suspense and action thrillers, military fiction and tough-guy detective fiction. Jack Reacher used to be an officer in the US Army Military Police, who lives on the road, with the clothes on his back, the money in his pocket, his strength, and his wits. He vaguely resembles John D. MacDonald's legendary Travis McGee, who lived on a houseboat, but Reacher is rootless. He is more like a character from a spaghetti western, an ominous drifter who breaks the law, but honours a higher law. In real life, the detachment is usually found only in monks, and the violence in serial killers. A man with Reacher's code of honour can't exist outside of a social setting. A man who cares for others will have a different kind of life. This kind of novel appeals more to fantasies of power and freedom than to social values, although there is a chivalrous ethic at work.It's a nicely crafted entertainment. Books53956@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Oct 2006 07:14:31 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/08/30/045928.php Tony DalmynThe latest title in Parker's long running Spenser series has reached the paperback rack. This time Spenser has been hired by the wealthy grandmother of a teenaged boy accused of Columbine-style multiple murder at a Boston-area prep school. The murder itself is not a mystery - the mystery is why. Spenser solves this one himself, without aid from his usual supporting cast. He can't go undercover, but Parker finds a way to let him talk to teens and get into their world of drugs and fantasy. He cracks wise, he cracks heads, he cracks the case. Parker takes the Columbine story and he get under the stereotypes. The kids are obnoxious, self-righteous in their rationalization for their violent moment. The parents, after the fact, are living with shame and grief, and with the condemnation of a society that blames parents for teen failure. Parker makes it look easy, which is a tribute to his experience and craftsmanship.As in the last several Spenser titles, Parker speaks as a social critic through Spenser's voice, and his voice is powerful but nuanced. Spenser interviews the single mother and grandfather of one of the shooters. The mother is a New Age type who had a kid because it was her right, and because she hoped to raise a sensitive feminist male child; she gave up on her son when he turned out to be a rambunctious male child. Mom, in a tangled web of self-deception, points fingers elsewhere, mostly at her father for taking him to football games and such. Granddad, whose grip on reality seems to be sound, has issues with an absent wife who raised the daughter as an artistic girly girl turned narcissistic hippie - who in turn, then, blames him for the fact that her son has become a homicidal punk.What does this have to do with murder? Everything and nothing. Parker rejects the popular theory that parents are the root of all evil. He turns it on its head: if that supposition is true, how many generations back does the blame run? He writes of interesting characters in conflict -- including intriguing secondary individuals -- and leaves the reader enough room to evaluate the story and work out the lessons.Parker in past books has used Spenser's relationship with therapist Susan Silverman to explore and expose the fallacies of modern therapy. In this book, Silverman is absent, giving lectures in the Carolinas, and only comes on stage at the end. That's enough literary leeway for Parker to make the point that some human issues are beyond talk and good intentions. Sometimes it takes a hard man to crack heads and confront people with their own compulsions and misdeeds. Books52218@blogcritics.org Wed, 30 Aug 2006 04:59:28 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/09/110226.php Tony DalmynIn 1936, British publisher, Victor Gollancz agreed to publish a book by Eric Arthur Blair on the imprint of the Left Book Club. Blair had been educated at Eton, but having failed to secure a University scholarship, had joined the British colonial service as a policeman in Burma. He came back to Europe as resolute opponent of colonialism and British snobbery. He was destitute and homeless for a period of time. He became a teacher, an assistant in a bookstore and a writer. His first full book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was published in 1933 under his pen name, George Orwell. To write The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell visited the coal mining cities of the industrial north of England and lived with miners and their families in rooming houses and in their homes. The well-known first part of the book contains his description of work in the mines and life in the mining cities. It is careful, rigorous, first-person investigative journalism. (The Wikipedia entry on The Road to Wigan Pier has a good summary). Orwell had a keen eye for details. His prose style was clean. He describes the hard tough work of the coal mines, the dirty working conditions and the poor living conditions, making the point that many of the things held against the working class by the middle class - dirt, squalor - are not due to genetic or moral failings. The workers work hard, within a system that does not reward them equitably, and marginalizes their value as human beings.The second part of the book is an essay about the British class system, industrialism, socialism and fascism. It reads well although Orwell repeats himself on some points. He wrote the book in about 12 weeks before going to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Although Orwell took a strong stance in favour of socialism, Gollancz wasn't comfortable with Orwell's ideas. He published the book as the Left Book Club selection in March 1937, having added a forward, which tried to distance the club from Orwell. His forward has been republished with the main work in print edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell. Orwell identified himself as a socialist for most of his career. The government thought he was a troublemaker. The conservative literary elites shunned him, and he had trouble getting his work published. The British Left didn't like him because he was a critic of Soviet Communism (Stalinism). He was at odds with the conventional thought of the Left for most of his writing career. The first three chapters of the second part of the book discuss snobbery and the British class system. Orwell's approach is introspective and personal. He doesn't use the terms culture and socialization, but that's what he is describing. He considers himself to be a product of the lower middle classes - status conscious, economically insecure, and deriving a sense of security and satisfaction from snobbish discrimination against the working class in Britain and the peoples of the rest of the world. Many of Orwell's critics and enemies accuse him of saying that the people in the working classes smell. What he said is that he was convinced, as a child at home and at school, that they smell. Orwell also suggested that the working classes had their own sense of snobbishness toward the middle classes, and that Northerners were snobbish about the South. His use of the concept of snob incorporates the self-righteous moral superiority of the oppressed as well as the arrogance of the oppressor.His descriptions of British socialism won him few friends. He thought socialism was dominated by members of the upper and middle classes - marginal to other members of their own class, and utterly alien to the real working class. He described the British socialist movement as a coalition of special interests united in their view of their moral superiority to the rest of their own class, and to the working class:In addition to this there is the horrible - really disquieting - prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured 'Socialists' ... He was probably right--the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank.His discussion of early 20th century socialism is a forerunner of modern critiques of identity politics and political correctness. His comments on feminism have been criticized by modern feminists. His criticism of feminism was a critique of the English middle class idea of the feminine, and the idealization of the feminine virtues as a pretext for snobbery and class prejudice. His critical perspective is honest, and delicately balanced. Like the later British social historians, he deflates the snobbish pretensions of the high culture of the British empire and the