Reply #36: Indeed. I wish we weren't so passive when they play us for suckers. [View All]

[Karmadillo]

It's as if we've forgotten there's even a jugular to be found. I'm feeling hopeless enough to pick up Christoper Lasch's The True and Only Heaven. I know I'll disagree with a fair amount of what he's going to say, but just from what I've read so far, he was on to something about how we've made a wrong turn by chasing a kind of progress whose promise is always disappearing into the distance. All the consumer stuff we've accumulated doesn't seem to balance out what we've lost.

I hope you're doing well. It's good to see someone from DU's golden age still posting. Anyway, here's a snippet from a review you might like:

http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1991/10/the-true-and-only-heaven-progr.html

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In The True and Only Heaven he takes a further step. What does it mean, he asks, that the democratic movement of the 18th century and the anti-capitalist movement of the 19th, like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, were wrought not by the “universal class” of Marxist theory, not by enlightened rationalists liberated from local attachments and traditional beliefs, but by people very much committed to such attachments and beliefs, people loyal to the “archaic” creeds, crafts, and communities under attack from the forces of “progress”? Not, that is, by people looking toward the future, but by people looking toward the past?

It means, he answers, that “the victory of the Enlightenment,” with its unwillingness to accept limits on human aspiration and its promise that in a rational society the traditional virtues would be obsolete, “has almost eradicated the capacity for ardor, devotion, and joyous action.” On moral even more than environmental grounds, “the basic premise of progressive thought-- the assumption that economic abundance comes before everything else, which leads unavoidably to an acceptance of centralized production and administration as the only way to achieve it--needs to be rejected.” Not rational optimism but supra-rational hope is true wisdom and succor:

"Popular initiative ... has been declining for some time-- in part because the democratization of consumption is an insufficiently demanding ideal, which fails to call up the moral energy necessary to sustain popular movements in the face of adversity. The history of popular movements ... shows that only arduous, even a tragic, understanding of life can justify the sacrifices imposed on those who seek to challenge the status quo.

The idea of progress alone, we are told, can move men and women to sacrifice immediate pleasures to some larger purpose. On the contrary, progressive ideology weakens the spirit of sacrifice. ... Hope does not demand a belief in progress. . . . Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it. Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced, even though it is never completely justified either..."

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