ROGER KIMBALL: Christopher Lasch vs. the Elites of Our Time.

Lasch takes great pains to encourage us to abandon both pessimism and optimism for the more modest virtue of hope. There is much to recommend this. In any robust sense of the word, optimism involves turning a blind eye to the “odious facts” of the world around us just as pessimism involves a monstrous ingratitude in the face of the unearned blessings we receive. Both involve a culpable distortion of reality.

Yet it is not clear whether Lasch himself ever overcame the temptations of pessimism. Moral passion was doubtless his greatest asset. Addicted to what the historian Herbert Butterfield described as “the luxury and pleasing sensuousness of moral indignation,” he was never less than earnest. He raised central questions, discussed them articulately, yet often failed to persuade. Perhaps this was because his diagnoses were so sweeping and historically one-sided. Perhaps it was because, having discarded one left-wing view after the next, he nevertheless was unable to discard the Left’s animating hatred of the free market. In any event, his attack on progress represents not a triumph of hope but an unusually dour form of populist pessimism (he would, I feel sure, have approved of Kafka’s quip that “there is hope, but not for us”).

But what is perhaps most noteworthy is the way Lasch attempts to salvage some margin of religious commitment from the stern diagnosis he offers. Traditionally, of course, religion has functioned in part as a source of existential consolation. Lasch would have us downplay that aspect of religious teaching, eager, as always, to combat the tendency to “make people feel good about themselves.” For Lasch “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” A person with “a proper understanding of religion,” he says, would see it not as “a source of intellectual and emotional security,” but as “a challenge to complacency and pride.” There is of course something to this. For pride is assuredly the enemy of religious life. But how touching, how sad, really, that even here, even when it was a matter of life’s ultimate mysteries, we find Lasch arguing against the possibility of consolation or solace.

Lengthy, but well worth a read.