British middle classes. However he holds to ideals of common sense and decency, and rejects the appeals of Marxist dialectics, psychoanalytic jargon and fashionable nihilism. He dismissed socialist theory as irrelevant to the real concerns of working people. He thought British socialism had no traction with the middle class, and little traction with the working class. As an aside, he has some withering things to say about upwardly mobile working class literary figures, who strive for acceptance in the middle class, but are scorned by the middle class. His discussion critique of socialism becomes even more interesting when he considers the relationship between socialism and industrialization. He notes that the English looked back with nostalgia for the time when England had been what Blake had famously described in the hymn Jerusalem as a "green and pleasant land" undefiled by "dark Satanic mills", and he was conscious of a wide aesthetic reaction against industrialism.He describes socialism as the great ideology of the machine age. He saw the socialist propaganda of the age as unsettling and untrustworthy. Socialists were fond of predicting the benefits of socialism. The typical socialist vision of the day when the workers controlled the means of production was that all people would be fulfilled in an earthly paradise, a human race of geniuses and supermen at play. Orwell wondered if the mechanization of labour would produce a race of healthy people. The working miners he saw in the coal mines were physically awesome. Would we see such strong men in a society where no one worked? And why would we assume that an industrial society could exist without defiling England's pastoral splendor? He couldn't see an industrial society working without some kind of totalitarian social controls. This provides an insight into the vision that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four. The same fears could be said to have inspired Tolkien's dark vision of legions of deformed men enslaved by the dark lords in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis's Arcadian vision of Narnia.Orwell presented British socialism as an unreal vision peddled by marginal people to an untrusting public. He saw, accurately, the appeal of anti-modern thinking in British culture, and the appeal of fascism to large segments of the British public. His basic advice to the socialist movement was to address itself to justice and freedom, to lose its fondness for bragging about new factories in Russia, to lose its love of Marxist theory, and to attack the totalitarian threat of fascism.The Road to Wigan Pier provides some interesting insights into Orwell's character. More importantly, it contains an honest personal record of Orwell's navigation of the cultural and political currents of British society during the Great Depression. Most importantly, he claims a unique honest and moral stance as a writer and critic. Books42029@blogcritics.org Mon, 9 Jan 2006 11:02:26 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/02/141522.php Tony DalmynAn Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture makes an argument for high culture and aesthetics as a civilizing force. The author, Roger Scruton, is a philosopher, a conservative writer, and a critic of postmodern ideas in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. His stated purpose, in the preface to the American edition was to explain what culture is and why it matters. That overstates his point, which is that the critical appreciation of the humanities is being displaced by a less critical, postmodern cultural studies of popular culture. The displacement has occurred in colleges and Universities, and in the arts and entertainment industries. It is manifested by the destruction of critical standards, the chaos of postmodern art and literature, and the fragmentation of culture. The core of the argument is that literature and the arts, like religion, express social emotions and play a vital part in maintaining an ethical culture. The book is short, at 158 pages, and clearly written. It span several topics - the concept of culture, the influence of culture on ideas and emotions, the history of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a theory of aesthetics, and the idea of cultural studies.His starting concepts are Johann Gottfried Herder's definition of culture as the flow of moral energy that holds society intact, and Wilhelm von Humbolt's idea of culture as something that is learned as a social inheritance, subject to critical scrutiny, and consciously imparted to succeeding generations. The first concept, when applied in a critical way, leads to the anthropologist's idea of common culture, the attitudes and social emotions of an identified set of people - a tribe. Within a common culture, human beings are able to make judgments about social behaviour. The ethical principles embedded in the common culture are founded in collective experience and tradition, and maintain the peace and happiness of the whole tribe. Culture is vital to human identity. In spite of variations - wide variations - it is not accidental, random or spontaneous. It is founded in a real core of human needs. It is an intellectual and emotional web, involving historical attitudes and prejudices under the strain of current needs and impulses. The idea of culture as inheritance leads to the idea that the literature and art of a culture can be studied critically, and that culture is a form of specialized knowledge. This leads to the idea of high culture. Both sets of concepts describe something that is absorbed by human beings, shaping our sense of identity, our sense of belonging to a particular group of human beings - family, gender, tribe, class, profession, nation - our distinctiveness from the rest of the world through membership in the group, and our identity in the group. Both sets of concepts describe something that influences our social emotions - our sense of what is attractive, what is beautiful, what is good, what is fair. The common culture and the high culture of Western Europe were historically grounded in a religious view of life. The art and literature of Western Europe reflects the shared ideals and history of the whole society, not the ideals and interests of any particular class. It represents the ethical vision of the common culture. The common culture began to break down during the era known in the history of ideas as the Enlightenment, and to economic historians as the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless people still learn social emotions that influence their sense of who they are, how they should feel and act, their social identity. The culture that allows for the expression and transmission of social identity is a public or civic culture. Scruton suggests that the dominant influence is actually popular culture, which is the end product of industrialization and globalization, and particularly the entertainment and media industry interacting with the common culture. It is a fluid concept, describing the culture that everyone is exposed to, and that most people inhabit unconsciously. The Enlightenment is generally viewed as the liberation of humanity from the restrictions of an aristocratic and religious view of life. Scruton's views on the Enlightenment are interesting. In his book on modern philosophy, he suggested it was trivial event in the history of philosophy, but a significant event in the history of ideas and culture. The collapse of the old world-view has been described both as the death of God, and the disenchantment of the world, the loss of a fundamentally ethical view of life based in the religious beliefs held by most members of society before the Enlightenment. Scruton argues that the popular idea that the Enlightenment liberated mankind from traditional morality is an ideological construct and a figment of the Romantic imagination. He argues that the Enlightenment was an intellectual and cultural project to rescue the ethical view of life by the heroic work of the imagination. He describes the Romantic movement as the cultural expression of a yearning for the old order, manifested in a strong commitment to the feelings, particularly feelings about nature, erotic love, and discovering the hidden force at the heart of the world. Romanticism, as it became disconnected from rational principles, criticism and ethics, became an increasingly destructive force. Imagination became fantasy. The ethical ideal of heroic striving