Degeneration Revisited

The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch, Norton, 268 pp., $11.95; Warner, 447 pp., $2.75.

It would seem fabulous if it were not in evidence all around us: it has been more than a year since the original publication of Christopher Lasch’s celebrated The Culture of Narcissism; the hardcover edition has given way to the inevitable paperback; yet still the talk goes on. Steadily, unaccountably, the book goes on stirring up controversy and interest. Hardly a month goes by before one or another national periodical brings the question before us (or before some celebrity interviewee) once again: is Christopher Lasch right? Is our culture suffering, dying, from pathological narcissism? Is there hope? What lies ahead?

Like most such vogues, that of Lasch and his jeremiad on “American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” tells us more about the reading public than about the feted author or work. Just as the little flurry of self-serving critical puffery which greeted the publication a few months ago of R. Emmet Tyrrell, Jr.’s Public Nuisances cast less light on either Tyrrell or his collected essays than on the extent to which H. L. Mencken (to whom Tyrrell was frequently and—without so much as a hint of irony—favorably compared, both as stylist and as ideologue) is no longer read; so the more enduring flurry which has set up around The Culture of Narcissism casts less light on either Christopher Lasch or his book than on the extent to which Max Nordau is no longer read.

Max Nordau (1849-1923) was a Jewish-Hungarian physician, author and Zionist. He grew up in Budapest, attended college and medical school there, and practiced medicine and journalism there for a few years, before moving on to Paris, where he devoted several years to postgraduate study in medicine, engaged in further periodical writing, and eventually resumed his medical practice.

It was during his Paris years (he spent most of his last years in a kind of self-imposed exile in Madrid) that he achieved international notoriety through his books. (He eventually became famous enough that in 1903 he was called upon to survive an assassination attempt spurred by his Zionist activities.) His first important books began appearing during the 1880s: Conventional Lies of Our Civilization in 1883, Paradoxes in 1885 and The Sickness of the Century in 1887. By 1892, when his magnum opus, Degeneration, was published, he had become well enough established that his books were routinely brought out in both French and English as well as in their original German.

Degeneration made an enormous splash. One might say that it was The Culture of Narcissism of its time. It was easily the most influential of the many extended essays in social and cultural criticism which were being published during the last years of the last century—and they were being published literally everywhere: in London, in New York, in Chicago, even in the Baptist-infested wilds of Waco, Texas, where William Cowper Brann was casting curses and imprecations on the age in a one-man newsletter he published and called (with no trace of irony) The Iconoclast. Degeneration even occasioned the first appearance in American print of George Bernard Shaw, who replied to it at length in an essay called “The Sanity of Art” in the July 27, 1895 issue of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty.

But Degeneration is famous no longer. In one of the few references to it in any contemporary piece of writing, Richard Gilman dismisses it out of hand as “a shabby, disreputable, but well-known 1898 tome,” thus tacitly calling into question his own assertion of its great fame by not even getting its publication date right. In some ways, as we shall see, Nordau’s oblivion is well deserved. Yet if he were more widely known among contemporary readers, those readers might not now be showering encomia upon such a book as Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism—a book which is remarkable chiefly for its highly unimaginative (if entirely unintended) echoing of Degeneration. Indeed, so obvious is this echoing to anyone familiar with Nordau’s work that the failure of any of the dozens of journalists and critics and publicists who have discussed The Culture of Narcissism in the past year to even mention its striking similarity to the earlier book must, as I have said, be taken in itself as evidence of the extent to which Nordau has been forgotten.

Consider the facts:

Nordau was a student of Cesare Lombroso, the Italian psychiatrist who “discovered” not only that antisemitism was a mental illness, but also that criminals were genetic “degenerates” who could be identified by certain physical and and mental “stigmata” of “atavism.” Lasch is a student of Lombroso’s frankly admiring contemporary, Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist who “discovered” that, as Vladimir Nabokov has neatly summed it up, “all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to [the] private parts.”

