June 22, 2017
Source: Bigstock
Back in 1976, after a disgraced Richard Nixon left the presidency and before Jimmy Carter assumed it, Christopher Lasch wrote an article in The New York Review of Books titled “The Narcissist Society.” Even then, Lasch saw the beginnings of the me-first attitude that would define the “80s and accelerate with the digital revolution.
The new cult of self grew out of a desire to escape the tumultuous past, including “the Sixties, the riots, the New Left, the disruptions on college campuses, Vietnam, Watergate, and the Nixon presidency,” soon culminating, as Lasch writes, in the country’s “entire collective past.”
Like a car speeding down a night road without headlights, forsaking the past and leaping headlong into the present is a dangerous course. Unmoored from what made us, we risk drifting aimlessly, with no direction, no goal, no guide rails to prevent us from crashing into injurious shoals.
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion”to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity,” Lasch observes. “We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
So it is with denying the dead their due.
A virtuous society pays the cost for protecting its most vulnerable members. With our ancestors unable to speak for themselves, are they not the most vulnerable? Does our rich patrimony, both material and intellectual, oblige us to account for the wishes of those who came before?
How you answer that question is highly revealing. It shows just how long you”ve eluded the hard truth that the past never dies. “But you shovel the crap out the window, it comes back in under the door,” said Victor Franz. It’s far better to settle with the crap than try to outrun it”it’s always an unwinnable race.
Lam couches his theory in forward-looking language, but he fails to see that the past determines the future. To consider what’s to come is to consider what’s before. We can”t escape our history, so better to cherish it than let it wither and dry up from neglect.