became sentimentalized as the agony of the lonely artist. At the same time, the rise of the entertainment industry created competition to create and sell art and literature for consumption. Before the Enlightenment, art was related to religious values of the common culture. After the Enlightenment, the artist's work was increasingly seen as the product of a personal creative process, and an expression of the artist's creative self. The imagination was put in the service of the needs of the self, and imagination and art became a commodity. In this way of thinking, there is a difference between real imaginative work and the cynical manipulation of feelings.Scruton values the study of high culture as a means of understanding of the evolution of culture as a defence against the dissolution of an ethical common culture. The study of high culture implies a process and logic, a system, known as aesthetics. His theory of aesthetics is based on the ethical philosophy of Kant, and the rational traditions of the Enlightenment. Art has meaning by using symbols within a tradition and common culture. Originality in art is the creation of new images creating new awareness of meaning within a tradition. Art imagines - it creates a symbolic, meaningful image. The art of high culture makes a statement of about meaning and beauty. The entertainment industry tends to produce repetitive and derivative images and stories that manipulate the emotions. Popular art is for consumption, which is why so much of it is unimaginative. Much of it is kitsch and melodrama. Scruton focusses on fantasy and sentimentality. Imagination is critical and objective. Fantasy is subjective, and involves the study of how to use the object for our own gratification. Pornography, for instance is the study of stories and photographs to generate a sexual response. The consumer of pornography relates to the image by using it for sexual excitement, without the inconvenience of dealing with a real person. Sentimentality is worse: Sentimentality, like fantasy, is at war with reality. It consumes our finite emotional energies in self-regarding ways and numbs us to the world of other people. .... While pornography puts our sexual appetites on sale, sentimentality trades in love and virtue. But the effect is the same - to deprive these higher things of all reality by cynically denying them, or making them insubstantial, dream-like and schematic.The cultivation of high culture has a fundamental ethical dimension: A high culture may survive the religion that gave rise to it. But it cannot survive the triumph of fantasy, cynicism and sentimentality. ... A common culture dignifies people by setting their desires and projects within an enduring context. It makes the spirit believable and the commitment sincere, by providing the words, gestures, rituals and beliefs which moralize our actions. A high culture attempts to keep these things alive, by giving imaginative reality to the long-term view of things ...Scruton is sympathetic to the modernist movement in the arts and literature, the critical vision of Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis, and T.S. Eliot, which was realistic, rather than sentimental. He has doubts about Eliot's idea that high culture can create new values, religious values to replace values lost when Western culture lost its connection to a common religious tradition. This makes the modernist project difficult, arcane and ultimately elitist. His assessment of the postmodern movement is that basically a negative movement, which is dissolving the common culture. Postmodernism follows in the footsteps of Romanticism with the same emphasis on subjectivity and the same quest for freedom from judgment. In the 19th century and 20th centuries it gave us the cult of the counter-cultural artist - the Bohemian, the beat poet, the hippie, true to art and love alone, to the point of suffering. It also spawned the cult of the intelligentsia and the tormented celebrity intellectual, in the style of Nietzsche, Sartre and Foucault. It underwrites the postures of persistent rebellion and fashionable nihilism. The last couple of chapters mount an attack on Foucault and Derrida and the pretensions of the current promoters of cultural studies. He makes an interesting and clever move in the last chapter. He suggests that viewing high culture as resource to be cultivated to maintain the ethical vision of common culture is not a unique perspective of the elite classes of Western Europe, or an especially. It is a cross-cultural perspective, supported in the works of Confucius and the philosophies (rather than the religions) of the Orient. Scruton is persuasive on many points. His starting assumption that culture socializes and teaches a system of judgment is clearly correct. He implies that people aren't comfortable with judgment, and that a good deal of the philosophy and ideology of period after the Enlightenment is dedicated to helping people escape from cultural judgment and asserting themselves - which may have a great deal to with why so many people seem to have sleazy pop-culture rationalizations for self-serving, greedy, aggressive and manipulative behaviour. He make a good argument that the study of high culture is important to maintain an ethical public culture. He makes a good argument that the ideology of cultural studies is corrosive. It encourages fantasies of escaping from judgment and disengagement from objective values.His discussions of aesthetics is good. It is informative and challenging. However his approach to high culture is, notwithstanding his arguments, austere and mysterious. He dismisses almost all of the art of popular culture, including all photography, cinema and electronic media, which seems to go too far. His attitude to popular art is essentially snobbish. His view of the process of creating art, in earlier times, is rather like the Christian theory of the Virgin Birth. The conception was a mystery, the gestation invisible and the whole process conveniently funded by the disinterested, patient and tolerant husband of Mary. It is a miracle. It would seem to me that art can be useful and valuable without having to be so pure or to meet such sublime critical standards.It seems that he have have has lost sight of the less exalted crafts of decorative art, storytelling, play and creative engagement. Much of popular art is honest work for the artist, honest entertainment for the audience. A story can be just a story. Popular art can be acquired and consumed honestly and harmlessly. It is idle play, escapist. His theory of the distinction between imagination and fantasy works sounds logical, but the distinction is more psychological and spiritual. Problems arise, I think, when popular art is manipulative and sentimental, when it pretends to be meaningful. The problem is that people can start to use fantasy, not as play or as an escape from reality but as a means of filling social needs and manipulating reality. It seems to me that a full critical theory should recognize popular culture and judge it by proper standards. To some degree, he has ignored the fact that pop culture, fluid, liberated and Romantic as it is, makes moral judgment possible, and teaches the techniques of instinctive moral judgment. Take for instance Batman Begins. The story presents the spiritual struggle of Bruce Wayne as he becomes a violent, private guardian of the public interest. There is a theme of decadence and fear of the masses, which seems to inspire the same fantasies for public order and security that were realized when the Fascists took power in Italy and Germany in the 1930s. It is fact the same world that T.S. Eliot described in The Waste Land, viewed in the medium of graphic art and cinema. The decadence and corruption inspires fantasies of violence, but it also inspires a vision of moral action: "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me." Books41715@blogcritics.org Mon, 2 Jan 2006 14:15:22 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/27/120941.php Tony DalmynChrisopher Lasch said, in the acknowedgements in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, ISBN 0-393-03699-5) that it was written under trying circumstances. He had cancer and died before it was published. It was based on essays published in several intellectual magazines and journals. In The Gift of Christopher Lasch, James Seaton, writing in First Things, a conservative, religious, intellectual magazine, saw his work turning from