Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time

Christian Century, Nov 17, 1999 by Gary Dorrien

Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. By Paul Rogat Loeb. St. Martin Griffin, 349 pp., $15.95.

TWENTY YEARS AGO the late social historian Christopher Lasch memorably lamented that American culture was turning its children into self-absorbed consumers who relished their self-preoccupation. Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979) bewailed the prevalence of what he called "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness." In a crowded field, his chief examples were the trivialization of politics and art as forms of celebrity spectacle. Capitalism commodifies everything that it touches, he observed. Commercial society bombards its customers with images of consumer goods and convinces them that exchange value is the only value that really matters. Increasingly the standards and ethos of commercial advertising pervade the rest of culture: "We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion."

The recent cult of ironic detachment struck Lasch as an especially notable example of the narcissistic trend. He attributed this phenomenon to the degradation of work. "As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday discourse," he observed. People coped with lousy jobs by affecting knowing superiority over them. Popular culture increasingly deflected their boredom and despair by adopting the same trope of ironic detachment. "Many forms of popular art appeal to this sense of knowingness and thereby reinforce it," Lasch noted. "They parody familiar roles and themes, inviting the audience to consider itself superior to its surroundings."

The next step in this cultural process was self-parody. Commercials began to spoof commercials; Westerns made fun of westerns; in 1979, soap operas were especially knowing. Some of the most popular shows on television were soap opera parodies: Fernwood, Soap and, above all, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. These shows assured soap opera viewers of their own sophistication by mocking the conventions of soap operas. Lasch shook his head: "The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvements in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life."

In 1979, Lasch could view ironic narcissism as a recent trend; today we are awash in it. Commercials and Web sites are laced with self-referential spin; Hollywood cranks out buckraking movie sequels that make fun of buckraking movie sequels; the ending of Seinfeld, "a show about nothing," was a major cultural event rating the front page of the New York Times; MTV's bottom-feeding Beavis and Butthead, with a wink and a nod, features two vulgar adolescents who spend their time watching overheated MTV videos.

With no mention of Lasch, Jedediah Purdy and Paul Rogat Loeb take up where he left off. Purdy, 24, is a Harvard graduate and home-schooled product of rural West Virginia who believes that the regnant culture of narcissism is more ironic than cynical. Loeb, 48, is a former peace activist and current entrepreneur of left-wing self-help who believes that American culture has moved beyond irony to a harder-edged narcissistic cynicism. Both of them urge that the remedy for retrogressive self-preoccupation is renewed commitment to civic and political activism.

Purdy takes the higher road, literarily speaking, modeling his prose on that of his favorite essayists, especially Henry David Thoreau, Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik and Wendell Berry. The essence of irony is "a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech--especially earnest speech," he observes. Against the romantic conception of a true self struggling for expression, the ironist takes for granted a quantum notion of the self, "all spin, all the way down." Ironic detachment is not cynical, Purdy cautions; the cynic stays home from the party and denounces frivolous partygoers with acidic superiority. The ironist goes to the party while making fun of it: "An endless joke runs through the culture of irony, not exactly at anyone's expense, but rather at the expense of the idea that anyone might take the whole affair seriously."

Purdy warns that the chief casualties of this cultural pose are moral seriousness and democratic politics. The normal course of acculturation today is to view politics with the same half-jaundiced eye that one gives to commercials. Like commercial advertising, politics is understood to be a spectator sport; aside from its possible value as an aid to acquisitive interests, politics is worth viewing, like advertising, only for its entertainment value.

"The ironic stance invites us to be self-absorbed, but in selves that we cannot believe to be especially interesting or significant," Purdy observes. "Its sophistication is sapping, a way of cultivating suspicion of ourselves and others." In a discussion that could have used a strong dose of Kierkegaard on its theme, Purdy judges that ironic detachment is a cowardly hedge against despair. Irony refuses "to place its trust in the world." It buffers the self from the pain of the world and thus reinforces the loneliness of contemporary society.