Elite enclaves enclosed within a wasteland: on Christopher Lasch & Catholic Social Thought
Elite enclaves enclosed within a wasteland: on Christopher Lasch & Catholic Social Thought
by Adrian Pabst
We live in an age of resurgent utopia masquerading as prophecy. Liberalism as the last utopian politics of the ‘long twentieth century’ might be in crisis, but a new technological utopianism has taken hold of the ruling elites in the West. They believe in the digital revolution and the supposed triumph of techno-science over tradition and common cultural customs. In the quest for salvation from human deficiency, disruptive dislocation is not merely the price to pay for progress, whatever the temporary setbacks. It’s the only means of achieving the end of evading mortality.
And in pursuit of the ultimate utopia of living forever, the new prophets are the tech billionaires – chief of all the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter) Elon Musk and the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos – who use their vast fortunes to achieve god-like ambitions for the future of humankind. They are committed to creating technologically enhanced human capabilities and building a new interstellar civilization on Mars while boosting the ideas of the Barbarian Right such as the amateur historian Darryl Cooper whose work fuses the Nietzschean idolatry of heroic power with pseudo-scientific IQ-based eugenics and with explicit racism and Antisemitism. As with all false prophets, theirs is a cult that worships idols. The old is the new.
In different yet complementary ways, the work of the social theorist Christopher Lasch and the body of Catholic Social Thought – from the first social encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 the most recent social encyclical Fratelli Tutti in 2020 – are the true prophecies for our age of disruption: a recognition of the ravages of capitalism, of social atomization and of a culture of entitlement based on individual rights, combined with a constructive alternative anchored in socially embedded markets, support for traditional marriage and family, the importance of patriotism, obligations that beget rights, and hope instead of utopia.1
Yet Lasch and Catholic social teaching are not mere critics of our contemporary condition or its origins in modern utopian abstraction. They provide a realistic vision that balances sacrifice with service, grief with hope, loss with gain. It is this paradoxical way of thinking that moves us beyond the false binary between the forces of anti-modern reaction and what Lasch called ‘the true and only heaven’ of progress.
Central to both Catholic Social Thought and the work of Lasch is the argument that secular Enlightenment modernity produces a form of progress that knows no material or symbolic bounds. It elevates the Renaissance motto of ‘man as a measure of all things’ into a moral absolute, rejecting the idea of limits on human volition and power or the limited nature of nature, of wealth, of nations and of a wider natural order. The loss of a philosophy and lived culture of limits marks the triumph of will over intellect, of coercive power over a just ordering of relations, of a closed immanence over an open transcendence.2
Solidarity, subsidiarity, and the elitist turn toward identity
Lasch’s writings are replete with references to the argument that only limits can balance our human freedom with our obligations to one another. As early as the late 1970s, he anatomized our age of elite anger and the underlying ‘culture of narcissism.’ “Once it was the
‘revolt of the masses’ that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture,” Lasch writes with reference to José Ortega y Gasset’s eponymous book. “In our time, however, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses” – a diagnosis in Lasch’s 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy that applies as much today to the formation of a new professional-managerial class and the plutocracy of tech and finance as it did in Lasch’s time to the revolutionary, secular New Left (about which more presently).
His critique of elites anticipates presciently our era of accelerating capitalism and identity politics. The years since the 2008 financial crash have seen a ‘revolt of the elites’ against the popular majority with its sense of mutual obligations towards family and fellow citizens, neighborhoods and nations. Lasch’s vision of small platoons and larger unions all nested within each another that resonates strongly with the principle of subsidiarity in Catholic Social Thought – locating agency at levels in line with the dignity of the human person. A subsidiarist polity is a more plural polity because people and public authorities at different levels are partners in power.
Connected to this is the practice of solidarity – another core principle of Catholic social teaching. Lasch was one of the first public intellectuals on the left to recognize that cultural diversity and social solidarity are in tension with one another, certainly if one assumes that people are readier to trust, cooperate and share with those with whom they have customs in common. Yet, as Lasch showed, the elites since the 1960s or so have privileged diversity over solidarity by favoring individual choice, change and liberation from tradition.
