Nightmares, Daydreams And Professor Shils

...But even if one were to grant that discussions of deterioration or improve...

...Shils, One suspects that he shares in that contempt for the multitude which is one of the distinguishing marks of the New Conservatism...

...Because these writers have lost the hope that the working class would usher in a new and better society, "their earlier economic criticism of capitalist society has been transformed into a moral and cultural criticism of the large scale industrial society...

...Even if he should be able to show that the intellectual heritage of some of the critics of mass culture may predispose them to a onesided emphasis on certain aspects of that culture and the consequent neglect of others, he has not thereby shown that their views are false...

...Shils' strictures really are...

...ble lies not in mass culture but in the intellectuals themselves...

...If we don't succeed in stopping the present trend toward the homogenization of culture, there will remain no high culture to which anybody can be assimilated in the future...

...Perhaps such discriminations are really of no great importance for Mr...

...Such questions cannot possibly be decided by reference to the critics' perspective, their moral allegiances and the like...

...Professor Shils' emotional ambivalence toward the radical critics—an ambivalence he shares with many other American intellectuals— has led him to become blinded to the symptoms of acute sickness in the culture he professes to defend...

...One need by no means claim that pre-industrial society was better, one need only show that the cultural conditions in that society were qualitatively different, if one wishes to point out how invalid and irrelevant Mr...

...By contrast, writers who are concerned with the cultural 'fate of the great majority of mankind must concentrate on stressing the qualitative differences in their cultural situation, precisely because they are concerned in establishing that distinctions between the elite and the mass are historically changing distinctions...

...The majority of more recent critics of mass culture, he writes, "are or were, Marxian socialists, some even rather extreme, at least in their past commitment to the socialist ideal...

...Recently, however, such criticism of mass culture has gained in amplitude, force and coherence on this side of the Atlantic...

...If these evil spirits can be successfully exorcized with the help of psychoanalysis, the sociology of knowledge or whatever other tool may seem handy, than it becomes possible again to relax into a stance of satisfied acceptance...

...One might be tempted to dismiss all this by pointing out, for example, that it is simply not true that all or the majority of critics of mass culture, even those whom Shils cites, are or ever were socialists, Marxists, exMarxists and the like...

...Their critical interpretation of mass culture rests on an image of modern man which has been imported into the United States from Germany and is at bottom German romanticism in modern American dress...

...NIETZSCHE Bergson once wrote about the man who, when asked why he didn't weep at a sermon which reduced everyone else to tears, replied: "I don't belong to the parish...

...Apart from Marx himself those most responsible for this distortion have been the German sociologists, especially Ferdinand Toennies and Georg Simmel...

...But then that would be indulging in the same type of ad hominem argumentation which Shils employs throughout his piece...

...ty with the intellectual tendency he proportionately raising the real income of the poor, industry has also impover ished life...

...How else is one to explain their obsessive concern with the few dissenting critics of mass culture who write for the small off-beat publications...

...1 A recent attack upon the critics of modern mass culture by Professor Edward A. Shils entitled "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture" in the Sewanee Review [Fall, 1957] provides an excellent example of, and might also serve as a springboard for some reflections on, that curious American phenomenon: the politics of willed conservatism...

...Discrimination between the cultural situation before and after industrialization involves no apologia for bear baiting, witch hunting, exhausting labor and high death rates, as Mr...

...Since few of our readers are likely to have read Professor Shils' article we will try to summarize his main argument...

...From Dwight Macdonald to Max Horkheimer, from Erich Fromm to Czeslaw Milosz, from Politics to DisSENT what do we find but socialist, near-Marxist and ex-Marxist critics...

...I merely note a fact of common observation...

...This is indeed a beautiful instance of what Freud has termed the "return of the repressed...

...Let us rather make an attempt to consider principia, non homines...

...Having triumphantly assumed that the ideas he is analyzing can only have grown up on the compost of radical alienation, he decides that it is not worthwhile to discuss the truth value of these assertions...

...Are the writers he cites correct when they point to the dehumanizing, the desensitizing aspect of mass culture or are they not...

...Thus current criticism of mass culture can be shown to be really the "transmogrified Marxism of the disappointed...

...William Hoggart's splendid The Uses of Literacy (Essential Books, 1958) shows in impressive detail how in the last few decades British working class values have been eroded by the mass media...

...he contemptuously refuses to discuss seriously the arguments they advance...

...And it involves moreover the need to discard the simplistic argument that there are neat stages in human development, that history develops step by step like a staircase...

...It is quite likely that the majority never will be able to develop good taste or discriminating judgment," but "a substantial minority" might quite possibly, "after several generations," be "assimilated into one of the various traditions of high culture...

...When one says that folk culture once had vitality, this does not mean that one desires a return to it or thinks such a return to be possible...

...In certain areas there has been not only difference but also deterioration...

...Bergson felt that what that man had said of tears was even more true for laughter: those who refuse to join in our merriment are perturbing, they spoil the fun...

