A Future
'Sucked Down the Sink'

December 1999

By Robert Stacy McCain

The late social critic Christopher Lasch once neatly captured the spirit of late 20th-century America: "To live for the moment is the prevailing passion -- to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future."

This, according to Lasch, was the mentality of the "culture of narcissism," a culture that has lost the historical sensibility, which denigrates both ancestry and posterity: "The emergence of the narcissistic personality reflects among other things a drastic shift in our sense of historic time. Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future."

Ours is most definitely such a society, and the desperate struggle to escape the obligations of marriage and parenthood is the surest sign of our society's narcissism. To commit oneself to a lifelong union, and to the rearing of one's children and grandchildren, is to live for something other than the moment, to make an investment in the future. In the statistics for divorce, abortion and unwed births, we see the unwillingness of many Americans to make such self-sacrificing commitments.

Divorces are caused by many factors, but the "narcissistic personality" whose emergence Lasch chronicled -- the personality which requires constant self-affirmation and self-indulgence -- probably figures one way or another in the failure of many marriages. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has traced the rise of the "expressive divorce" in recent decades, when an "ethic of expressive individualism" has justified divorce as "offer[-ing] opportunities ... to achieve a more coherent and fully realized sense of self."

The individual who seeks divorce as a means of obtaining a "sense of self" is indistinguishable from Lasch's narcissistic personality. Mrs. Whitehead notes that apostles of the "expressive divorce" went so far as to preach that divorce could actually be good for the helpless children involved -- a self-serving myth Mrs. Whitehead decisively refutes with both statistical and anecdotal evidence in her brilliant book, The Divorce Culture.

Parents who divorce without concern for their children's welfare are but one manifestation of the narcissistic rejection of posterity. The startling rise in fatherless children is an even more striking example. Much concern has been lavished upon unwed mothers -- about a third of American children are born out of wedlock -- but what of these children's fathers? What can be said of men who refuse to marry the mothers of their children? They are narcissists, living only for the moment, only for themselves, without any interest in the future.

There is, however, no more powerful testimony to the narcissistic rejection of posterity than the 1.5 million abortions which have been performed annually in the United States for more than two decades. The narcissist's desire to escape the "succession of generations" has established abortion so firmly in American society that even conservatives who call themselves pro-life only dare nibble around the political edges of "a woman's right to choose."

Even as Americans have, by their actions, increasingly rejected marriage and parenthood in real life, they rhetorically continue to celebrate these commitments to the future. In her book, It Takes a Village, Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to rally the national to a vision of communal child-rearing. But it is hard to envision people enthusiastically caring for other people's children, when they are content to have their own unborn children "sucked down the sink," to borrow an evocative phrase from radio's Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

To act selfishly while seeking admiration for being unselfish is, perhaps, the ultimate in narcissism. One thinks of the Columbine killers, who in videotaped journals explained how they were going to express their own petty grievances by slaughtering their classmates but who, perversely, expected to become heroes for doing so.

Truly, these self-obsessed adolescent misfits were the ideal offspring of "a society that has lost interest in the future."

r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net

Click HERE to return to ESSAYS
Click HERE to visit our HOT LINKS