Lasch Quotes

“The issues that give rise to strident professions of faith on both sides of the ideological divide seem to have little bearing on the problems most people face in everyday life. Politics has become a matter of ideological gestures while the real problems remain unsolved.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“... careerism tends to undermined democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience; devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise - the logical result of policies that equate opportunity with open access to places of higher consideration - is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the last best hope on earth.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“Early admirers of the market - Adam Smith for example - believed that selfishness was a virtue only if it was confined to the realm of exchange. They did not advocate or even envision conditions in which every phase of life would be organized according to the principles of the market. Now that private life has been largely absorbed by the market, however, a new school of economic thought offers what amounts to a new moral vision: a society wholly dominated by the market, in which economic relations are no longer softened by ties of trust and solidarity.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The political process is dominated by rival elites committed to irreconcilable beliefs [...] the politics of ideology distorted our view of the world and confronted us with a series of false choices between feminism and the family, social reform and traditional values, racial justice and individual accountability. Ideological rigidity has the effect of obscuring the views Americans have in common, of replacing substantive issues with purely symbolic issues, and of creating a false impression of polarization.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“Social criticism that addressed the real issue in higher education today - the university's assimilation into the corporate order, and the emergence of a knowledge class whose "subversive" activities do not seriously threaten any vested interest - would be a welcome addition to contemporary discourse. For obvious reasons, however, this kind of discourse is unlikely to get much encouragement either from the academic left, or from its critics on the right.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The idea that democracy is incompatible with excellence, that high standards are inherently elitist - or, as we would say today: sexist, racist, and so on - has always been the best argument against it. Unfortunately many democrats secretly - or not so secretly - share this belief, and are therefore unable to answer it. Instead, they fall back on the claim that democratic men and women make up in tolerance what they lack in character. The latest variation on this familiar theme - its reductio ad absurdum - is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. This is so clearly a recipe for universal competence; or at least a disastrous split between the competent classes and the incompetent, that it is rapidly losing whatever credibility it may have had when our society, because of its abundance of land and natural resources, combined with its chronic shortage of labour, offered a more generous margin for incompetence.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The rise of the advertising and public relations industries side by side helps to explain why the press abdicated its most important function - enlarging the public forum - at the same time that it became more responsible. A responsible press as opposed to a partisan or opinionated one attracted the kind of readers advertisers were eager to reach: well-heeled readers, most of whom probably thought of themselves as independent voters. These readers wanted to be assured that they were reading all the news that was fit to print, not an editor's idiosyncratic and no doubt biased view of things. Responsibility came to be equated with the avoidance of controversy, because advertisers will willing to pay for it. Some advertisers were also willing to pay for sensationalism; though on the whole, they preferred a respectable readership to sheer numbers. What they clearly did not prefer was opinion [...] because opinion reporting didn't guarantee the right audience.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The right and the left share another important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely subversive. Kimbal takes the radical claims of the academic left at face value. He does not object to the tenured radicals because they are more interested in tenure than in radicalism. He objects to them because, in his view, they use the security of their academic positions to attack the foundations of social order.

[...]

Now, instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. No doubt, they would like to think so; but their activities do not seriously threaten corporate control of the universities. And, it is corporate control - not academic radicalism - that has corrupted our higher education. It is corporate control that has diverted social resources from the humanities into military and technological research; fostered an obsession with quantification that has destroyed the social sciences, replaced the English language with bureaucratic jargon, and created a top-heavy administrative apparatus, whose educational vision begins and ends with the bottom line.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy