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| Christopher Lasch - another dead white male I admire. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
http://s-usih.org/2013/11/reflections-on-christopher-laschs-reflections.html
Christopher Lasch: “Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction."
A family is a man and a woman with their offspring.
Christopher Lasch: “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."
The distinction between politics and religion is a distinction without a difference.
Christopher Lasch: “Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.”
Every age is either a beneficiary or a victim of its ideology.
Christopher Lasch: “Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.”
It is obvious and undeniable that all laws, good or bad, must logically and necessarily be coercive if they are in force.
Christopher Lasch: “Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.”This is so because Conservatives believe they are obliged to retain the status quo. It would be far more efficacious to define clearly the values that we Conservatives have sworn to defend. These values should be contained scripture, surely, for it is the Bible and the Koran that contains the rules that would protect and maintain social conservatism. I would argue that Conservatives should really be defenders of a theocracy.
Christopher Lasch: “The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.”
The Conservative Party has a constitution that refers to the principles of the Conservative Party but does not define them. Therefore the Conservative Party is a fraud on its members.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Should-the-Conservative-Party-adopt-the-principles-Claire-Khaw-recommends/480788695347743
Christopher Lasch: “The Left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.”
Everything about feminism undermines the institution of marriage.
Christopher Lasch: “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.”
It seems even liberals have parents and offspring they love.
Christopher Lasch: “Most of these alternative [family] arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old-fashioned marriage.”
The definition of a household containing a family should be narrowed to "a man and a woman living together with their offspring".
Christopher Lasch: “The Left has come to regard common sense — the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community — as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.”
The Left are suffering from dementia caused by prolonged atheism.
Christopher Lasch: “The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-wing; it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.”
There is the patriarchy which is the product of the ideology of the Abrahamic faiths, and there is everything else.
Christopher Lasch: “Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.”
If the destination is Dementia and Decline and we are on a journey towards it , then one can progress towards it, I suppose.
Christopher Lasch: “The Left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.”
It is important that we define the family correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names
Christopher Lasch: “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.”
Then this ought to be enshrined in the Labour Party constitution too.
Christopher Lasch: “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.”
Are men really so feeble and effeminate now that they cannot assert that a family at its most basic is the nuclear family, ie a man and a woman living together with their offspring?
Christopher Lasch: “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.”
Not sure what it is meant by the family "as a purely voluntary arrangement".
I think Lasch was referring here to how easy it has become not simply to divorce, but to make the decision itself to divorce as though family breakdown were not that significant.
Christopher Lasch: “A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future.”
Christopher Lasch: "When art, religion, and finally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality, the banality of pseudo-self-awareness becomes so overwhelming that men finally lose the capacity to envision any release at all except in total nothingness."
That is why so many Western men are drunks now, I suppose.
Christopher Lasch: "Is society's obsession with appearances a cause (or metaphor) for its tendency toward anti-intellectualism, i.e. a refusal to not only look deeper but to think deeply as well?"
Society's obsession with appearances is caused by cultivating consumerism and materialism through usury. Shopping is materialism writ large.
Christopher Lasch: "The ideology of modern management draws on the same body of therapeutic theory and practice that informs progressive education and progressive childrearing."
Do you mean it is intended to cause problems so it can be called upon to solve the problems it causes, like a protection racket?
Christopher Lasch: "In the hierarchies of work and power, as in the family, the decline of authority does not lead to the collapse of social constraints; it merely deprives those constraints of a rational basis. Just as the parent's failure to administer just punishment to the child undermines the child's self-esteem rather than strengthening it, so the corruptibility of public authorities -- their acquiescence in minor forms of wrongdoing -- reminds the subordinate of his subordination by making him dependent on the indulgence of those above him."
Bad parenting is first excused and then normalised when more and more bad parents are created. It is a triumph of evil over good, really.
