Think About It 095: CHRISTOPHER LASCH

 

We are accustomed to thinking that the suburbs are the solution to the problem of the cities.  We need to recognize that in the deepest sense they are the cause of the problem and not the solution.  Suburbs institutionalize a false idea of freedom as social mobility, as climbing out of one's class.  They dramatize the dangerous freedom that drains talent and wealth and imagination away.  To say that our ideal of freedom is above all a suburban ideal is to give it palpable shape; it helps us understand more explicitly than any other image what's wrong with it.  It is not only the underclass that is impoverished by this flight to the suburbs.  In one way or another it diminishes all of us.  The suburb organized around the shopping mall rather than the neighborhood eradicates the last vestiges of reciprocal obligation.  It underscores the illusion that the good life consists of unlimited choices unconstrained by any sense that others are in the picture.  No less than the drug culture of the ghetto, suburban culture rests on the phantasy of escape.  So it is no accident that the suburbs have a drug problem too, or that young people in the suburbs find that nothing holds their attention, that sustained effort is beyond their powers and that nothing seems to justify sustained effort anyway.

 

'On The Moral Vision of Democracy' [Civic Arts Review #4, Fall 1991]

 

 

 

 
 
Use the link below to read the full 1991 interview with North American historian and cultural critic CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932–1994):
 
 
 
 
https://chamberscreek.net/library/Christopher%20Lasch/car_interview.html

 

 

 

 

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At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms.  Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt.  It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones.  By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with the glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement.  Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously make him acutely unhappy with his lot.  By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt.

 

The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a July 2020 article about the prescient work of North American historian and cultural critic CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932–1994):

 

 

https://unherd.com/2020/07/the-book-that-predicted-2020/

 

 

 

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Think About It 083: ANNE HELEN PETERSEN 

 

Think About It 074: DWIGHT MACDONALD

 

Our mass culture –– and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well –– is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility and speculation.  We are obsessed with technique, hag-ridden by Facts, in love with information.  Our popular novelists must tell us all about the historical and professional backgrounds of their puppets; our press lords make millions by giving us this day our daily Facts; our scholars –– or, more accurately, our research administrators –– erect pyramids of data to cover the corpse of a stillborn idea…

 

Against The American Grain (1962)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a short article about the work of North American writer, social critic, philosopher and activist DWIGHT MACDONALD (1906–1982):

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/04/masscult-midcult-dwight-macdonald-review

 

 

 

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Think About It 065: CHRISTOPHER LASCH

 

Think About It 032: ABE OSHEROFF

 

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A society of consumers defines choice not as the freedom to choose one course of action over another but as the freedom to choose everything at once. ‘Freedom of choice’ means ‘keeping your options open.’ . . . [S]uch is the open-ended, experimental conception of the good life upheld by the propaganda of commodities, which surrounds the consumer with images of unlimited possibility.

 

The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a July 2020 article about the prescient work of North American historian and cultural critic CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932–1994):

 

 

https://unherd.com/2020/07/the-book-that-predicted-2020/

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 022: CHRISTOPHER LASCH

 

 

Think About It 027: MARION WOODMAN

 

 

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Think About It 022: CHRISTOPHER LASCH

The university remains a diffuse, shapeless, and permissive institution that has absorbed the major currents of cultural modernism and reduced them to a watery blend, a mind-emptying ideology of cultural revolution, personal fulfillment, and creative alienation… Not only does higher education destroy the students' minds; it incapacitates them emotionally as well, rendering them incapable of confronting experience without benefit of textbooks, grades, and pre-digested points of view.  Far from preparing students to live 'authentically,' the higher learning in America leaves them unable to perform the simplest task –– to prepare a meal or go to a party or get into bed with a member of the opposite sex –– without seeking academic instruction.  The only thing it leaves to chance is higher learning.

The Culture of Narcissism (1979)


 

Use the link below to read a 1991 interview with North American sociologist, historian and cultural critic CHRISTOPHER LASCH:

 

http://brandon.multics.org/library/Christopher%20Lasch/car_interview.html

 

 

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