Aspiring teachers be warned: The first year of teaching brings a world of pain and lessons learned.

Perhaps the most important lesson the greenhorn teacher quickly learns is the lesson on the limits of human communication. Consider an example from an actual history lesson. It is Valentine’s Day 2012. Tommy is sitting in class, gazing into the distance, physically inhabiting a room where a class review of material that has been read about and lectured on is taking place for his impending test. The teacher notices Tommy’s inattentiveness and tries to reel him into the discussion. “Tommy, what is the key word to remember for 1848?” Tommy fidgets, looks up, then down, then at Jenny, then back down, and finally replies: “The Enlightenment?”

The Enlightenment was a period of history that young Tommy learned about in class, but he learned about it approximately three months ago—before the semester exams, before New Year’s Day, almost before Thanksgiving. The word Tommy was looking for was “revolution,” and his teacher unfortunately did not mask his revulsion when he heard the fateful word uttered by young Tommy.

This example is extreme, but teachers (and probably pastors) will affirm the multitude of milder examples of the same phenomenon. People do not listen. Though inability to listen is prevalent, no one would really denigrate the value of listening. It is still considered to be a virtue in most contexts. But actual examples of thoughtful listening are harder to find in our world of iPods and shouting heads. Eric Miller’s 2010 biography of the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time, is admirable as American intellectual history in the 20th Century and as biography, but it is also a thoughtful example of and argument for one of the most important tasks of the historian: attentive listening. Lasch was one of the most influential American historians of the latter half of the 20th Century. He was most prominent to the public after he wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979. Following publication of the book, he met in the White House with Jimmy Carter and also was featured in TIME. In his scholarship and public writing, he was restlessly at war with whatever threatened his most cherished ideal for American citizens. In Miller’s assessment, this ideal was “a politics of gratitude, a careful, collective arranging of everyday life in such a way that the gifts that make life possible—family, faith, place, work, earth—are honored, celebrated, and preserved” (p. xix). Lasch developed this ideal by listening to a chorus of unlikely sources.

He was the son of New Deal Democrats from the Midwest, his mother a social worker with a doctorate in philosophy, and his father a Rhodes Scholar who became a journalist and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for articles criticizing the Vietnam War. His first book, An Age of Exploration, published at the age of eleven, came complete with what must be the cutest dust jacket (self-produced) ever to grace a history book: “Robert C. Lasch, the author, is known to his friends as ‘Kit’. He likes sports. This is his first complete book, though he has started many” (p. 1). He left the Midwest for Harvard then moved to New York City to begin doctoral work at Columbia. After finishing his doctorate, he published two books that included harsh criticism of the liberalism that was his intellectual heritage, but not from the perspective of the Right. He had begun looking to Marx and Freud for his intellectual ballast and, as he was developing his scholarly reputation, hoped to provide intellectual support for the idealism of the 1960s counterculture.

He eventually grew to deplore the libertinism of the counterculture as a glorification of perpetual immaturity, and started writing in defense of traditional morality and the importance of the family as the culture warriors were firing their opening shots. To the confusion of some critics, these defenses were still written from within the framework of a Marxist political philosophy and a Freudian understanding of the self. That framework led to The Culture of Narcissism and his visit with President Jimmy Carter. By the time he had mastered Freud well enough to be invited to give the Freud lectures in 1981, Marxism and psychoanalysis had proven incapable of sustaining his intellectual outlook. He began looking to the tradition of American populism for resources. A loose coalition of mostly American thinkers that he tied to populism, whether they would have identified with the term or not, served as the heroes of his magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven, published in 1991, just before his early death in 1994. As this brief description of his intellectual life suggests, he had little patience for the boundaries of the academic disciplines and roved across the scholarly landscape looking for weapons with which to fight for his cause, a kind of intellectual krav maga.

Christian theology did not have a significant effect on Lasch’s thinking until later in his life. His parents were militant secularists, and as a precocious youth Lasch had enjoyed flaunting his atheism to his peers. It was not until Harvard that Lasch started thinking seriously about Christianity. In a letter home to his parents after a theology class, Lasch apologetically described his attraction to Paul’s epistles and Martin Luther.

He then moved away from Christian influence until he started turning against the libertinism of the counterculture. As he wrestled with the immorality of those he once considered allies, he found himself being drawn to Christian theology almost against his will. By the end of his life some believed he had become a Christian, though Lasch himself never committed to Christ in public or joined a church. Throughout the biography, as Miller describes Lasch’s growing admiration for Christian faith, it is hard not to be reminded of Augustine in the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” As Miller traces Lasch’s intellectual wrestling, he notes how Lasch’s ear develops. Though Lasch was generally praised throughout his life for his writing style, historical interpretation, and insight, he was not always praised for actually listening to those he wrote about with such flair. In a review of one of his early books, the reviewer noted that Lasch gave “the impression that he [was] disposing of, rather than understanding, his subjects” (p. 97). A friend also noted this tendency to distance himself from other people in her comments to him about The Culture of Narcissism: “There is some way in which real people in their everyday lives drop out of your analysis. Do you know people that have narcissistic personalities? Really, are there people you relate to who you would describe that way?” (p. 214) Miller argues that Lasch began to change when he realized that he did not have an answer to the problem of goodness. Looking through his Marxist and Freudian lens, he was quite adept at deconstructing the folly of his fellow citizens, but eventually his writing became nothing more than satire, which he could not abide. “Satirists who would be reformers,” Miller writes, “eventually must depart from satire and account for the presence, amidst the abounding folly, of goodness and hope” (p. 234). As he forced himself to reconcile with the problem of goodness, Miller argues, Lasch began to actually listen to the voices of the past, rather than simply turning to analysis. This commitment shaped his magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven.

In The True and Only Heaven, a rich, massive, historical essay, Lasch offers vignettes of thinkers that he considered worthy of reflection for their ability to resist the false dream of modern progress. Though he was not pointing readers to the heaven of Christ Jesus, he was pointing readers away from the false “heavens” that we are so easily satisfied by, whether we realize it or not. It is a feast worthy of slow enjoyment for anyone looking to understand some of the most pernicious idolatries of our time. Miller compares Lasch to a conductor bringing out the best of his musicians, a list of thinkers long enough to merit a 36-page fine-print bibliographic essay.

It would be a mistake to argue that in praising Lasch for developing his ability to actually listen to the past, Miller equates listening to acceptance. It is not as if Miller is arguing that historians must listen attentively and tolerantly because everyone is right and has something nice to add to our understanding of truth; Miller also praises Lasch for rejecting ideologies that had attracted his ear. But Miller does argue for a type of listening that reflects proper humility and can bring the hearer closer to the truth in a way that is often surprising.

Matt is a member of Trinity RPC in Beltsville, Md., and teaches history at Trinity Christian School in Fairfax, Va. He studied history with Prof. Eric Miller at Geneva College.