Education Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch’s jab lands because it flips a familiar liberal self-image on its head. “Progress and enlightenment” are usually the left’s moral vocabulary; by pairing them with “obstacle,” he suggests a reform culture so convinced of its own benevolence that it can’t recognize when it’s become contemptuous. The line is not really about policy. It’s about posture: the educated stratum, armed with expertise and good intentions, treating the accumulated habits of ordinary life as backward noise to be engineered away.

“Common sense” is doing double duty here. It’s the appealing, democratic phrase that implies: regular people know things intellectuals forget. But Lasch quickly defines it as “traditional wisdom and folkways,” a choice that nudges the reader toward place, family, religion, neighborhood norms-the unglamorous institutions that stabilize lives. The subtext is populist and accusatory: if you dismiss those supports as superstition, you’re not liberating people; you’re severing them from what makes agency possible.

Context matters. Writing in the late 20th century, Lasch was a prominent critic of both corporate capitalism and managerial liberalism. He watched the post-60s left become increasingly professionalized, fluent in technocratic fixes and cultural critique, and less comfortable with the moral language of restraint, obligation, and loyalty. This sentence is his warning that “enlightenment” can become a class project: a credentialed minority deciding that the majority’s inherited ways are problems to be solved. It works because it’s an indictment wrapped in a mirror, inviting the reader to ask whether “progress” is still persuasion-or now a sneer.