fashionable radicalism to "the moral and spiritual depth that becomes possible when an intellectual disdains the consolations offered by the intellectuals' view of themselves as morally and mentally superior to the rest of humanity." The conservative critic Roger Kimball was less gracious, even condescending in "Christopher Lasch vs. the elites", (1995, Vol. 13, New Criterion, p. 9). (Lasch praised Kimball's book Tenured Radicals in one of his essays, and said little that Kimball would disagree with, except on capitalism and high culture).Lasch favoured pragmatism in philosophy and populism in politics, and he was skeptical of high culture conservatism. The lead essay is a refutation of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a favoured text among cultural conservatives. Ortega argued that modern politics were dominated and degraded by mass culture and that mass tastes were responsible for increasing ugliness in art and banality in public life. Lasch argues that the masses are primarily workers and consumers, with little choice in how to fill their needs and satisfy their tastes. They consume the tangible and artistic products that are available. His view is that society is dominated by elites. He argues that technocrats in business and government exercise wide powers of economic and social control, perpetuating their own power and influence as a new aristocracy of talent. He argues that there are enduring class divisions in American society, in spite of cultural pretenses to the contrary, and that technocrats are part of the ruling class."Opportunity in the Promised Land" traces the history of the term social mobility, a term that was popularized in the media after 1945 as kind of modern myth that tempers the reality of limited opportunities for the majority of modern Americans. "Does Democracy Deserve to Survive" addresses the way that American culture seems to have given up on the capabilities of the ordinary citizen, increasingly treating citizens as unintelligent and lazy consumers.There is an essay on communitarianism and populism - he favours populism. There is an essay on isolation - we meet each other at work, or in specialized contexts. The social institutions of the neighbourhood have withered. We end up relying on our own families for our entire social life, unless we are fortunate or wise enough to connect with friends and fellow human beings in other ways. There is an essay on the racial politics of New York, the politics of identity and outrage of Al Sharpton, as opposed to Jim Sleeper's vision of a city of proletarian strength, professional excellence and high cultural achievement."The Common Schools" looks back at the principles of moral fervour and democratic idealism of Horace Mann, one of the founders of the modern public school system and finds the source of some of the persistent problems of the educational system in the loss of Mann's moral fervour combined with the fulfilment of some of his methods - a professional class of teachers working in a specialized institutional system, taking charge of children and promising, unrealistically to turn them into responsible moral citizens. "The Lost Art of Argument" sheds light on the issues of superficiality and bias in the media. In the decades before and after the Civil War, newspapers were frankly partisan, but they engaged their readers in serious disputes about public affairs. The ideal or the pretence that a newspaper is a vehicle for the delivery of neutral information can be traced to the commercial alliance between the media and the advertising industry. Advertisers wanted to be able to publish commercial information in a respectable medium, and the newspapers wanted to respond to the tastes of consumers as interpreted by advertisers by being more dignified and useful. The identification of news became the function of a professional elite of journalists and editors. The delivery of the news became a specialized art, serving a business. He notes that Walter Lippman, a liberal propagandist of note, developed the idea of professional journalism as technocratic institution mediating the flow of information between citizens and the techocrats who administered business and government. Lasch argues this has the effect of putting distance between citizens and events, eliminating the engagement of argument. In argument, there is the chance of persuading an opponent and the risk of being persuaded. (I watched Good Night, and Good Luck as I was reading this essay, and it put the conflict between Murrow and Paley in a fuller perspective). Being immersed in a stream of information and progapanda is not the same. We are consumers, with no influence, no ability to speak back, no way to stop the noise, except tuning out. Some news engages the sentiments, but nothing seems to have an real connection to our lives. This essay is useful in understanding why the media is not necessarily a trustworthy source of information to make decisions. The news is a cultural product, and the media expresses the dominant cultural values of materialism and consumption. It maintains a stance of fashionable criticism of established authority, and is infatuated with novelty and celebrity. It is "conservative" on economic and political stories and crime but generally "liberal" on cultural issues (favouring tolerance, diversity, choice, liberation, personal growth and the pleasures of consumption over self-restraint). It doesn't as much reflect as create the tastes of mass culture. The stance of objectivity, combined with sheer laziness and stupidity, means that political stories are reported literally, superficially and uncritically. The media is full of badly written political propaganda, celebrity news, sports and entertainment and lifestyle information. We are losing contact with the debate over vital issues and becoming disengaged from the democratic life of our cities and nations. As well, people tend to learn how to present themselves and even how to write and speak by watching and imitating the styles of celebrities and the media, hence: When words are used merely as instruments of publicity or propaganda, they lose their power to persuade. Soon they cease to mean anything at all. People lose the capacity to use language precisely and expressively or even to distinguish one word from another. ... ordinary speech begins to sound like the clotted jargon we see in print. Ordinary speech begins to sound like "information" - a disaster from which the English language may never recover."Academic Pseudo-Radicalism" begins with a comment about stratification and specialization in higher education. One of historical goals of higher education was the democratization of liberal culture. Due to the rising cost of universities, a liberal education is increasingly unavailable to most students. The students who get one are increasingly homogeneous in affluence. They are taught by a self-obsessed academic elite, occupied with postmodernity and identity politics. They specialize in the rhetoric of revolution and transgression, the language of creating one's one values - but it is just posturing by comfortable members of a comfortable elite. Meanwhile, as for an education in the history and values foundational to our culture ...In "The Abolition of Shame", he reflects on the disappearance of a moral vocabulary from American culture, the disappearance of the idea of personal responsibility and the preoccupation with self-esteem. He discusses several current psychological studies of shame, judging them to be increasingly misguided as they move away from or ignore the idea of responsibility and treat shame as an enemy of self-esteem. He carries this discussion into the ideology of education and the ideology of parenting as taught by psychology. When psychology teaches that people have a right to approval - whether or not their actions merit attention or approval - it becomes propaganda for a morality of selfishness.In "Philip Rieff and the Religion of Culture" he asks the question "whether a democratic culture can flourish, or even survive, in the absence of the internal constraints that formerly supported the work ethic and discouraged self-indulgence". Religion has declined among the educated technocratic elites, as a persuasive and coherent source of values, and as a general sensibility. People understand their own actions, and the actions of others in therapeutic, rather than religious and ethical terms, a situation discussed in the writing of Philip