Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope - First Things

Hope is the rejection of envy and resentment and all that invites them. It’s not difficult to see why those would always seem to be compelling moral postures, because we live in a world that doesn’t seem arranged for human convenience. It’s a world in which human happiness is not the overriding goal, and our plans go awry, and there are terrible li... See more

misses the religious challenge to complacency, the heart and soul of faith. Instead of discouraging moral inquiry, religious prompting can just as easily stimulate it by calling attention to the disjunction between verbal profession and practice, by insisting that a perfunctory observance of prescribed rituals is not enough to ensure salvation, and... See more

One can expect to find among the cultural, intellectual, and economic elite, says Lasch, a “snobbish disdain for people who lack formal education and work with their hands, an unfounded confidence in the moral wisdom of experts, an equally unfounded prejudice against untutored common sense, a distrust of any expression of good intentions, a distrus... See more

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of

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For Lasch, these developments represented a betrayal of democracy: citizenship had been replaced by individualism; virtue had been supplanted by an ethic of material success; belief in equality and in civic obligations had given way to claims of individual liberty and an emphasis upon autonomy. Curiously, while the spirit of aristocratic generosity... See more