Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation Book

This book was written right at the end of Lasch's life and it reads like it: he pulls no punches in telling the chattering classes what he thinks about them and the cultural trends they are presiding over. It is surprising this was published two decades ago since the criticisms are not only still applicable it did not seem to have made any difference for Lasch to have pointed them out so long ago. Elites of all types effectively live in their own world; the original American ideal of an educated public at all levels actively involved in debate and able to argue their interests has been replaced by a highly-credentialed cognitive elite lording it over uneducated plebeians. The latter are viewed with patronizing contempt, and indeed they periodically seem to confirm their low status by expressing themselves politically in a way that reflects their lack of education.

The gap has gotten bigger politically, although in the years since Lasch wrote this the cultural playing field has been at least partly levelled by the internet. One thing social media has shown us is that people truly do love to debate and are hungry for knowledge at all levels of society. His analysis of hte attempt to replace religion with a mixture of art (broadly defined) and psychoanalysis is also apt. Almost all social problems are now talked about as though the solutions are primarily therapeutic, the recent interest in self-help books for white people about racism seeming to be a prime example. The therapeutic state really becomes stronger with every iteration.

I don't know if Lasch identified as a conservative but this certainly came across as a conservative critique of contemporary culture. Lasch stood strongly against relativism in knowledge and lamented what he saw as the dissolution of the intellectual and moral bases of society; accusing contemporary forms of liberalism of living off the moral capital of the systems it replaced. As a whole the book was an entertaining and at times eloquent polemic but the crux of it should be more or less familiar to anyone following the subject broadly.