Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer (1912) by Gustav Klimt:
Farm Garden with Sunflowers (1907) by Gustav Klimt:
Watched the first episode of Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-part documentary series Civilisation (1969). Eager for more…
Listening to Joan Shelley’s self-titled LP (2017) at the recommendation of a friend. I don’t recall the last time I gave such undivided attention to an entire album.
Finished reading: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch đ
One of those books where seemingly every paragraph is bursting with ideas. A good word for the book would be generative. So many of Lasch’s insights spurred my mind to go in all different directions. It is astounding that the book was published in 1979 (!!!) and speaks with as much insight to our current culture as anything written today. The Culture of Narcissism is now my favorite example of what I argued for here.
The best defenses against the terrors of existences are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs…. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of “creative, meaningful work” are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of “true romance” puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
More than anything else, it is this coexistence of hyper-rationality and a widespread revolt against rationality that justifies the characterization of our twentieth-century way of life as a culture of narcissism. These contradictory sensibilities have a common source. Both take root in the feelings of homelessness and displacement that afflict so many men and women today, in their heightened vulnerability to pain and deprivation, and in the contradiction between the promise that they can “have it all” and the reality of their limitations.
There is a close connection…between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning of the capacity for self-helpâin the categories used by John R. Seeley, between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence. “What says ‘you are not guilty’ says also ‘you cannot help yourself.'” Therapy legitimates deviance as sickness, but it simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist. As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority.
Medical justice shares with enlightened childrearing and pedagogy a tendency to promote dependence as a way of life. Therapeutic modes of thought and practice exempt their object, the patient, from critical judgment and relieve him of moral responsibility. Sickness by definition represents an invasion of the patient by forces outside his conscious control, and the patient’s realistic recognition of the limits of his own responsibilityâhis acceptance of his diseased and helpless conditionâconstitutes the first step toward recovery (or permanent invalidism, as the case may be). Therapy labels as sickness what might otherwise be judged as weak or willful actions; it thus equips the patient to fight (or resign himself to) the disease, instead of irrationally finding fault with himself. Inappropriately extended beyond the consulting room, however, therapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense.