#lasch

Here again the academic left turns out to be in fundamental agreement with the right. Both hold the same debased view of politics as the rule of the strongest, a shouting match that drowns out the voice of reason. The right and the left share another important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely 'subversive." [...]  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. One of the effects of corporate control is to drive critical thinkers out of the social sciences into the humanities, where they can indulge a taste for 'theory' without the rigorous discipline of empirical social observation. 'Theory' is no substitute for social criticism, the one form of intellectual activity that would seriously threaten the status quo and the one form that has no academic cachet at all.

Imagine

Only in a world in which words and images bear less and less resemblance to the things they appear to describe would it be possible for a man like Reich to refer to himself, without irony, as secretary of labor or to write so glowingly of a society governed by the best and brightest. The last time the 'best and brightest' got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance - the 'arrogance of power,' as Senator William Fulbright used to call it - to which the 'best and brightest' are congenitally addicted.

Vivre dans l'instant est la passion dominante - vivre pour soi-même, et non pour ses ancêtres ou la postérité. Nous sommes en train de perdre le sens de la continuité historique, le sens d'appartenir à une succession de générations qui, nées dans le passé, s'étendent vers le futur.

L'atmosphère actuelle n'est pas religieuse mais thérapeutique. Ce que les gens cherchent avec ardeur aujourd'hui, ce n'est pas le salut personnel, encore moins le retour d'un âge d'or antérieur, mais la santé, la sécurité psychique, l'impression, l'illusion momentanée d'un bien-être personnel. Même le radicalisme des années 60 a été utilisé, non comme une religion de substitution mais comme thérapie par un grand nombre de ceux qui l'ont embrassé, pour des raisons plutôt personnelles que politiques. Une politique « radicale » donnait sens et signification à des existences vides.