We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

Christopher Lasch

Categorized in : Order Class Ghetto

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Christopher Lasch

heartless family world

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Christopher Lasch

congratulations success inspirational

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

modern family people

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

birth moral order

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

Christopher Lasch

demand too-much littles

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

Christopher Lasch

blue class jobs

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

swag speech names

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

Christopher Lasch

denial buttons smile

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

Christopher Lasch

coercion perfect justice

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

logic loyalty different

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

overcoming-addiction our-society drug

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.

Christopher Lasch

roles technique inspirational

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

Christopher Lasch

advertising new-experiences way

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

Christopher Lasch

drug want needs

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

Christopher Lasch

conservative social sides

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

Christopher Lasch

silence important intellectual

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

political wings lying

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

Christopher Lasch

age birthday character

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

Christopher Lasch

addiction media believe

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

Christopher Lasch

art-is scream art