...But by engaging in such procedures Professor Shils, the pro fessed conservative and defender of western civilization, is helping to sap the very foundations of this civiliza tion of the dialogue...

...This might be called the Theory of Progress by Contamination: Dip the clods into the vat of culture long enough and some of the fat will stick .. . There are some curious and unanticipated parallels here between Professor Shils and those modern millenarians whom I recently had occasion to discuss in these pages...

...Here is Clement Greenberg's argument that mass culture, as distinct from folk culture, feeds parasitically upon high culture, that it levels cultural distinctions, that it erodes standards, that it homogenizes culture...

...Industrial civilization has destroyed those bonds of communal values which linked the individual to the traditional culture of which he was a part...

...And our reason for opposing it is fundamentally the same: if we refrain from proclaiming that the fish stink, the Eastern fish and the Western fish, we prepare a future in which it will no longer be possible even to notice that they stink...

...Shils to succumb so easily to what Whitehead has called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness...

...Shils would have his readers believe...

...What from one point of view may be seen as a gain may from another point of view bring significant losses...

...Shils, can we account for the recent outcropping of criticism of mass culture...

...How, asks Mr...

...And if the historical evidence is considered doubtful, it can be checked in any of the contemporary underdeveloped countries...

...Mr...

...Not the cultural situation needs scrutiny, but the motives of the critics...

...The effort to arrive at criteria which allow for fruitful discrimination involves a comparison with past periods, but it need not lead to a glorification of the past...

...Yes, admits Professor Shils, things don't go too well today, but wait a few generations, and while the majority can never really be expected to develop good taste or discriminating judgment, a substantial minority, if exposed long enough to high culture or reasonable facsimiles thereof, will finally absorb it as by osmosis...

...Only the frustrated attachment to an impossible ideal of human perfection, and a distaste for one's own society and for human beings as they are, can obscure this...

...Ernest van den Haag, one of Shils' chief targets, happens to have views on economics which my banker-father would have called a trifle old-fashioned back in the twenties...

...they can be decided only by reference to facts and by serious argument...

...attacks, should be a bit circumspect when he argues from past affiliation to present position...

...all that is left is de bunking...

...This is the substance of Professor Shils' argument...

...Shils would call Marxist bias, documents such qualitative differences...

...He is drawn to what might be termed global re sponses, he loses the ability to discriminate between various aspects of the total arguments he is discussing...

...III Not only does Mr...

...Earlier criticism by such men as Ortega y Gasset or Wyndham Lewis was mainly impelled by an elitist, esthetic outlook common to many of the European opponents of political democracy since the early nineteenth century, and therefore had but few repercussions in democratic America...

...But here he reserves for us an interesting surprise: he comes up with a simplistic and vulgarized version of, incredibly enough, the Theory of Progress...

...I believe," she writes, "that standards in modern popular fiction have deteriorated very seriously during the past hundred years...

...Thus in his attack on amajor critic of mass culture, Ernest vanden Haag, he writes, "It is sheer romanticism when Professor van den Haag says'industry has impoverished life.' The contrary is true...

...He who regards human beings as a herd, and thus flies from them as fast as he can, will certainly be caught up by them and gored upon their horns...

...Professor Shils is convinced that he has found the true explanation for this phenomenon...

...We belong to a period of which the culture is in danger of being destroyed by the appliances of culture...

...And one might even point out that Professor Shils, whose role in introducing Karl Mannheim to America would seem prima facie evidence that he himself had once a rather deep affini...

...Hunger and imminence ofdeath, work such as we in the West would now regard as too burdensome even forbeasts, very long hours, prevented the development of individuality, of sensitivityor refinement...

...Industrialization has not simply meant a further stage in development, it has brought in its wake a catastrophic disruption of the patterns of common life...

...Hence only ignorance or prejudice can account for the modern critics' idealizing and romanticizing of the past.* In fact, modern mass cul * Shils, one might remark in passing, isnot always, let us say, overscrupulous inhis quotations...

...All these elementary points are obscured in Professor Shils' anxious concern to defend the present cultural situation...

...Now this is not a value judgment, it is a statement of fact which can easily be verified...

...It hardly behooves so cultivated a critic as Mr...

...I do not here argue about desirability...

...it The crucial question, I suppose, is whether there is anything unique, anything fundamentally new in modern mass culture or whether, as Shils claims, modern man lives in a basically unchanged cultural milieu and remains "1'homme moyen sensuel known to past ages...

...ment always involve complicated and value-laden appraisals, one must be willfully blind to deny that there have been deep-going changes, involving fundamental differences, between preindustrial and industrial culture...

...But Mr...

...While the latter desire to make us accept the horrors and miseries of the totalitarian present in the name of History and Tomorrows that Sing, while they blunt our sensibilities to the injustices of the day by reference to the felicities of the morrow, Professor Shils attempts to dull our sense of indignation about the state of mass culture in the American present by reference to some indeterminate future in which, if not everybody, at least significant numbers of people will be saved...