Rieff. Rieff had not published a book since 1973 (a situation that has just changed, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education), and Lasch spends several pages capturing his thought. According to Rieff, culture is a way of life backed up by the will to condemn and punish those who defy its commandments. A "way of life" is not enough. A people's way of life has to be embedded in a "sacred order" - that is a conception of the universe, ultimately a religious conception, that tells us "what is not to be done".Those who regard tolerance as the supreme virtue and confuse love with permissiveness will find these propositions forbidding ...This kind of thinking seems to bring Lasch into line with Roger Kimball and other cultural conservatives, but he rejects the high culture project. He says "the worst way to defend culture is by deifying it .... modern intellectuals should not aspire to be the successors of the clergy .... it tends to make a religion out of culture." He goes on to argue: Culture way well depend on religion but religion has no meaning if it seen merely as prop of culture. Unless it rests on a disinterested love of being in general, religious faith serves only to clothe human purposes with a spurious air of sanctity. That is why an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a culture Christian. His closing chapter, "The Soul of Man under Secularism" begins with an attack on the "religion of art" as expressed by Oscar Wilde as offering the "seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familial or religious obligations." This leads into an unfavourable evaluation of Jung's spiritualized, aestheticized, romanticized version of psychology that has been so influential in modern thinking. This leads into a discussion of the false idea of social progress, taught by Jung and others, that the history of society can be compared to the growth of a child. In this view, religion is viewed as a childlike system of ideas that comforted our immature ancestors, which in modern times "is treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, rather than a challenge to complacency and pride".He doesn't comment on the evangelism and fundamentalism that have become the religion of mass culture in modern America, except to defend it in populist and social terms. His defence of religion conveys a withering criticism of the modern idea of personal spirituality and all the pseudo-religions devoted to self-fulfillment and self-esteem. It would have been interesting to get his take on how the culture of narcissism has started to influence religious practice in American churches that consider themselves conservative - their grandeur, their use of modern technology, their familiarity with the psychology of personal fulfillment, their relationship with corporate values, their acceptance of consumerism, their self-righteous focus on criticizing the sins of others. Lasch has been described as a difficult writer. His prose is good, but he tends to write in aphorisms and to argue elliptically. His philosophy is unsystematic, running from foundationalism to Jamesian pragmatism. But, he was a rigorous thinker, a gifted writer, and he had an honest belief in democratic values. His arguments fall outside the conventional ideological boxes, joining conservative social ideas with a radical critique of capitalist economics and social institutions. His ideas are worth thinking about. Books41515@blogcritics.org Tue, 27 Dec 2005 12:09:41 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/26/101827.php Tony DalmynIn the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don't know how to value anything and cannot identify values worth having. The Minimal Self deals more with cultural and psychological issues, with some attention to the political and social movements that came out of the Counterculture of the 1960's. (He addressed a few points about the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age in the Afterword of the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism). His method, again, is a review of the social and psychological effects of living in a late capitalist, postmodern society. This time, he pays more attention, on the one hand, to the experience of alienation and fear, and on the other hand, to the emerging politics of the narcissistic self.His first main clarification of narcissism is identify it as a cultural response to fears about survival, at two levels - survival as a distinct person, and survival in itself. The second and third Chapters deal with the Survival Mentality, and the Discourse of Mass Death. The Survival Mentality looks at survival themes in the arts and the media. There has been a shift in thinking, so that for many people, survival has become success. There is a pervasive sense of oppression, and for many, victim-hood has become the defining characteristic of personal identity. The Discourse of Mass Death looks at cultural responses to the reality of mass death, the extermination of populations of disposable people. Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps used the Biblical term "holocaust" to identify the event. He argues that this was partly a response to the debasement of the term genocide, (from ethnic slaughter to any ethnic conflict) and partly a response to a horrifying insight. The Holocaust was a radical slaughter of people who had been systematically dehumanized in a totalitarian regime. He moves on to discuss the debasement of the term totalitarian, originally conceived by Hannah Arendt as a monstrous use of power to render people valueless and superfluous, to a synonym for an authoritarian regime. His argument is that totalitarianism and the Holocaust represent a deep break in the human condition, calling for a renewal of religious faith and a commitment to decent social conditions. The argument that the Holocaust is distinctive because the Nazis made their victims seem subhuman to the soldiers and functionaries ordered to kill them seems flawed. The dehumanization of victims is a necessary step to induce thousands of human beings to engage in mass murder, and a necessary mechanism of genocide. (For an example from recent memory, watch Hotel Rwanda and listen to the Hutu propagandists calling for the extermination of the cockroaches). The Holocaust lurks like a monster in our consciousness because it exposes the frailty of the American and Western European faith in free markets, democracy and culture. The Germans were a civilized, educated people, who happily elected a lunatic, and followed him into war and mass murder. Both Liberals and conservatives in the West tended to view Western culture as more highly evolved than other cultures, and incapable of the brutalities of humanity in earlier times and other places. Lasch goes on to review the psychological studies of Holocaust survivors and the relevance of the Holocaust to Jewish identity and world politics. Psychologists study Holocaust survivors as examples of survival under extreme stress. Lasch suggest that when the events are studied this way, the horror is watered down, and people are left arguing about who had it worse, and how to survive. This reflects a disengagement from hope. He argues that where individuals have no power to protect themselves from these monstrous powers, their only refuge from pervasive fear is in imagining ways to survive. The next chapter returns to themes of survival in the arts and the media looking at novels by writers as diverse as Philip Roth, J.G. Ballard, Henry Burroughs, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, and a variety of modern visual art. Here, Lasch tries to show that artists are discerning and expressing concern for survival, in order to show that survival concerns are dominating people's imaginations.He devotes a chapter to a reexamination of the Freudian theory of narcissism, and its cultural parallels. In this area, he adds substantially to the ideas covered in The Culture of Narcissism. He draws on Melanie Klein and the later Freudian writers and their theorizing about narcissism and the fragmentation of the ego The simple version of Freud's theory is that every person has three basic personality structures - id, ego and superego. The id represents basic physical needs and raw emotion, the superego represents social needs and rules, and the ego represents rational self-mastery and the true mature self. Freud identified the ego ideal as an aspect of the superego. Later writers argued it was a