Progress and its Critics

* Book: Christopher Lasch. he True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991)

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Discussion

Chris Smaje:

"People (are) quickly reconstituting themselves as peasantries, with local moral economies and agrarian populist politics, as discussed in Chapters 19 and 20 of A Small Farm Future.

One thinker I’ve found useful in getting to grips with this is the late Christopher Lasch, notably in his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991). Recently, I came across an interesting [critical essay about Lasch by Rich Yeselson https://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/04/avoiding-the-lasch-of-modernity/] (the essay itself is not recent, but I’ve never been overly concerned about newness or being on-trend). I agree with some of Yeselson’s criticisms, even while finding his position generally a bit too complacently liberal-modernist. But where I mostly disagree is in his objections to Lasch’s fixation with the populist politics of artisans, small farmers and proprietors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The problem with this for Yeselson is that “all of these people are dead”, so “they are inadequate agents to carry forward a critique of modernity”. But as I see it, their ideas (or at least the ideas that Lasch invested in them) are not dead. They’re very much waiting in the wings. Our task today is to bring them centre stage."

(https://chrissmaje.com/2023/11/of-settlers-colonists-and-doomers/)