"Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize"
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Lasch is smuggling an argument about power into what looks like a tidy definition of knowledge. The line flatters the modern faith that reality can be “copied” like a document, cleanly reproduced and universally legible. But the phrase “preferably a scientifically trained observer” is a quiet needle: it names a gatekeeper class and then pretends that gatekeeping is simply good hygiene. Knowledge, in this framing, is not what communities remember, what workers learn by doing, or what politics reveals under pressure. It is what an accredited observer reports back, in a format “we can all recognize.” Recognition becomes the real currency - not truth in some metaphysical sense, but consensus calibrated to the standards of institutions.
The subtext is Lasch’s long-standing suspicion of technocracy and credentialism in late-20th-century America, where expertise increasingly served as a substitute for democratic argument. “Copy of reality” does two jobs at once: it invokes the authority of science (measurement, verification) while revealing how mediated our access to the world actually is. We don’t encounter reality; we receive representations of it, packaged by people trained to speak in the right idiom.
Context matters: Lasch wrote amid the postwar boom in professional-managerial authority, when social science and policy expertise promised to rationalize everything from poverty to parenting. His point isn’t anti-science so much as anti-complacency. When we treat knowledge as a neutral photocopy, we stop asking who decides what counts as “reality,” whose experiences don’t scan, and why recognition often aligns so neatly with the interests of those doing the observing.
The subtext is Lasch’s long-standing suspicion of technocracy and credentialism in late-20th-century America, where expertise increasingly served as a substitute for democratic argument. “Copy of reality” does two jobs at once: it invokes the authority of science (measurement, verification) while revealing how mediated our access to the world actually is. We don’t encounter reality; we receive representations of it, packaged by people trained to speak in the right idiom.
Context matters: Lasch wrote amid the postwar boom in professional-managerial authority, when social science and policy expertise promised to rationalize everything from poverty to parenting. His point isn’t anti-science so much as anti-complacency. When we treat knowledge as a neutral photocopy, we stop asking who decides what counts as “reality,” whose experiences don’t scan, and why recognition often aligns so neatly with the interests of those doing the observing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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