CHRISTOPHER LASCH
11
The diffusion of the new ideology of social welfare and
"civilized" consumption has had the effect of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. By convincing the housewife, and finall y even her husband
as well, to rely on outside technology and the advice of outside
experts, the apparatus ofmass tuition -the successor to the church in
our secular society - has undermined the family's capaci ty to ptovide
for itself and has thereby justified the continuing expansion of health ,
education, and welfare services . This process has altered both the
sexual and the generational balance of forces within the family .
According to the new ideology of consumption and well-being which
has flourished ever since the twenties, women have to be educated for
new responsibilities,
to
become equal in the management of house–
hold expenditures, to achieve equality in order to enjoy sex and to
satisfy their husbands, and in the last analysis to become wage
earners, since the logic of consumption requires that every member of
the family have an independent income or at least aspire to one.
Similarly the new forces have allied themselves with the
younger generation against the older . Advertising glorifies youth.
Educators insist on the " needs" of the young. So does psychiatry. All
maintain that the needs of the young should occupy the first place in
their parents' thoughts. The family is to be organized around the
requirements of the future generation .
At the same time, the new forces have undermined parents'
confidence in their ability to provide for those needs. According to
the reigning orthodoxy, only modern science and technology can
provide for them.
Since the "helping professions" now impinge in so many ways
on the family, it is important for students of the family to study the
ideology of social workers, teachers, juvenile court officers, marital
counsellors, doctors, and psychiatrists. Older studies, such as those
by Kingsley Davis and
C.
Wright Mills, had the merit of recognizing
that social pathologists had developed an ideology and that this
ideology was an important agency of social control. But when they
accused the ideology of mental hygiene of providing a scientific
rationale for "Protestant individualism," in Davis's formulation, of
shoring up "norms and traits ideally associated with small-town,
middle-class milieux" in Mills's, and of upholding an obsolete,
patriarchal model of the family, these authors went far off the mark.