separate psychic structure. Lasch treats the ego ideal as a separate structure drawn to visions of unity and perfection in a demanding and selfish way. The ascendancy of the ego ideal is narcissism. In Lasch's thought people who become fixated on cultic religious practices, personal growth, identity politics and special issue politics are cultural, if not psychological, narcissists. They are typically self-righteous and supercilious, dramatic and intense, and largely detached from the world. They cultivate postures of critical irony or spiritual detachment. They don't ignore the world outside the self, but they disengage when they can't control the world outside the self. Later in the book, he explores the history of the Counterculture and the politics of narcissism. He builds his point by tracing the evolution of the idea of the self, in an arc from individualism to narcissism, in religion and psychology, drawing on his knowledge and skill as a historian. He looks at the tension between ecstatic religion and rationalism within the American Protestant Churches, the assimilation of a light version of Freud's ideas into the optimism of American psychology, and the influence of Romantic and mystical figures like Jung and Bateson. The end product is an emphasis on being righteous about your feelings. He argues persuasively that the concerns of the New Age and the American New Left with primitive nature, identity, authenticity, feelings, imagination, feminine principles, and utopian visions are essentially narcissistic, and represent a disengagement from the political process.The idea that emerges, not necessarily in Lasch's own words, is that there is movement to a politics of taste. The common themes unifying his discussions of the ego ideal, narcissism, the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age are sentiment, intuition, drama, and beauty. The politics of narcissism are the politics of dramatic protest against the fact that the world is ugly and unhappy. It is idealistic in the sense that it protests the failure of the world to live up to imagined aesthetic ideals of peace and harmony. The Freudian section of the book is difficult, with Lasch developing an obscure idea of the ego ideal within the obscure and unhappy field of Freudian personality structures. However, it allowed him to develop the metaphor of narcissism and to apply it to modern cultural and political movements. In the first chapter, he reviewed three different sets of reactions to his earlier book, all of which interpret him as a critic of materialism and self-gratification. Conservatives saw him as a critic of a decadent morality and mainstream liberals saw him as a critic of consumerism. The emerging New Left agreed that society was narcissistic, but thought this was a sign of cultural progress. It was focused on self-fulfilment, rather than justice. Lasch didn't agree with any of those visions and responded by suggesting an alternative to the well-accepted but muddled left-right vision of politics. He suggested that we might think of three factions, the parties of the superego, the ego and the the ego ideal, each focused on one aspect of the Freudian structure as the dominant mechanism of social control. The party of the superego favours the use of rules. The party of the ego including classical political and economic liberals, want to manipulate people to act the right way. The party of the ego ideal - the Counterculture, the New Age, the postmodern liberalism of feeling, and identity - is self-righteously utopian. His suggestion is fertile with ideas. It creates a framework for his discussion of the cultural and psychological foundations of the modern Left, and implies that the new liberalism of identity politics represents the collapse of democracy, under the pressure of life in the modern world, into postmodern absurdity.His new classification is basically a critique of the failures of the logic of individualism against the manipulative programs of modern social planning, on the government side, and advertising on the economic side. His own loyalties seem to lie with the party of the Superego, which he identifies with social critics like Daniel Bell and Philip Rieff. He has substantially adopted Rieff's analysis of the emergence of the therapeutic sensibility. He has much in common with Daniel Bell, who was described by Rick Perlstein, in "The Prophet Motive, Daniel Bell's take on capitalism 20 years later" (Slate Magazine, 1996): Daniel Bell is, simply, one of the most important cultural critics of the postwar era, though also something of an anomaly, with his uncompromising commitment to both economic equality and bedrock cultural conservatism.Lasch writing in 1984, two decades after the Counterculture of the 1960's, two decades before matters reached their present state, was an early critic of postmodernism. His original idea that cultural narcissism reflects uncertainty about survival becomes stretched, but the book works very well, when read with The Culture of Narcissism, as a critique of the ideology and art of postmodernism and mass culture in late capitalist society. Books41479@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 Dec 2005 10:18:27 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/15/094936.php Tony DalmynChristopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and it stands as one of the most distinctive works of social criticism and commentary of the last three decades. Lasch used the term narcissism, a psychological term based on a myth, "as a metaphor for the human condition". Analyzing culture through a psychological, diagnostic metaphor is an experimental venture. Many writers fail. The bookstores and libraries are filled with half-baked social theories dressed up in medical jargon. And, of course, narcissism has become one of the catchphrases of popular psychology, with literally hundreds of self-help books mentioning narcissism in some way. Lasch's ideas stand out from a mass of inferior material. Lasch was a student and teacher of American history, with an emphasis on populist and radical ideas and politics. He described himself as a radical and a populist. He was a critic of capitalism as practiced by modern corporations, criticizing the way advertising constantly undermines people's confidence in their skills, their abiliities and the quality of their lives, in order to sell them new products and services. He was also a critic of the educational system, psychology and social work, identity politics, celebrity culture, the destruction of tradition, the devaluation of ordinary skills, and the devaluation of families in modern society. He is basically a democrat and a humanist, with a strong sense that social limitations and social forces make people lead degraded and unhappy lives. This perspective makes him an ambivalent critic of popular culture. The fact that he is a critic of popular culture doesn't make him a conservative, but some aspects of his critique resonate with intellectual conservatives. Liberal philosophers and ideologues of individualism, identity, and self-actualization like Charles Taylor, writing in The Malaise of Modernity, associate him with Allan Bloom and other conservative social critics. The term "narcissism", was relatively obscure in 1979. As Lasch noted in the Afterword to the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism, by 1979, Tom Wolfe's identification of the 1970's as the "Me decade" was a journalistic and cultural cliche. Freud used the Greek myth of Narcissus in his own distinctive method of psychological analysis - psychoanalysis - to describe a particular pattern of feeling, thinking and acting. In classical Freudian theory, a very young child is the perfect narcissist. Radically dependent, and frightened of being alone, the child tries to be recognized by adults, to control adults, and find a sense of peace and security. This explains the child's fears, demands for attention, fantasy life, and extreme emotions. This kind of process is normal in children, but abnormal for adults. As we grow up, we learn about attachments, trust, and independence. We learn our limitations. Narcissists don't get it - they are so insecure about themselves that they constantly demand attention and constantly try to control other people. It is an elusive concept, because people responding to the same insecurities may act in dramatically different ways. A narcissist may appear to be neurotic, needy and passive-aggressive, or may present