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28 Historically Speaking · January/February 2007 ***************** Pilgrim to an Unknown Land: Christopher Lasch's Journey Eric Miller In 1965 Christopher Lasch published The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectualas a Social Type, the book that launched him into intellectual stardom. It was an interpretive history of 20th-century radicalism, wrapped in a bracing call for intellectuals to resist the allure of political power and return to their birthright as exemplars of "the life of reason ." Intellectuals, positioned uneasily in "a world in which die irrational has come to appear not the exception but the rule," should chart the way forward widi critical analyses of contemporary society that would yield more rational directions for the nation to take. Three decades later, the last chapter of his last (posthumously published) book The Revolt of the Elites would be entided "The Soul of Man Under Secularism." He was still monitoring the intellectuals, but from a quite different vantage point. Intellectuals were still compromised, but now he declared their failure to be rooted not in their rejection of "the life of reason" but rather in their embrace of a "seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familial, or religious obligations." In TheNew Radicalism Lasch had blamed the intellectuals' longing for political power on their devotion to "the religion of experience." Now he saw their political preoccupations as the fruit of their submission to another religion : "the religion of art," a "secular religion" that had emerged from "the tradition of romantic subjectivity ." This new "ideal of personal freedom" had triumphed both politically and culturally. It was the defining element of what by the 1990s had come to be known as "postmodernity"The distance between diese two radically different perspectives on 20thcentury intellectuals reflects a significant shift in Lasch's understanding of human personhood. Lasch had come to believe that, of the many conceits that plague liberal moderns, the most insidious was die smug confidence diat diey had evaded their basic state of dependence: dependence upon one another, dependence upon the earth, dependence upon a creator. "The Soul of Man Under Secularism " suggested that autonomous, independent moderns "find it galling to be reminded of their dependence on a power beyond dieir own control or at least beyond the control of humanity in general." Taking their dependent estate as an offense rather than as a touchstone, moderns had developed an economic and technological apparatus that made dependence on anything else seem unnecessary, unreal, even blasphemous. It was this illusion—"the illusion of mastery"—that was proving to be so tenacious, and so deadly. "If the whole world now seems to be going through a dark night of the soul," he wrote, "it is because the normal rebellion against dependence appears to be sanctioned by our scientific control over nature, the same progress of science that has allegedly destroyed religious superstition." By the time he wrote this passage, such "superstition " had, for Lasch, become anything but. Radier, the religious heritage of his civilization had become a source of spiritual and intellectual ballast, a means of discerning our deepest identity and guiding us toward more satisfying ends. For anyone seeking to move beyond modern, liberal conceptions of personhood , a study of that message is a promising place to begin. . . . EricMiller is associateprofessor of history at Geneva College, and afrequent contributor to suchjournals as First Things, Christianity Today, andBooks and Culture. Thepresent essay is drawnfrom his ongoing work on a book-length biographicalstudy of Christopher Lasch. The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity* David W. Galenson In 1933, at the age of 67, the distinguished critic Roger Fry was offered the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University. Fry had been bitterly disappointed when he was denied the job twenty-nine years earlier, and his initial reaction to the belated offer was to refuse it. Upon reflection, however, he changed his mind, for he realized diat die lectures would give him the opportunity to apply his theories to the entire history of art more fully than in the occasional essays he had written throughout his career. He devoted his inaugural lecture to outlining a systematic approach to the study of art. This included a consideration of artists...
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