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Example research essay topic: Lowest Common Denominator 20 Th Century - 3,171 words

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ter> Sam Vaknin's Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web Sites "The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace.

Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire. " (Christopher Lasch - The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979) "A characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unquantifiable... " (Jose Ortega y Glasses - The Revolt of the Masses, 1932) Can Science be passionate?

This question seems to sum up the life of Christopher Lasch, erstwhile a historian of culture later transmogrified into an ersatz prophet of doom and consolation, a latter day Jeremiah. Judging by his (prolific and eloquent) output, the answer is a resounding no. There is no single Lasch. This chronicler of culture, did so mainly by chronicling his inner turmoil, conflicting ideas and ideologies, emotional upheavals, and intellectual vicissitudes.

In this sense, of (courageous) self-documentation, Mr. Lasch epitomized Narcissism, was the quintessential Narcissist, the better positioned to criticize the phenomenon. Some "scientific" disciplines (e. g. , the history of culture and History in general) are closer to art than to the rigorous (a. k.

a. "exact" or "natural" or "physical" sciences). Lasch borrowed heavily from other, more established branches of knowledge without paying tribute to the original, strict meaning of concepts and terms. Such was the use that he made of "Narcissism."Narcissism" is a relatively well-defined psychological term. I expound upon it elsewhere ("Malignant self Love - Narcissism Re-Visited"). The Narcissistic Personality Disorder - the acute form of pathological Narcissism - is the name given to a group of 9 symptoms (see: DSM- 4). They include: a grandiose Self (illusions of grandeur coupled with an inflated, unrealistic sense of the Self), inability to empathize with the Other, the tendency to exploit and manipulate others, idealization of other people (in cycles of idealization and devaluation), rage attacks and so on.

Narcissism, therefore, has a clear clinical definition, etiology and prognosis. The use that Lasch makes of this word has nothing to do with its usage in psychopathology. True, Lasch did his best to sound "medicinal." He spoke of " (national) malaise" and accused the American society of lack of self-awareness. But choice of words does not a coherence make.

Lasch was a member, by conviction, of an imaginary "Pure Left." This turned out to be a code for an odd mixture of Marxism, religious fundamentalism, populism, Freudian analysis, conservatism and any other -ism that Lasch happened to come across. Intellectual consistency was not Lasch's strong point, but this is excusable, even commendable in the search for Truth. What is not excusable is the passion and conviction with which Lasch imbued the advocacy of each of these consecutive and mutually exclusive ideas. "The Culture of Narcissism - American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations" was published in the first year of the unhappy presidency of Jimmy Carter (1979). The latter endorsed the book publicly (in his famous "national malaise" speech). The main thesis of the book is that the Americans have created a self-absorbed (though not self aware), greedy and frivolous society which depended on consumerism, demographic studies, opinion polls and Government to know and to define itself. What is the solution?

Lasch proposed a "return to basics": self-reliance, the family, nature, the community, and the Protestant work ethic. To those who adhere, he promised an elimination of their feelings of alienation and despair. The apparent radicalism (the pursuit of social justice and equality) was only that: apparent. The New Left was morally self-indulgent.

In an Orwellian manner, liberation became tyranny and transcendence - irresponsibility. The "democratization" of education: .".. has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational standards." Lasch derided capitalism, consumerism and corporate America as much as he loathed the mass media, the government and even the welfare system (intended to deprive its clients of their moral responsibility and indoctrinate them as victims of social circumstance). These always remained the villains. But to this - classically leftist - list he added the New Left.

He bundled the two viable alternatives in American life and discarded them both. Anyhow, capitalism's days were numbered, a contradictory system as it was, resting on "imperialism, racism, elitism, and inhuman acts of technological destruction." What was left except God and the Family? Lasch was deeply anti-capitalist. He rounded up the usual suspects with the prime suspect being multinationals. To him, it wasn't only a question of exploitation of the working masses. Capitalism acted as acid on the social and moral fabrics and made them disintegrate.

Lasch adopted, at times, a theological perception of capitalism as an evil, demonic entity. Zeal usually leads to inconsistency of argumentation: Lasch claimed, for instance, that capitalism negated social and moral traditions while pandering to the lowest common denominator. There is a contradiction here: social mores and traditions are, in many cases, THE lowest common denominator. Lasch displayed a total lack of understanding of market mechanisms and the history of markets.