as a self-confident person, focussed to the point of being obsessed, perhaps a bully or a predator.Freud's ideas were popular with American psychologists for a while, but not necessarily widely understood or accepted. In modern therapeutic literature, narcissism tends to refer to the more aggressive presentations. Mental health professionals used to use the term megalomania as the formal DSM diagnostic category for individuals with a personality problem marked by a grandiose sense of the self. The colloquial term was egotism. In 1980, DSM started referring to it as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The clinical disorder is marked by lack of empathy for other persons, manipulative actions, grandiose fantasies and pretentious behaviour. Narcissism isn't an especially popular term, but it has gone into common usage to describe people who might otherwise be described as vain, conceited, arrogant, pretentious, selfish, self-absorbed or manipulative. When the word is used this way, it becomes a matter of opinion and perspective. Simple confidence and strength can appear as narcissism to an insecure or defensive person. As Christina Rosen said in her essay The Overpraised American :But therapy today is itself a form of attention, as a glance at popular self-help books reveals. Lasch might have diagnosed the problem of cultural narcissism, but the contemporary self-help industry has rushed in to try to solve it; the shelves of bookstore self-help aisles are filled with offerings such as Why Is It Always About You? Saving Yourself from the Narcissists in Your Life and Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me: How to Recognize and Manage the Narcissists in Your Life. In the ever-indulgent world of self-help, the narcissist is, of course, never you; it is always someone else. Lasch used the term as Freud had used it, rather than in either the modern clinical (DSM) sense or the modern popular sense. He specifically refused to label self-confidence, self-interest and detachment from the needs of others as narcissism. His working method was an analysis of social conditions, looking for indications of narcissism in the Freudian sense. He started with the idea that a lot more ordinary people were acting like classical narcissists, and tried to understand what social circumstances were contributing to this behaviour. Lasch explains cultural narcissism as a response to anxiety, and a social strategy for people who lack a secure sense of their selves. This analysis allows Lasch to identify several interconnected social systems that cause social anxiety, that fail to educate and support people in being aware of their identities as human beings with rights and responsibilities, and that promote extravagant and grandiose behaviour. While he discusses various systems separately, Lasch also describes the evolution of the modern, technological, materialist, consumption-oriented, personally liberated, nominally egalitarian American society. People are insecure because they are in fact vulnerable. More and more people are adopting narcissistic strategies to protect themselves. One strategy is making a grandiose show of ourselves. Another is turning to religious and psychological practices to reach psychological states where we experience peace, harmony and transcendence.Lasch mentions a therapeutic sensibility as the prevalent way of understanding people's feeling and actions. He suggests which has largely replaced religion as a source of language about moral and political matters. People understand themselves and others in terms of personality and emotional forces rather than character and moral choice. It is based on the idea of health and it looks for causes - or excuses - for behaviour in both nature and nurture. He discusses the modern fascination with being aware of feelings and justifying actions based on feelings. He suggests that this kind of awareness is superficial and false - he devotes a chapter to the banality of pseudo-self awareness. The therapeutic sensibility subjects people to the judgments of therapeutic experts and people imitating therapeutic experts, which makes people self-concious about how they present themselves. It encourages people to present themselves in socially conventional "healthy" ways, but it celebrates spontaneity and authenticity in personal relations. This makes it acceptable to act like a celebrity, which usually means flamboyant and theatrical behaviour - life as a performance. The therapeutic sensibility is genially non-judgmental towards impulsive and selfish behaviour, but harshly judgmental towards discussion of character, goals and values. American industry became adept and producing commodities which were supposed to save labour and increase personal freedom. The advertising industry became adept at selling new commodities. This caused people to become dependent on industrial systems, which is a form of vulnerability. The selling process depends on manipulative language, and manipulative tactics to persuade consumers that they need something new. The language of advertising is often appeals to the consumer's sense of entitlement while undermining the consumer's sense of his own status and competence. The process contributes to distrust of language, and a pervasive anxiety about having the right possessions to signify safety and success. Work itself has become more tenuous. Lasch suggests that the old model of work involved purposeful activity and genuine accomplishment. Less jobs involve strength, skill and concrete achievement, and more jobs involve the slippery businesses of networking and selling. Work becomes an exercise in presentation. Workplace relationships become competitive, exploitative and unsatisfying. The old model of success was the self-made man, who created wealth by skill and ingenuity. The modern model is the happy hooker, happily selling herself. The American educational system has become the recruiting and training arm of industry, producing workers and consumers, instead of self-reliant citizens. An elite class of managers, bureaucrats and professionals has gained increasing power. Political life has become a form of theater and entertainment. Politicians speak to the public through advertising, propaganda and stage-managed events. People find that public life has become distant, and they find themselves powerless to participate. The social sciences have been important to industry and politics, providing new techniques to motivate, persuade, manipulate and control workers, consumers and citizens. The managerial and professional class has aggressively expanded its power and influence. One its projects has been the idea that expert judgments on the process of human social living are possible and desireable. The managerial class discredits tradition, common sense and personal judgments. This has contributed to the erosion of democracy, and the disempowerment of ordinary citizens. The social structures of families and small communities, in which children learned the business of being human from interaction with trusted adults have been disrupted and largely discredited. For most of the time, adults interact with other adults in the workplace, while their children go to school, where children interact with each other and with a few selected adults. At home, children's interactions with adults are limited, and tend to be organized around the consumption of commodities - including entertainment commodities in the form of TV, movies and games. Family bonds are strained, the parental role in the socialization and education of children is minimized and parental authority is radically undermined. Adults are culturally sanctioned for not fulfilling their children's wishes and for hurting their feelings, which reduces them to negotiating with their children, and bribing them to behave well. Adults fail in the task of socializing children, and children become insecure tyrants. Lasch devoted a short chapter to "The Flight from Feeling, The Sociopsychology of the Sex War" which starts with the claim that the modern dream of a rich, satisfying, erotic and emotional relationship is an illusion, and that "personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened". Love is based on trust, and it is hard to trust anyone in a culture of narcissism. People are so isolated, so vulnerable, so fearful that they can't have satisfying emotional relationships. The sexual revolution has not, contrary to the hopes of 20th century