“Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the r...”
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Author detail
In his wide-ranging books and essays, Mr. Lasch offered a leftist analysis of industrial capitalism and its effects on American politics, social arrangements, modes of thought and personal psychology. As a counterpoise to the alienation and despair he saw as pervasive in American life, he proposed a progressive program that, paradoxically, relied heavily on the values of community, family and self-discipline. Diagnosing a Malaise "The Culture of Narcissism"(W. W. Norton) is his best-known work. In the 1979 book, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks, he described postwar America as a society of dangerously self-absorbed individuals, fixated on personal goals, fearful of their impulses and easily controlled by power elites. President Jimmy Carter asked Mr. Lasch to advise him on Mr. Carter's speech, delivered in July 1979, on the nation's "crisis of confidence." It became known as the "national malaise" speech. (Obituary, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/15/obituaries/christopher-lasch-is-dead-at-61-wrote-about-america-s-malaise.html). See also: "The Writings of Christopher Lasch: A Bibliography-in-Progress", Compiled by Robert Cummings Social Science Division, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO 63501 https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/3271 See also: https://www.domusweb.it/en/opinion/2020/03/31/from-beauty-to-beauticians.html (Forty years ago, the historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch “foresaw the dramatic transformation of a world where the loss of all concept of the past destroyed all hopes for the future”, writes the editorial director Walter Mariotti. Watch the interview with Christopher Lasch on DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x33apgj https://towardfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/220px-Christopher_Lasch.jpg
Quotes
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“Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the r...”
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“The history of popular movements, including the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties – the last of such uprising in American history – shows that only an arduous, even a tragic,...”
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“The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.”
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“A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.”
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“Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.”
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“Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.”
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“Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.”
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“Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.”
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“Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.”
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“A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.”
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“It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.”
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“It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.”
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“Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.”
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“George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.”
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“In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.”
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“Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.”
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“The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.”
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“Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.”
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“Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.”
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“The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.”
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