Time & Perspective Quote by Louis Kronenberger

Kronenberger’s line lands like a civilized sigh with a stiletto inside it. He isn’t pining for prudishness; he’s warning that a useful social emotion has been collateral damage in the modern cleanup. “False shame” names the old inventory of manufactured embarrassment: the class-coded cringe, the body panic, the moral policing that keeps people small and compliant. Getting rid of it reads, at first, like progress. The misfortune is that the demolition crew didn’t stop at the rotten parts.

The phrasing does the real work. “Killed off” is blunt, almost clinical, turning cultural change into something closer to manslaughter than liberation. Kronenberger implies that shame isn’t merely an oppressive tool; it can be a moral sensor, the internal wince that keeps you from cruelty, vulgarity, or cheap self-exoneration. The subtext is that modernity has confused “never feeling judged” with “never needing judgment,” trading ethical restraint for a breezy, performative confidence.

As a mid-century critic, Kronenberger writes from a moment when mass media, celebrity culture, and consumer optimism were reshaping public behavior and private standards. In that environment, “authenticity” becomes a social currency, and the rejection of embarrassment starts to look like virtue. His sentence pushes back against a culture that treats all shame as repression and every boundary as hypocrisy.

What makes it sting is its refusal to romanticize either side. Progress can be real and still be reckless. The liberation from bogus taboos is welcome; the loss of any capacity to blush at one’s own pettiness is not.