Christopher Lasch: "The new-style bureaucrat, whose 'ideology and character support hierarchy even though he is neither paternalistic nor authoritarian,' as Michael Maccoby puts it in his study of the corporate 'gamesman', no longer orders his inferiors around; but he has discovered subtler means of keeping them in their place. Even though his underlings often realize that they have been 'conned, pushed around, and manipulated,' they find it hard to resist such easygoing oppression. The diffusion of responsibility in large organizations, moreover, enables the modern manager to delegate discipline to others, to blame unpopular decisions on the company in general, and thus to preserve his standing as a friendly adviser to those beneath him. Yet his entire demeanor conveys to them that he remains a winner in a game most of them are destined to lose."
It is soft, fluid feminine power that confuses everyone when some hard clear rules are required to regulate people's behaviour. Women in the workplace will of course be a factor in this.
Christopher Lasch: "The demystification of womanhood goes hand in hand with the desublimation of sexuality. Sex valued purely for its own sake loses all reference to the future and brings no hope of permanent relationships. Sexual liaisons, including marriage, can be terminated at pleasure."
There was a reason why marriage was created and it was to regulate the sex instinct. Regulated it allows the current generation to rear the next generation in optimum conditions, unregulated it merely produces degeneracy through widespread illegitimacy.
But regulating our instincts is boring and means the practice of social conservatism ie forbidding extramarital sex, which only religion supported by the law can make us adhere to.
Christopher Lasch: "The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. Formerly sexual antagonism was tempered not only by chivalric, paternalistic conventions but by a more relaxed acceptance of the limitations of the other sex. Men and women acknowledged each other's shortcomings without making them the basis of a comprehensive indictment. Partly because they found more satisfaction than is currently available in casual relations with their own sex, they did not have to raise friendship itself into a political program, an ideological alternative to love. An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession."
Very true. The contempt of familiarity is what men and women feel for each other now, when sexual liberation and therefore sexual promiscuity and widespread illegitimacy is now the norm in the West.
Christopher Lasch: "Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. These women are less angry at their men because they don't spend that much time with them. Middle-class women are the ones who were told men had to be their companions."
Indeed. Muslim women do the same too, I am sure.
Christopher Lasch: "The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals."
Christopher Lasch: "For many reasons, personal relations have become increasingly risky -- most obviously, because they no longer carry any assurance of permanence. Men and women make extravagant demands on each other and experience irrational rage and hatred when their demands are not met. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that more and more people long for emotional detachment, or 'enjoy sex only in situations where they can define and limit the intensity of the relationship.' Sexual separatism is only one of many strategies for controlling or escaping from strong feeling."
Sexual separatism? I assume this is not the same as sex segregation and is really about treating relationships and sex partners as being disposable.
Christopher Lasch: "The sexually voracious female, long a stock figure of masculine pornography, in the twentieth century has emerged into the daylight of literary respectability. The cruel, destructive, domineering woman, la belle dame sans merci, has moved from the periphery of literature and other arts to position close to the center. Formerly a source of delicious titillation, of sadomasochistic gratification tinged with horrified fascination, she now inspires unambiguous loathing and dread. Heartless, domineering, burning with 'a lust of the nerves rather than of the flesh', she unmans every man who falls under her spell."
Indeed. Clytemnestra and Medea were just such women. They were what ambitious men would become if they became women and used their feminine wiles intelligently and ruthlessly.
Christopher Lasch: "Capitalism has severed the ties of personal dependence only to revive dependence under cover of bureaucratic rationality. Having overthrown feudalism and slavery and then outgrown its own personal and familial form, capitalism has evolved a new political ideology, welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance. It has evolved new modes of social control, which deal with the deviant as a patient and substitute medical rehabilitation for punishment."
Instead of Big Brother, we now have Big Sister administering the Nanny State. The Nanny State is the Opium of The People.
http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Lasch/e/B000APM2QU
My thanks to the person who brought Christopher Lasch to my attention through
http://ask.fm/oneparty4all
I sometimes wonder if I was specially chosen to deliver a very pointed message to the white man sent to them by their outraged and disgusted ancestors. They will not listen to each other even if one of them chose to adopt this message, and his wife would divorce him probably, and deprive him of half his property and then of access to his children as Fathers Need Families http://www.fnf.org.uk/ would confirm.
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