Nordau announces at the beginning of Degeneration that “the disposition of the times is curiously confused, a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent feeling is that of immenent perdition and extinction.

Fin-de-siecle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly-developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.”

Lasch announces, at the beginning of The Culture of Narcissism, that “as the twentieth century approaches its end, the conviction grows that many other things are ending too. Storm warnings, portents, hints of catastrophe haunt our times. The ‘sense of an ending’ which has given shape to so much of twentieth-century literature, now pervades the popular imagination as well. . . . The question of whether the world will end in fire or in ice, with a bang or a whimper, no longer interests artists alone. Impending disaster has become an everyday concern, so commonplace and familiar that nobody any longer gives much thought to how disaster might be diverted.”

Nordau believes that it is a kind of sickness which has brought us to this pass. “The physician,” he writes, “especially if he has devoted himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies, recognizes at a glance, in the fin-de-siecle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ‘decadent’ works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia.”

Lasch too sees disease as the underlying source of our cultural malaise: “the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, which in less extreme form appear in such profusion in the everyday life of our age.” “In the clinical literature,” he writes, “narcissism has come to be recognized as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical attention once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses.”

of quantity,” says Nordau. “Pathology represents a heightened version of normality,” says Lasch. And “every society reproduces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience,” whether these norms, assumptions and modes are healthy or not, “in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized.”

What then is this fin-de-siecle personality—whether

Christopher Lasch (right), author of The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and Max Nordau, author of Degeneration (1892).

And both Nordau and Lasch argue that the sickness of an age manifests itself not only in the type of pathological personality which is most common during that age, but also in the normal, more or less healthy personality of the average man of that age. “The difference between disease and health is not one of kind, but normal or pathological—all about? Mainly it is about selfishness, “a love of self,” as Nordau puts it, “never met with in a sane person in anything like the same degree. The hysterical person’s own ‘I’ towers up before his inner vision, and so completely fills his mental horizon that it conceals the whole of the remaining universe. He cannot endure that others should ignore him. He desires to be as important to his fellow men as he is to himself.” And this ego-mania, as Nordau calls it, this narcissism, as Lasch calls it, is nowhere more on display than in the literature of the age. Lasch writes of “the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography,” and the fact that “instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it,” serious writers have “taken to presenting it undigested” and to including in their books “the kind of spurious confession whose only claim to the reader’s attention is that it describes events of immediate interest to the author.” As Lasch sees it, any author of such a confessional piece “seeks not to provide an objective account of a representative piece of reality but to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self.”

Nordau agrees entirely. “Formerly,” he writes, “it was the custom to utilize . . . excursions into all possible fields of discussion as articles for newspapers or monthly periodicals, and afterwards to collect them in book form. But experience has taught that the public does not exhibit much interest in these collections of essays.” Accordingly, authors on the make—Huysmans is Nordau’s central example—have concocted a new literary form: a novel which consists of nothing but “the description of a human being, with his intellectual life, and his monotonous, scarcely modulated external destinies.” This form demands no skill as a plotwright or storyteller, but it “gives the author a pretext for expressing his own ideas on all possible subjects.” Nordau complains that “M. Huysmans and his school” have transformed “the novel from an epic poem in prose into a hybrid mixture of the Essays of Montaigne, of [the] Parerga at Paralipomena of Schopenhauer, and the effusions in the diary of a girl at boarding school.” Not only is the narcissistic personality, the personality of the ego-maniac, fervently devoted to exhibitionism; it is elitist as well. The narcissist relies on others to make him the center of attention, but he despises them nevertheless. “The narcissist,” says Lasch, “divides society into two groups: the rich, great and famous on the one hand and the common herd on the other. Narcissistic patients, according to Otto Kernberg, ‘are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich and powerful, and of belonging instead to the “mediocre,” by which they mean worthless and despicable rather than “average” in the ordinary sense of the term.’ The degenerate, says Nordau, “is fain to de-spise the vulgar herd for the dullness and narrowness of their minds.”

Both Nordau and Lasch deny that the narcissistic, exhibitionistic self-preoccupation they have described is in any sense the same thing as simple selfishness or egoism. “Egoism,” Nordau writes, “is a lack of amiability, a defect in education, perhaps a fault of character, a proof of insufficiently developed morality, but it is not a disease. The egoist is quite able to look after himself in life, and hold his place in society.... The ego-maniac, on the contrary, is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does not understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude towards it.” In similar fashion, Lasch argues that “men have always been selfish,” and asserts that “narcissism has more in common with self-hatred than with self-admiration,” because it leads ineluctably to self-defeating or self-destructive behavior.

Both Nordau’s ego-maniac and Lasch’s narcissist are archconsumers. “A stigma of degeneration,” Nordau writes, is “oniomania” or buying craze. This is not to be confounded with the desire for buying, which possesses those who are in the first stage of general paralysis. The purchases of these persons are due to their delusion as to their own greatness. They lay in great supplies because they fancy themselves millionaires. The oniomaniac, on the contrary, neither buys enormous quantities of one and the same thing, nor is the price a matter of indifference to him as with the paralytic. He is simply unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to acquire it.”

Similarly, Lasch writes of the narcissist: “Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.”

It would be possible to go on like this for many more pages than I have already filled, but the point is made. Christopher Lasch’s much touted, much praised Culture of Narcissism is little more than an updated rewrite of Max Nordau’s discredited and forgotten Degeneration. The two books agree not only in their fundamental ideas, but even in small details of their arguments and in their illustrative examples. Nordau explains that the degenerate cultivates forbidden vices and becomes a seeker of thrills at any cost because his degeneration has brought with it a blunted sensitivity to stimuli of all kinds, and he needs intense experiences if he is to feel anything at all; Lasch describes the attempt of the narcissist to “cultivate more vivid experiences, … beat sluggish flesh to life, … revive jaded appetites.” Nordau likens the ego-maniac to “a mental Robinson Crusoe, who in his imagination lives alone on an island, and is at the same time a weak creature, powerless to govern himself.” Lasch likens the nineteenth-cen-tury rugged individualist who saw the world “as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design” to Robinson Crusoe, and asserts that the twentieth-century narcissist more closely resembles Moll Flanders.

It is easy, of course, to dismiss Nordau entirely, merely by discrediting the ideas of Lombroso on which his analysis rests. Similarly it is easy to dismiss Lasch by discrediting the ideas of Freudism on which his analysis rests—by saying sweepingly as Sir Peter Me-dawar does that “psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.” But this is not only too easy, it is also unnecessary. There are other grounds aplenty for dismissing The Culture of Narcissism, not the least of which are its internal incoherence and its outright factual errors.

One example will suffice to illustrate both problems. Americans, Lasch tells us near the beginning of his first chapter, are in “retreat from politics” and have turned their attention “to purely personal concerns. Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement.” Yet only a few pages earlier, in his Preface, he has written that “the ‘flight from politics,’ as it appears to the managerial and political elite, may signify the citizen’s growing unwillingness to take part in the political system as a consumer of prefabricated spectacles. It may signify, in other words, not a retreat from politics at all but the beginnings of a general political revolt.” And a little later, near the end of Chapter I, he faults fellow cultural critic Edwin Schur for “setting up an over-simplified opposition between ‘real’ issues and personal issues” and for ignoring “the fact that social questions inevitably present themselves also as personal ones.” Which is it? One wonders. Are Americans in retreat from politics or brewing a revolution? Are they substituting a concern for the self for their old concern with the polity, or have they begun considering the personal dimension of their old social concerns?