“It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote in his Revolt of the Elites: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” It is the small-c conservative dispositions of many ordinary people that are not represented by the dominant elites in politics, business or the media. For Lasch, this is a cultural and a class issue, not an ideological difference of left versus right: “It is the working and lower middle classes, after all, who favor limits on abortion, cling to the two-parent family as a source of stability in a turbulent world, resist experiments with ‘alternative lifestyles,’ and harbor deep reservations about affirmative action and other ventures in large-scale social engineering.” Since Lasch penned these points in the early 1990s, social attitudes in the U.S. have on the whole become much more liberal but, if anything, the values divide between an increasingly radicalized upper-middle class and the more moderate majority of the population is growing.
In the tradition of Catholic Social Thought, solidarity together with subsidiarity are conceptualized as ‘principled practices’ that hold in balance the dignity of each and every person with the common good of all. In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI defines the common good as “the good of ‘all of us’, made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society. It is a good that is sought not for its own sake, but for the people who belong to the social community and who can only really and effectively pursue their good within it” (§7).
It is precisely the common good that mainstream politics has abandoned. One reason why Lasch’s analysis is so prophetic is because he critiqued the emerging consensus from within the left, questioning the dogma of progress and the culture of individualism promoted by a ‘new class’ of professionals and managers who are much more interested in their own social status than in economic justice or political pluralism. This mirrors much of the contemporary left with its focus on smashing statues and ransacking small shops often owned by working-class immigrants, in alliance with big billion-dollar businesses and the mainstream media, who share the commitment to relentless commodification and the disdain for ordinary people. Lasch puts this well in his Revolt of the Elites: “The growing insularity of elites means, among other things, that political ideologies lose touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens.”
Thus, Lasch anticipates the dangerous dynamic unleashed by identity politics that focuses on the values of individuals or separate groups rather than on what people share as citizens, and what binds them together as members of national communities. By privileging difference over common bonds, it supplants a sense of belonging and shifts the character of politics in four ways: first, from contribution and sacrifice to a culture of victimhood; second, from building a common life to a politics of protest; third, from the struggles of representative democracy to direct action; and finally, from collective agency to narcissistic groupthink that is nowadays amplified by the echo chambers of social media – a destructive force denounced by both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis for its lack of limits qua ethical constraints.
The New Left vs. New Right, ethics/anthropology vs. ideology/politics
Yet neither Catholic Social Thought nor Lasch propose a return to the aristocratic virtues reserved for the few or the moralism of the self-righteous bourgeoisie. Rather, they call for more virtuous elites and greater popular participation based on mutual obligation anchored in a common culture and a sense of limits. Our first obligation is to respect natural, human, and social limits just because we do not have god-like power but instead are finite, moral beings who are nevertheless ordered towards their ultimate source in the transcendent Creator God. Our second obligation is to one another as persons who are all made in the image and likeness of God.
Though never personally religious, over time Lasch came to be increasingly sympathetic towards faith and religious believers. He understood that in society, the growing opposition
between ruling elites and ordinary people is not primarily ideological or party political. It has its roots in ethical and anthropological assumptions. Elite obsession with separate status or with boundless progress violates a popular sense of shared customs and of intrinsic limits on human power to control society, nature and the body. True social advancement is the sense of obligation that every generation has to improve its inheritance and pass it on to the next – socially as much as ecologically.
That is why Lasch became increasingly opposed to both the New Left and the New Right. During the Reagan years, he rejected the New Right’s economic orthodoxy of wealth disparity masquerading as market competition based on supposedly equal opportunity. Rising inequality is both materially damaging and morally corrupting, as it entails the use of political power for private gain and the erosion of Republican virtue along with the hollowing out of the middle class and the collapse of national cohesion. Lasch was equally critical of the New Left, holding it responsible for the decline of a common culture under attack from 1960s radicalism and from the progressive movement, which equated its self-serving values with the interests of society as a whole.3
At the heart of the constructive alternative advanced by both Lasch and Catholic social teaching lies the practice of inherited obligations among persons. For Lasch, a thick sense of obligation means that wealth carries with it civic duties. Public libraries, parks, universities, museums, music halls, hospitals, hospices, and other civic institutions endowed by old elites stood as monuments to munificence. Of course, there was much selfishness involved in these acts of generous charity, besides the fact that a lot of the wealth came from the slave trade and other forms of appalling exploitation. But public generosity – another social virtue – meant that the wealthy participated up to a point in the life of the community and contributed to that of future generations. This overlaps with the meaning of the common good in Catholic Social Thought. Here too, the old is the new.
