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Christopher Lasch: Haven in a Heartless World New York: Basic Books, 1977, 230pp.
CHRISTOPHER LASCH WARNS US of the tyranny of our contemporary super state which invades and controls the most private recesses of the human soul through its commercial and therapeutic instruments. The earlier authority of the church and parents has now been displaced by television, corporations, government and various professional groups. Family life has become painful, marriages more fragile and relations between parents and children increasingly filled with hostility and recrimination. In his introduction Lasch repeats again and again that there is no haven in this heartless world.
He sets forth a historical perspective affirming the acculturating instrumentality of the family as an institution for embedding specific culture in specific individuals. He describes the Protestant personality demanded by a capitalist economic order and the increasing importance given to child rearing in the bourgeous family. This family, already beginning to decay as an institution at the end of the 19th century was characterized by a marriage of companionship, child-centered home, the quasi-emancipation of all women, and the isolation of this family from kin and from community. Exclusive sexual fidelity between spouses was abandoned, the virginity standard set aside and martial harmony was suspect with an emphasis on "healthy" marital quarrels. Romantic love was dismissed as "sick" and the orgasm elevated to an inalienable right.
Gilman prophetically declared in 1903 that children were citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state, and that those children could no longer be the property of personal ownership. Between