One of the problems we face in trying to answer these questions and figure out what Lasch is trying to say is that the available data simply don’t support the hypothesis, no matter how often we hear it repeated these days, of a “retreat from politics.” It is true, of course, that voter turnout in major elections has reached a series of all time lows in the past decade and a half, but it is surely a mistake to infer from this a general lack of concern for political issues. On the contrary: the evidence suggests that the American people are increasingly concerned with political issues, and tend to stay away from most elections for precisely the reason that they have nothing to do with issues—they are merely empty exercises designed to preserve the appearance of republican methods of government, when in fact the candidates are indistinguishable and the outcome of the election a foregone conclusion, whoever may emerge the victor.

There is certainly ample evidence that growing numbers of voters are perceiving elections in just this way. “The electorate is skeptical,” writes U.C. Berkeley political science professor Jacob Citrin, “if not wholly contemptuous, of government’s ability to solve the nation’s problems.” He cites figures from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research showing that nearly 75 percent of the electorate now believe that “the government wastes a lot of tax money”; 60 percent believe “the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right only some of the time”; 50 percent believe “public officials don’t care much what people think”; and 45 percent believe “the people running the government don’t know what they are doing.”

And these attitudes are, of course, turning up at the polls. CBS news reported on January 14, 1979 that slightly less than 50 percent of those eligible to vote in the November 1978 elections had bothered to do so. According to a Census Bureau spokesman, these non-voters could not properly be described as apathetic; rather, he said, they were politically alienated—increasingly uncertain that voting changed anything or could change anything, that elections were anything more than a fraud or a charade. Moreover, the Census Bureau told CBS, it was likely that even more Americans are staying away from the polls than the figures would seem to suggest, since it’s widely known that many people lie when asked if they voted in the last election.

Confirmation of this speculation came early in February of 1979, when the British magazine The Economist released its privately conducted survey of participation in the November 1978 elections. The Economist found that only 37 percent of the electorate had bothered to vote.

Were the non-voters in the 1978 election uninterested in politics—or in candidates and politicians? It is surely significant that in California two years ago, two ballot initiatives or referendums, the famous Proposition 13, which passed overwhelming, and the Briggs Initiative, which would have forcibly removed homosexual teachers from the public schools, and which failed overwhelmingly, both drew vastly more voters to the polls than the elective races on the same 1978 ballots. It is also significant that the circulation of political magazines is now at an all time high, with Mother Jones, a slickpaper monthly aimed at the younger generation, the generation of the ’60s, leading the field—not to mention the new prevalence of informed political analysis and commentary, by such as Robert Sherrill, Nicholas von Hoffman, William O. Douglas, and Karl Hess, in the pages of mass-circula-tion men’s magazines like Playboy and Penthouse.

And who can look out over the Woodstock-like seas of young and middle-aged faces, hundreds of thousands of them, at anti-nuclear rallies all over the country in the past few years and say that Americans are in retreat from politics? Who can recall the hundreds of simultaneous rallies on college campuses from coast to coast on May 1, 1979, some of them attended by more than a thousand students, which put a premature halt to the Carter administration’s plans for a new draft, and say that Americans are becoming indifferent to social issues?

Christopher Lasch can— and does, for nearly 300 pages of mostly capable enough prose which he has systematically defaced here and there with great blots of Freudian gobbledygook. And what can one say in the face of such a feat of blindness, except, again, that it reflects more badly on the reading public than on Lasch himself? Lasch is alone responsible for his ignorance, to be sure, and for the sloppiness with which he allowed contradictions to stand when he edited and strung together into a book what had originally been a series of more or less discrete magazine articles, and for the intellectual credulity which has led him to view the world deliberately through Freudian spectacles. But, willy nilly, readers are like citizens. As the latter tend to have the sort of government they deserve, so the former tend to— have the sorts of books they deserve. If they fail to educate themselves, they will fail to recognize charlatanry and con-artistry when it is offered them under the name of the higher criticism. And their quest to understand the culture in which they live will suffer accordingly. For the buyers of books as for the buyers of all else, the old admonition says it all: let the buyer beware.

Jeff Riggenbach is Executive Editor of LR.