Christopher Lasch Quotes
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, p. 22.
Often called Blackshirts. He is one of the few politicians in the world who saw Fascists and Nazis in the middle of the political spectrum.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg){kind=small}
The CHP is the oldest political party in Turkey. The great Turkish refomer, Ataturk, the first President of Turkey, represented this party. He modernized and cleaned up what was a backward and corrupt country and although there was little bloodshed in the massive cultural transformation, it was very much a top down revolution where the people, like most people, did not welcome radical changes to their society and way of life. Ataturk gave women the vote, imposed compulsory education for both genders, established a parliamentary system, banned traditional garb, and even forced a language change, shifting from the Arabic alphabet to the European Latin Alphabet. Most opposed however was his complete separation of church and state and the transformation of Turkey into a sectarian nation from what had been a theological dictatorship where the Sultan was the absolute ruler of the state and of the Muslim religion.
This was not exactly a complement. Adams was outraged by Paine’s overt and public atheism and anti religious statements. (See {623040}.) Others of the founding fathers were also atheists but Paine wrote publicly and actively tried to persuade people of his religious position. Adams was particularly concerned because Paine was not just one of the great leaders of the American Revolution. His was the most recognized name, and a huge percentage of the American population had read his Common Sense. He was the person who was most persuasive with the mass of Americans to revolt—more so than Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin or any of the other great men of the time. Because Paine was so influential, Adams thought that he should be more passive in shaking the religious faith of so many others. Actually, it was Paine’s overt atheism that has tended to diminish his influence and status given by historians throughout the ages. It also caused him some difficulty in America after the Revolution and moreso in England.
What the Supreme Leader did not understand was that the very books that he recommended to see the faults of America were the very instruments that influenced the American reformers to change and improve America. And the lesson he missed is that he would not allow authors to heavily criticize the current Iran and have a wide audience so that Iran could improve. His examples were very well chosen. The lesson is the wrong one however.
Robert Christopher Lasch was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled "the culture of narcissism".
