Book: Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism"

Narcisstic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a debilitating and morbid set of internal constructs and behaviours that alienates and distresses the people surrounding the narcissist. Although many people are a bit conceited, selfish, temperamental or manipulative, narcissists are so compulsively and self-defeatingly, and are usually without insight into their own faults.

In "The Culture of Narcissm" Lasch argues that social changes originating from the industrial revolution have encouraged and reflects the psychological mechanism underlying NPD, although most people of course do not show the full disorder. According to Lasch, the problem is now reflected in the systemically in our society.

On the whole, Lasch's book seems similar to many conservative social critiques that have appeared in America over the past 40 years. Some will therefore be tempted to dismiss his critique because it appears reactionary. Others will note that many of the conditions present when the book was published have changed. The book dates from 1978: the time of the Cold War, economic confusion because of the oil price shocks, and the immediate after-effects of the disillusionment with 60s idealism. Indeed, the book's contents do reflect a certain antagonism towards the Left's thinking and tactics during the 60s.

Nonetheless, a careful reading shows that Lasch's real objection to the Left is that it failed to present a significant alternative to capitalist individualism. Lasch's critique of the Left radicalism is thus not only still relevant, but in a tradition of "conservative communitarian Leftism" which can be fruitfully compared to Chesterton's conservative Catholic "consocialism" and C. Wright Mill's attacks on the hippies and other 60s rebels as unwitting enablers of "The System".

Lasch outlines the following symptoms of a narcissistic culture:

• A waning sense of historical continuity; of heritage and investing in future generations. This is linked to a pessimistic expectation of a coming apocalypse which, Lasch claims, is quite different to similar dire predictions in late medieval and early modern times. The fact that Lasch wrote the book during the Cold War should of course be borne in mind. Lasch also argues that the waning of a sense of leaving a legacy and vicarious happiness in one's children has heightened the dread of old age.
  
• The "therapeutic sensibility". According to Lasch, people have adopted an individualistic meliorism. The masses are (no longer) out to transform the world, they have withdrawn from substantive political activities which could result in systemic change
  
• A retreat from politics to self-examination: Lasch is able to cite a number of works written by left-wing authors in which they show a turn towards "self-improvement" and away from the reform of civil society. This abandonment of politics is closely linked to a false literature of confession, in which an author makes use of autobiographical material while continually undermining the readers trust in his account. Lasch argues that the Left, which also criticized the middle class for its focus on private rather than social affairs, failed to realize that the kinds of private troubles associated with the working class have now worked their way into the middle classes. This fact would indicate that the Left has failed to see the scale of the forces at work in contemporary social evils.
  
• Despite the turn towards private affairs, therapy and self-improvement, there is a pervasive sense of inner emptiness, accompanied by chronic boredom, and a failure to build long-term personal relationships.
  

Lasch discusses changes in a wide range of social activities in order to tease out further implications and to drive home his points. Among these are changes in the labour market, where the older (often blatantly colonialist) Protestant work ethic has given way to a model of "success" linked to superficial characteristics that are lumped under the label of "one's personal image". By now this critique of Western labour markets is something of a platitude.
Like right-wing social critics such as Alan Bloom, he is scathing about the American educational system and its failures. Interestingly, he locates the problem in the context of historical debates about the necessity of "democratizing" education by extending it to the working class and the use of education as a means of "Americanizing" immigrants.
The problem of education is also linked to changing child-rearing practices that involve a bigger role for state bureaucracies and psychological and medical experts, while the authority of individual parents and guardians has lessened. Here again it is possible to mistake Lasch for a reactionary, but one would be ill-advised to regard him as a crank. The usual right-wing whipping boys such as Spock are treated much more fairly and carefully by Lasch, who incidentally is quite willing to use Freudian and Marxian arguments.

Lasch makes many other arguments that are fascinating, if not always compelling. Among other things, he discusses sport and the battle of the sexes. It may be worthwhile to blog about his work again, but for the moment I'll just say that I recommend it.

Book: Pietra Rivoli's "Travels of a T-Shirt"

Pietra Rivoli's "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" uses an extended anecdote about the production and fate of a T-shirt to discuss contemporary economic issues. In the course of the book, the larger significance and interest of seemingly mundane and random details about cotton farming, textile production and world trade are revealed - no small achievement on the part of the author.

Rivoli argues that both free-market fundamentalists and anti-globalisation activists are apt to misconstrue the role that politics and markets play in economic development. In fact, the two sides in the debate are joined in an "unwitting conspiracy": the interaction between them leads to a continual restructuring of the economy that has widespread benefits. They need each other. At the same time, the compromises that emerge often result in legislation that seems irrational to everyone.

While economists tend to stress the importance of unregulated competition in markets, Rivoli reveals that producers often go out of their way to constrain competition and agitate for greater regulation. Thus it is that the cotton industry in the American South has survived and thrived by circumventing the labour market - first through slavery, then through share-cropping and "company town" systems that were little better than slavery, then by agitating for the government to institute a migrant-labourer programme. Today American cotton farmers are part of a "virtuous circle" of market, government and community institutions that protects them from a wide variety of risks in their trade. Such protection includes a subsidy that, if removed, would cause the world price of cotton to rise by up to 30%. That is to say, it would increase the chances that West African farmers could actually subsist from commercial cotton farming.

On the other hand, Rivoli argues that the infamous Asian textile "sweat shops", horrifying as they may be to Western sensibilities, are not only less damaging than similar sweat shops that existed in the West when textile production was centred there, but save countless women from "a life of rural idiocy" (Marx). In her view, the textile industry was a key component of industrial development for successive regions: Britain, Massachussets, the American South, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and now China. It was precisely the success of this industry which led to a level of development where workers would stand up for their rights and develop the skills that are needed in an advanced economy - one where labour prices are too high for the textile industry to survive. Each time this privilege was passed on to another country or region.

Furthermore, this labour market depends on large numbers of workers willing to work at any price, usually because of the way social institutions and politics work in the region concerned. In England, the allocation of formerly common land to privileged gentry created a large supply of desperate labourers. In today's China, the functioning of the labour market is shaped by a rural-urban split in which people from rural areas are subject to movement controls not unlike Apartheid pass laws.

The upshot of the matter is that the debate about whether markets are "good" or "bad" often misses the point: markets simply have a quite limited relevance, because social, institutional and technological factors impose significant constraints on them. Having said that, Rivoli is still a "classical" economist in her dislike of any import tarrifs and quotas. She shows how such constraints often lead to unintended consequences and irrational modes of doing things ("The US quotas for imports from the Seychelles are not yet full this year, let's shift our whole company there from China ").

There is one market involving T-shirts, though, that appears to be perfectly competitive, and about which Rivoli permits herself to be fairly enthusiastic: the used clothes market in East Africa. After being thrown away by Americans, tonnes of clothes are shipped to Tanzania to be sold in street markets as "mitumba". This business is highly competitive and requires no small knowledge of one's customers. Rivoli contrasts this market pointedly with the failure of African governments employing socialist rhetoric to effect change: "The mitumba trade... is run by the masses rather than the elite, and is governed by relationships between importers, customers, drivers, menders and dealers rather than by what many observers have titled the 'kleptocracies' still common in much of Africa... Thanks to mitumba, Geofrey Milonge and his entrepreneurial peers are players now, and are finding their own way around Africa's challenges" [p. 345]. A pro-market book after all, then, but one imbued with a healthy realism about the limits of markets.