But once we replace mutual obligation with individual right as entitlement, then we end up depersonalizing life in society. The reverse side of the elite culture of narcissism is a culture of indifference to others – what Pope Francis calls in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium the new culture of ‘disposability’ in which everyone and everything that does not satisfy our immediate desires can so readily be dispensed with precisely because it has already been turned into a commodity. 4
Indifference and exclusion are not limited to the lower social classes, for whom elites have contempt. Nor just national industry, which they sold off. Nor even national public services, which they opt out from. Worse, Lasch also diagnosed elite indifference to their national obligations as a whole: their country, culture, and customs. Finance, tech platforms and the dominant political classes are all part of a global moneyed elite more loyal to Davos than to Denver. Today’s plutocracy is just the opposite of the old aristocracy’s sense of noblesse oblige where status comes with duties. Many elites have no substantive conception of democracy and citizenship, which are debased and become merely functional arrangements to advance the interests of a new cosmopolitan class.
Elites without commitment
For them, the formal mechanisms of democracy are a cipher for popular consent to the rule of power and money, while citizenship offers a passport for free movement. Without a sense of attachment to the nation, the ruling oligarchy lacks any sense of sacrifice or responsibility for their actions. By avoiding tax and exploiting workers, “they have managed to relieve themselves, to a remarkable extent, of the obligation to contribute to the national treasury. Their acknowledgment of civic obligations does not extend beyond their own immediate neighborhoods.” The future Lasch foresaw is our present: elite enclaves enclosed within a wasteland.
Lasch highlighted the link between the decline of nations and the collapse of the middle class, which is connected with the forces of globalization, capitalism, and techno-science. Like Michael Lind and Christophe Guilluy in recent years, he was right three decades ago to argue that much of the working and lower middle classes have shared interests in improving their lot, anchored in common customs without which the economy and society would dissolve: fair play, contribution, care for loved ones, the dignity of labor and of the person as well as the intrinsic worth of nature. All these ‘principled practices’ are seen as gifts in the tradition of Catholic social teaching, and the body of work that is Catholic Social Thought is itself a gift which successive pontiffs have given “urbi et orbi.”
In short, the social encyclicals and Lasch’s writings teach us that capitalism commodifies not just labor and social relations but land and ultimately creation, and that the centralized state similarly subordinates society to coercive control. The practice of subsidiarity together with solidarity can help build a decentralized economy and polity embedded in society that upholds the value of vocation and our prudent stewardship of nature. The common – as a negotiated civic settlement between the estranged interest of capital and labor, young and old, urban and rural, indigenous and immigrant – is the ultimate end of both the economy and the polity. As the British Labour Peer Maurice Glasman has testified, Catholic Social Thought is a unique gift to the world: “In the darkest moments, it lights the way.”
Adrian Pabst is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent and Deputy Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. A New Statesman Contributing Writer, he is the author of several books, including Postliberal Politics (2021) and The Constitution of Political Economy (2023).
In his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate published just after the global financial crisis in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI warned of the dangers of utopian ideology which alienates humankind from its roots: “Man is alienated when he is alone, when he is detached from reality, when he stops thinking and believing in a foundation. All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies, and false utopias” (§53) – a meditation on Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical entitled Populorum Progressio that anchors the flourishing of the person and people in a life that is as materially embedded in family, work and place as it is spiritually enveloped in the community of faith, worship and communion.
In his first social encyclical Laudato Si’ released in 2015, Pope Francis’ conceptualization of the cosmos as our common home of nature accentuates the importance of natural law and a divinely created cosmic order that are not reducible to human will but instead require careful judgment and prudence. We need to be wary of claims about measureless acquisition and endless growth in a finite world in which humankind transgresses all manner of physical and moral boundaries at its own peril – the acquisitive spirit of capitalism first diagnosed by the Anglican social theorist R.H. Tawney in his 1920 book The Acquisitive Society and his 1926 tome Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
The writer Ed West highlights the enduring importance of Lasch’s ideas: “If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness? And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics. It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism – emphasizing choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral”.
In the words of Pope Francis, “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "throw away" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the ‘"leftovers.’”"