True, markets start out as mass-oriented and entrepreneurs tend to mass- produce to cater to the needs of the newfound consumers. However, as markets evolve - they fragment. Individual nuances of tastes and preferences tend to transform the mature market from a cohesive, homogenous entity - to a loose coalition of niches. Computer aided design and production, targeted advertising, custom made products, personal services - are all the outcomes of the maturation of markets. It is where capitalism is absent that uniform mass production of goods of shoddy quality takes over. This may have been Lasch's biggest fault: that he persistently and wrong-headedly ignored reality when it did not serve his pet theorizing.

He made up his mind and did not wish to be confused by the facts. The facts are that all the alternatives to the known four models of capitalism (the Anglo-Saxon, the European, the Japanese and the Chinese) have failed miserably and have led to the very consequences that Lasch warned against in capitalism. It is in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, that social solidarity has evaporated, that traditions were trampled upon, that religion was brutally suppressed, that pandering to the lowest common denominator was official policy, that poverty - material, intellectual and spiritual - became all pervasive, that people lost all self reliance and communities disintegrated. There is nothing to excuse Lasch: the Wall fell in 1989. An inexpensive trip would have confronted him with the results of the alternatives to capitalism. That he failed to acknowledge his life-long misconceptions and compile the Lasch errata cum mea culpa is the sign of deep-seated intellectual dishonesty.

The man was not interested in the truth. In many respects, he was a propagandist. Worse, he combined an amateurish understanding of the Economic Sciences with the fervor of a fundamentalist preacher to produce an absolutely non-scientific discourse. Let us analyze what he regarded as the basic weakness of capitalism (in "The True and Only Heaven", 1991): its need to increase capacity and production ad infinitum in order to sustain itself. Such a feature would have been destructive if capitalism were to operate in a closed system.

The finiteness of the economic sphere would have brought capitalism to ruin. But the world is NOT a closed economic system. 80, 000, 000 new consumers are added annually, markets globalize, trade barriers are falling, international trade is growing three times faster than the worlds GDP and still accounts for less than 15 % of it, not to mention space exploration which is at its inception. The horizon is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. The economic system is, therefore, open.

Capitalism will never be defeated because it has an infinite number of consumers and markets to colonize. That is not to say that capitalism will not have its crises, even crises of over-capacity. But such crises are a part of the business cycle not of the underlying market mechanism. They are adjustment pains, the noises of growing up - not the last gasps of dying. To claim otherwise is either to deceive or to be spectacularly ignorant not only of economic fundamentals but of what is happening in the world.

It is as intellectually rigorous as the "New Paradigm" which says, in effect, that the business cycle and inflation are both dead and buried. Lasch's argument: capitalism must forever expand if it is to exist (debatable) - hence the idea of "progress", an ideological corollary of the drive to expand - progress transforms people into insatiable consumers (apparently, a term of abuse). But this is to ignore the fact that people create economic doctrines (and reality, according to Marx) - not the reverse. In other words, the consumers created capitalism to help them maximize their consumption.

History is littered with the remains of economic theories, which did not match the psychological makeup of the human race. There is Marxism, for instance. The best theorized, most intellectually rich and well-substantiated theory must be put to the cruel test of public opinion and of the real conditions of existence. Barbarous amounts of force and coercion need to be applied to keep people functioning under contra-human-nature ideologies such as communism.

A horde of what Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses must be put to work to preserve the dominion of a religion, ideology, or intellectual theory which do not amply respond to the needs of the individuals that comprise society. The Socialist (more so the Marxist and the malignant version, the Communist) prescriptions were eradicated because they did not correspond to the OBJECTIVE conditions of the world. They were hermetically detached, and existed only in their mythical, contradiction-free realm (to borrow again from Althusser). Lasch commits the double intellectual crime of disposing of the messenger AND ignoring the message: people are consumers and there is nothing we can do about it but try to present to them as wide an array as possible of goods and services. High brow and low brow have their place in capitalism because of the preservation of the principle of choice, which Lasch abhors.

He presents a false predicament: he who elects progress elects meaninglessness and hopelessness. Is it better - asks Lasch sanctimoniously - to consume and live in these psychological conditions of misery and emptiness? The answer is self evident, according to him. Lasch patronizingly prefers the working class undertones commonly found in the petite bourgeois: "its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress... sense of unlimited power conferred by science - the intoxicating prospect of man's conquest of the natural world." The limits that Lasch is talking about are metaphysical, theological. Man's rebellion against God is in question.

