‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch’s pessimistic prognosis of the shifting relationship of individuals to society and to each other in The Minimal Self was published 40 years ago. It might have been written yesterday.
From the late 1970s, Lasch published a series of books, most notably The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self and The Revolt of the Elites, that prefigured many contemporary debates, about culture wars, the rise of a “liberal elite”, the corrosiveness of individualism, the encroachment of the market into social life, the creation of a celebrity culture, the rise of a “therapeutic” mindset.
Lasch’s early writings in the 1960s were deeply inflected by Marxism. Over time, his sulphurous critique of liberalism and of the impact of the market led him towards more familiar conservative themes, especially the defence of tradition, a critique of feminism and a wariness of progress. His work has proved influential on sections of the left and the right, and his legacy has been claimed by both radicals and conservatives.
For Lasch, the combination of consumer capitalism, competitive individualism and the abandonment by radicals of campaigns for material change in favour of demands for cultural transformation, had led to the emergence of a new narcissistic personality type. Lasch did not mean narcissism in the colloquial sense, such as a Trump-like figure, bursting with “self-centredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration”, as one profile put it. Rather, drawing on psychoanalysis, Lasch was describing an individual who could not distinguish between themselves and the world beyond and so came to “see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires”.
It was a beleaguered self rather than an overbearing one. “The new Narcissus,” Lasch wrote, “gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay”, seeking “relief from the burden of selfhood”. He described people as increasingly yearning for contact and intimacy with others, yet fearful of the pain of engagement.
Lasch may not be a household name, but many of his ideas and motifs have become infused into our culture. Much of the way we talk about “snowflakes” or the “anxious generation” draws, even if indirectly, on themes elucidated by Lasch. He did not live to see the advent of social media, yet today’s worries about its impact often seem Laschian. “Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors,” he wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. The technology described may be anachronistic but the sentiment could have come from the contemporary keyboard of Jonathan Haidt or Ellen Ullman.
Perhaps the current theme that speaks most to Laschian fears is the growing concern about what a report last year from the US surgeon general called “an epidemic of loneliness”, an alarming rise in the social disconnectedness of people. In Britain, Tracey Crouch was in 2018 appointed as Britain’s first minister for loneliness following a report from the Jo Cox commission on loneliness.
Against this background came a study last week that compared perceptions of loneliness among middle-aged people in the US and 13 European nations, examining data over the past two decades from surveys. It found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Americans seemed the loneliest, followed by Britons. It is a finding that fits in with the general perception of Britain and the US as societies with the greatest stress on individualism and therefore more likely to nurture a sense of loneliness.
Dig deeper, though, and the results are more nuanced. The study divided Europeans into three groups: “continental” states (France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Israel); Mediterranean countries (Italy, Spain and Greece); and Nordic nations. It found Nordics the least lonely, while those from Mediterranean countries are almost as lonely as Britons.
This upends the usual stereotypes – Nordic nations are generally regarded as more individualistic, Mediterranean countries as more community-minded. One explanation for the disparities, the report suggests, lies in the strength of social safety nets. Government support for programmes such as paid family leave, unemployment protection and subsidised childcare is far more robust in Nordic states than in the US, UK or Mediterranean countries. Beyond the often shallow national caricatures lies a complex mesh of social developments and public policies that profoundly shape, or distort, the way we think about ourselves and our relationships to others.
Few would deny that loneliness is a serious issue. Nevertheless, the question of whether there is an “epidemic”, or even whether the prevalence of loneliness has increased across generations, is contested.
There is a deeper issue, too: the tendency to individualise social issues, whether poverty or unemployment, to view them as psychological dispositions or even as moral failure. Loneliness, too, is frequently framed as a psychological condition, or mental health problem, the product of narcissism or self-obsession.
Forty years ago, Lasch was trying to show how social changes were distorting relationships, and to describe people’s attempts to negotiate a new world. But his psychoanalytical eye often overwhelmed his social vision and what many took from his work was less his social critique than his delineation of a new, narcissistic personality type. The end point of his analysis (the emergence of a public disconnected from one another and so more self-centred) became, instead, the starting point for explanation – that people’s narcissism and self-obsession explained their disconnectedness and the erosion of communal bonds.
This is even more true today. Too much of contemporary discussion about the impact of social and technological changes on people’s psychology – from the influence of social media on the wellbeing of the young to the effect of hyper-individualism on our sense of self – fetishises the psychology at the expense of social analysis. We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces. We could do with obsessing less about personality types than about the obsession with the psychological at the expense of the social.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