liberationists, allowed people to become more intimate. It has simply made us promiscuous.Christina Rosen covers many of these points, and relates them to the current state of culture in her essay The Overpraised American.The Culture of Narcissism addressed important social and existential themes - alienation and anomie, but it was read as an attack on popular culture. Lasch felt that he had been misunderstood. He wrote The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, published in 1984, and added a long Afterword to the 1991 paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism to clarify his stance. In the Afterword he wrote:The best defences 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 ... that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable us to explore a small corner of the world and come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or 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.... We find it more and more difficult to a 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. Books41021@blogcritics.org Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:49:36 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/04/100425.php Tony DalmynSerenity got some cautiously supportive advance reviews. It's an adaptation of Joss Whedon's Firefly TV series. I wasn't familiar with this series - I went to the movie as a Firefly Virgin. Most or all of the regular cast of the series were in the movie. They have a fair number of TV guest credits and a few movie credits, but none of them have achieved any stature in the movie industry. Canadian actor Nate Fillion, who plays Captain Mal Reynolds, was in Saving Private Ryan. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who wasn't a regular in the series, was in Love Actually and Dirty Pretty Things. What this movie had working for it, to attract an audience, was Joss Whedon's reputation as the creative force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the reputation of the series. After that it's going to rest on review and on word of mouth. IMDb reports it did well on its first weekend. It deserves to do well. It's a clever, stylish production. The story has a classical sf setting on the fraying edges of an interstellar human civilization. Ship's captain Mal Renyolds is a freewheeling smuggler, bandit and buccaneer, in the tradition of Han Solo. He has a past as a rebel soldier in an unsuccessful rebellion or civil war by the libertarian outer planets against the control of the more civilized inner planets and the central Parliament. His voyage becomes a mission and an adventure, protecting River Tam (actress Summer Glau) and her secret from the Parliament's sinister Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The acting is competent, perhaps a bit over the top - in the wise-cracking, ironic style of the early Star Wars movies and the Buffy TV series. The plot is tight and fast. The visuals and special effects are professional. There are a couple of great martial arts scenes which will enhance Summer Glau's reputation. There is a thoughtful moral premise about peacefulness, aggression, social controls, free will, human nature and the messiness of life - think Brave New World or Clockwork Orange. We get an early glimpse of this in scenes of River's back story, when she was being educated and socially conditioned as a young child on a planet controlled by the Parliament. The Operative provides a second ethical theme. He is a perfect soldier, proficient in his technique, aware of the immorality of his violent intrusions into other people's lives and freedom, justifying it in the faith that he is working for a better world. Because he does have an ethical compass, there is a continuing tension in his character. But enough hints and spoilers.This movie has all the pieces and puts them together very well. It should make the DVD of the Firefly series quite popular. Video37383@blogcritics.org Tue, 4 Oct 2005 10:04:25 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/02/183815.php Tony DalmynPhilosophy, A Very Short Introduction is an excellent place to start educating oneself about philosophy. It is one of the Oxford University Press's excellent Very Short Introductions. Craig's approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed. His definition of philosophy is delivered in a kind of parable. Imagine when human beings became conscious that sensory data could be interpreted through concrete symbols and ideas. An animal track means an animal has passed, which might be pursued as prey, or avoided. Human beings perceived and visualized events by indirect evidence and ideas, and then considered how human beings could act to influence events. Human beings became aware of forces of nature and events beyond human control. Human beings investigated nature, but encountered mysteries, and developed a sense of the supernatural. The project of understanding and explaining nature is science, and the project of recovering from the shock of mystery is philosophy.Craig maintains that philosophy has progessed, but progress in the discourse of ideas is much slower than progress in science. The answers aren't always verifiable and clearly true, and the ideas don't quickly gain traction in a diverse culture. Historians of science can trace the rise and fall of theories and paradigms fairly clearly. Bad theories are generally discounted except by kooks. Philosophical ideas can be traced too, but the problems tend to persist.His approach is to examine a few key problems by looking at how a select group of thinkers dealt with issues: Plato's Crito on the ethical and political question of why Socrates, given the chance to escape, allowed the Athenian state to execute him. Hume's On Miracles on evidence and reality. The unknown Buddhist writer of King Milenda's Chariot outlining an idea of the self. From there, he sketches some of the main themes of philosophy&#8212ethical consequentialism, integrity, political authority, evidence, rationality, the self. He sketches the main groupings of ideas&#8212dualism, materialism, idealism, empiricism, rationalism, skepticism, relativism. After that he looks at a few interesting works. He talks about Descartes's Discourse on Method, Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Darwin, and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. The sections on Hume, Darwin and Nietzsche, were good in explaining what they wrote, and why their ideas have been influential. The fact that he includes Darwin is interesting. Darwin wasn't a philosopher, but he had an interesting and influential idea, which many others have used and abused.At the end, he suggests reading other introductory books: Thomas Nagel's What Does it All Mean, or Simon Blackburn's Think and moving on to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.This book is nicely written, in a good clean style with convincing arguments and good ideas. Craig's approach to philosophy is that it is important and useful. He takes it beyond the narrow concerns of current professional philosophers who are mainly occupied, with many exceptions of course, in dealing with logic and language. He doesn't claim that philosophy can explain everything. His approach is common sense&#8212he doesn't use philosophy to confuse or speculate or rationalize. Philosophy is a discipline of enquiry and discourse, which tends to take apart speculative systems and to take down thinkers who are too wrapped up in their own ideas. All of the books in the Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series are short&#8212usually not more than 125-150 pages&#8212quality-paperback introductions to challenging and complex topics or writers. The writers are experts in their areas, communicating ideas to intelligent readers. They respect the reader, and they guide the reader to further reading. Some of them&#8212this one for instance&#8212may have a light tone and use some dry humour but they don't pretend to be talking to Bubbas and Bimbos. (The series seems to have started as a reprint of a series called Past Masters, started in the late 1970's. At that stage, they were being printed as regular paperbacks on cheap paper. As far as I can tell, the OUP has reprinted all the titles in the Past Masters series as Very Short Introductions, and built the series. A few of the books are dry, but the later titles have been written with the clear view of avoiding technical jargon). Edited: PC Books37265@blogcritics.org Sun, 2 Oct 2005 18:38:15 EDT