This, in Lasch's view, is a punishable offence. Both capitalism and science are pushing the limits, infused with the kind of hubris which the mythological Gods always chose to penalize (remember Prometheus? ). What more can be said about a man that postulated that "the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy." Some matters are better left to psychiatrists than to philosophers. There is megalomania, too: Lasch cannot grasp how could people continue to attach importance to money and other worldly goods and pursuits after his seminal works were published, denouncing materialism for what it was - a hollow illusion? The conclusion: people are ill informed, egotistical, stupid (because they succumb to the lure of consumerism offered to them by politicians and corporations). America is in an "age of diminishing expectations" (Lasch's).

Happy people are either weak or hypocritical. Lasch envisioned a communitarian society, one where men are self made and the State is gradually made redundant. This is a worthy vision and a vision worthy of some other era. Lasch never woke up to the realities of the late 20 th century: mass populations concentrated in sprawling metropolitan areas, market failures in the provision of public goods, the gigantic tasks of introducing literacy and good health to vast swathes of the planet, an ever increasing demand for evermore goods and services.

Small, self-help communities are not efficient enough to survive - though the ethical aspect is praiseworthy: "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state. "A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect. Unfortunately, such statements do not tell the whole. " No wonder that Lasch has been compared to Mathew Arnold who wrote: " (culture) does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; ... It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere... the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time. " (Culture and Anarchy) a quite elitist view. Unfortunately, Lasch, most of the time, was no more original or observant than the average columnist: "The mounting evidence of widespread inefficiency and corruption, the decline of American productivity, the pursuit of speculative profits at the expense of manufacturing, the deterioration of our country's material infrastructure, the squalid conditions in our crime-rid- den cities, the alarming and disgraceful growth of poverty, and the widening disparity between poverty and wealth growing contempt for manual labor...

growing gulf between wealth and poverty... the growing insularity of the elites... growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments. " Paradoxically, Lasch was an elitist. The very person who attacked the "talking classes" (the "symbolic analysts" in Robert Reich's less successful rendition) - freely railed against the "lowest common denominator." True, Lasch tried to reconcile this apparent contradiction by saying that diversity does not entail low standards or selective application of criteria. This, however, tends to undermine his arguments against capitalism. In his typical, anachronistic, language: "The latest variation on this familiar theme, its reductio ad absurdum, is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. " This leads to "universal incompetence" and a weakness of the spirit: "Impersonal virtues like fortitude, workmanship, moral courage, honesty, and respect for adversaries (are rejected by the champions of diversity)...

Unless we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life... (agreed standards) are absolutely indispensable to a democratic society (because) double standards mean second-class citizenship. " This is almost plagiarism. Allan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind"): " (openness became trivial)... Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness has rendered openness meaningless. " Lasch: "moral paralysis of those who value 'openness' above all (democracy is more than) openness and toleration... In the absence of common standards...

tolerance becomes indifference. "Open Mind" becomes: "Empty Mind." Lasch observed that America has become a culture of excuses (for self and the "disadvantaged"), of protected judicial turf conquered through litigation (a. k. a. "rights"), of neglect of responsibilities. Free speech is restricted by fear of offending potential audiences. We confuse respect (which must be earned) with toleration and appreciation, discriminating judgement with indiscriminate acceptance, and turning the blind eye. Fair and well.

Political correctness has indeed degenerated into moral incorrectness and plain numbness. But why is the proper exercise of democracy dependent upon the devaluation of money and markets? Why is luxury "morally repugnant" and how can this be PROVEN rigorously, formal logically? Lasch does not opine - he informs. What he says has immediate truth-value, is non-debatable, and intolerant.

Consider this passage, which came out of the pen of an intellectual tyrant: .".. the difficulty of limiting the influence of wealth suggests that wealth itself needs to be limited... a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation... a moral condemnation of great wealth... backed up with effective political action... at least a rough approximation of economic equality...

in the old days (Americans agreed that people should not have) far in excess of their needs. " Lasch failed to realize that democracy and wealth formation are two sides of the SAME coin. That democracy is not likely to spring forth, nor is it likely to survive poverty or total economic equality. The confusion of the two ideas (material equality and political equality) is common: it is the result of centuries of plutocracy (only wealthy people had the right to vote, universal suffrage is very recent). The great achievement of democracy in the 20 th century was to separate these two aspects: to combine egalitarian political access with an unequal distribution of wealth. Still, the existence of wealth - no matter how distributed - is a pre-condition. Without it there will never be real democracy.

Wealth generates the leisure n...


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