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Home
Authors
Christopher Lasch
American
Historian
About the author
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Understanding
#Values
#Capitalism
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.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Desire
#Ownership
#Lie
#Appetite
#Possessions
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.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Family
#Popular
#Awareness
#Liberals
A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Life
#Past
#Today
#Society
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Religion
#Spiritual
#Politics
#Religious
#Separation
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Nothing
#Family
#Crime
#Popular
#Abortion
#Defense
#School
#Bigotry
#Superstition
#Curriculum
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Heart
#Improvement
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Time
#People
#Family
#Open
#Delusion
#Options
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Conservative
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Life
#Family
#Wage
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Silence
#Conservatism
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Public
#Information
#Job
#Press
#Debate
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Family
#Wage
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#People
#Family
#Conflict
#Feminism
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Talk
#Life
#Family
#Diversity
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Progress
#Wisdom
#Community
#Common sense
The left has lost the common touch.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#People
#Society
#Sense
#Suspicion
#Propaganda
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Common sense
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Belief
#Effect
#Media
#Addiction
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Society
#Ownership
#Addiction
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Appetite
#News
#Jaded
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Religion
#Politics
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Now
#Family
#Society
#Question
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Events
#News
#Propaganda
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Development
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Today
#Sense
#Americans
#Order
#Possibility
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Will
#Activism
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Now
#Change
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Strength
#Family
#Feeling
#Popular
#Values
#Rhetoric
#Liberals
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Love
#Justice
#Politics
#Measure
The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Popular
#Present
#Opinion
#Party
#Common sense
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Information
#Debate
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#People
#Language
#Tradition
#Prejudice
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Sense
#Television
#Nature
#Connection
#Drugs
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Destruction
#Values
Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Society
#Values
#Obvious
#Drugs
#Addiction
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Business
#Order
#Conservation
#Innovation
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Character
#Age
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.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Trouble
#Speech
#Names
#Contention
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Perceptions
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Hope
#Lies
#Politics
#Lie
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Want
#Experience
#Society
#Drugs
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Effect
#Order
#Crisis
#Rhetoric
Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Logic
#Reality
#Media
#Advertising
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Support
#Will
#Family
#Law
#American
#Wages
#Wage
#Capitalism
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Success
#Nothing
#Appearance
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Danger
In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#God
#World
#Culture
#Society
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Smile
#Ideology
#Symbol
#Denial
#Conservatism
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.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Life
#Family
#Logic
#Loyalty
#Values
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#News
#Advertising
#Propaganda
#Liberal
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Want
#Force
#Advertising
#Economics
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Right
#Family
#Women
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Knowledge
#Reality
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#People
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Old
#Marriage
#Improvement
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Art
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
Christopher Lasch,
American
Historian
#Family
#Defense
#Conviction
#Liberals