Rebel Without Applause. - Review - book review

Reason, May, 2000 by Jacob Sullum

Oddly, Lasn looks back fondly on the 1950s, a period that the counterculture he admires derided as stultifyingly conformist, hardly characterized by the "spontaneity" and "authenticity" for which he yearns. Indeed, this was the decade in which social critics such as Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith began warning the public about corporate manipulation of consumer desire, the role Lasn and his fellow culture jammers have now taken on. Yet Lasn insists that "in postwar America things really were pretty good," and "people really were fairly happy." He's a bit hazy on when and how things went wrong, "but somewhere along the line, the dream soured," and now "our world seems an almost cartoonish distortion of the world we once knew."

Lasn's treatment of environmental issues, which he links to a way of life that generates pollution and depletes resources through excessive production and consumption, is similarly impressionistic. He offers a litany of concerns, from global warming to genetically modified crops, without pausing to consider how serious a threat each represents. He is so eager to paint the darkest possible picture that he outdoes himself. "In country after country," he asserts on page 61, "studies reveal that men's sperm counts are falling. Nobody quite knows why." Yet 54 pages later, he has convinced himself that "sperm counts are falling, due to chemical pollution of our air, water and food."

Lasn's position on violent entertainment also evolves during the course of the book. "We still haven't answered the most basic questions," he says on page 12, "such as how media violence affects children." By page 188, however, he is referring to "the incontrovertible link between TV violence and real-world crime," "a clear cause-and-effect relationship." In case you were wondering, he also takes a dim view of fictional sex. "I think the constant flow of commercially scripted pseudosex, rape and pornography makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive," he says, "even though I can't prove it with hard facts."

Along with intuitive toxicology and fact-free sociology, Lasn advocates "ecological economics," which holds that "the world is already 'full' and further expansion will lead us into an ecological nightmare, a prolonged and possibly permanent 'age of despair."' Since Lasn's brand of economics also holds that it's more efficient to grow your own vegetables than to buy them in a supermarket, he could be wrong about the end of the world too. He concedes that economists almost universally reject the view that humans are bumping up against "limits to growth," but he asks that we "assume for the moment that our survival is indeed threatened." In that case, "The solution is nothing short of a cultural revolution."

That's the sort of phrase a critic of capitalism probably should avoid. But it's of a piece with Lasn's grand ambitions. "On the ruins of the old consumer culture," he writes, "we will build a new one with a noncommercial heart and soul." Among other things, he calls for "new consumption patterns and new lifestyles," "a global across-the-board pricing system that tells the ecological truth," and "new cities designed chiefly with pedestrians, bicycles and public transport in mind." It is hard to reconcile such goals with Lasn's avowed rejection of central planning.