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stock market quotations to visual images produced by Madison Avenue .
. . [and to] specialize in the interpretation and deployment of symbolic
information. "
Lasch borrows the term "symbolic analysts" from Robert Reich,
who himself is one of these privileged young people who have been
nurtured at the best schools, by the best mentors, in a cosmopolitan at–
mosphere that helps produce "insights" and "information," and who
have learned to operate in teams. Lasch elaborates on how the media
acts as an umbrella and godfather for them all, and in its focus on
"news" pays more attention to the condemnation by the boxer Mike
Tyson (from his prison cell) of the President for "crucifYing" his nominee
for assistant attorney general Lani Guinier, than it does to the war in
Chechnya or the fall of the dollar. And Lasch notes that "Washington
has become a parody of Tinseltown, which is exemplified by the fact
that movie stars are the President's favorite friends, and that Ross Perot
launched his campaign from the
Larry King Show."
While such absurdi–
ties will continue to abound, and the confusions of words and images
with reality have become routine, this cultural elite no longer "assumes
responsibility for the exacting standards without which civilization is im–
possible." Instead, it has replaced Ortega's mass man as the "spoiled man
of human history." Now, the masses have become more conservative
and, for instance, "favor limits on abortion, cling to the two-parent
family as a source of stability, and resist experiments with alternative
lifestyles." Thus they might well show us the way out.
The new elites are arrogant, states Lasch, and our "seemingly demo–
cratic system of elite recruitment" leads to results that are far from
democratic. Reiterating Michael Young's predictions in
The Rise oj the
Meritocracy
(1958), Lasch reminds us that educating the most promising
children of the lower classes also deprives them of leaders from their own
ranks and encourages the new elite to legislate for those they left behind;
and that their "compassion" is self-serving, devoid of personal contact
with their inferiors as well as of the aristocrats' notions of
noblesse oblige.
But because they have succeeded by dint of merit, this elite feels secure in
its privileges and "generates an excessive concern with 'self- esteem'," and
its concomitant therapies which, in turn, end up blaming societal rather
than personal failures without curing the current ethnic wars. Lasch
would prefer a return to old-fashioned nationalism, and to do away
with the reorganization between rich and poor that has occurred in the
wake of the fruits of the upward mobility that has been mistaken for
equality, as he argues in the following essay. But much as he would have
wanted to tum back the clock, he was too smart to believe that this was