...The "transmogrified Marxist" critics have elaborated "arbitrary constructions" as to the non-industrial past, which they then counterpose to no less arbitrary constructions concerning a modern urban present that is said to be characterized by impersonality and anonymity, the severing of the bonds of tradition, kinship, religious belief and loyalty...

...That those to whom "celebrating" is part of their job are often deeply uneasy about it, a score of novels and semi-sociological reports, most often written by disillusioned members of the fraternity, have recently documented...

...And even if one were to grant that some critics of mass culture do at times tend to romanticize the past a little, does that in any way lessen the power of the criticism they make of the present...

...One might also point out that the whole category of "socialists, Marxists, ex-Marxists" is so vague and ill defined that it might be possible to include in it a very high proportion of American intellectuals...

...The very essence of historical perspective consists in an ability to recognize certain losses in those changes which one may nevertheless feel to have been necessary, inevitable and perhaps even desirable...

...And it may also explain their eagerness to prove that if these critics decline to cheer there must be something wrong with them —since, manifestly, there can be very little wrong with American culture...

...Western culture may be able to deal with its critics, but who will protect it from its friends...

...It rests on a romanticizing distortion of the pre-industrial past in which traditions were allegedly stable, men fully integrated into their community and communal solidarity unquestioned...

...What is more remarkable is that those for whom celebrating is, so to speak, an extracurricular activity seem to share these anxieties...

...One might thus have expected that he would wind up his argument by reference to the frailties of human nature, the philosophy of limits, the tragedy of the human condition or any of those other abstractions fashionable today among those who have labored hard to will into being their modish conservatism...

...he contributes to the defeat of the very reason which he professes to defend...

...In fact any standard cultural history, not only those tainted by what Mr...

...Shils disdains to concern himself with all this—it isn't worthy of his attention for a reason analogous to that which leads the True Marxist to consider it beneath his dignity to discuss the findings of "bourgeois science...

...Hence the need to refer to the alleged personal sources of the critics' discontent...

...Shils does not sufficiently distinguish between the incorrectness and the one-sidedness of an intellectual position...

...It simply involves an attempt to discover the peculiar characteristics which distinguish particular cultural conditions...

...Shils attempt to discredit the critics of mass culture by pointing to their alleged discreditable ancestry...

...Cultural historians note significant deteriorations of the cultural level even within the last hundred years...

...Here we find Dwight Macdonald's thesis that mass culture, as distinct from other cultural forms, "is imposed from above...

...Like Karl Mannheim in his earlier writings, Mr...

...Under such conditions, of course, a "dialogue" is not possible...

...It is fabricated by tech 272 nicians hired by businessmen...

...More importantly, to say that certain aspects of life in a medieval village had a somewhat attractive quality is in no way to deny that there was also misery, illiteracy and hunger...

...He is ostensibly reviewing Mass Culture (edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, The Free Press, 1957), that is, a book in which some of the most telling arguments of the critics of mass culture are brought together, along with some of the arguments of its defenders...

...Shils feels that this disastrous distortion of the facts needs to be set right by pointing out, for example, that hunger and imminence of death, that burdensome labor and very long work hours prevented the development of individuality, sensitivity and refinement in the great majority of the lower classes in pre-industrial society, and that theirs was a culture of bear-baiting, cockfighting and drunkenness, of Iurid tales and frightening superstitions...

...To believe that culture will somehow steadily progress from the awful to the somewhat less awful and then to the still less awful is to succumb to the fallacy of pathetic optimism...

...This may seem quitea polemical blow—until we look at whatvan den Haag really wrote: "While immensely augmenting our comforts, ourconveniences and our leisure, and dis ture is less damaging to the lower classes than pre-industrial culture...

...The root of the trou...

...Emphasis added] Professor Shils is known for his Anglophile senti ments but this has not apparently led him to emulate the British sense of fair play...

...The operation is basically the same in both cases, the motive is the same...

...This may be why the enthusiastic participants in the American Celebration are so perturbed by the handful of dissenting critics who refuse to join them...

...The new elitists are convinced that as a matter of common fact human nature is always the same, that there always has existed a gulf between the sodden masses and the cultured elite, so that there is really no need to engage in finer historical discriminations...

...In this article and in his other re cent writings Professor Shils poses as a kind of neo-Burkean conservative gentleman, a moderate, urbane, re laxed and cultivated commentator upon the fads and foibles of impas sioned radicals and "philanthropic lib erals," a thinker safe and sane who is simply appalled by those impatient fellows (non-U all of them, no doubt) who feel the need to oppose the pres ent in the name of some "utopian" image of a better society...

...Thus Margaret Dalziel's painstaking examination of Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (Cohen and West, London 1957) notes that the fierce joys of sadism displayed in, say, Mickey Spillane "are quite without parallel in my reading of penny dreadfuls and similar Nineteenth Century literature...

...The book offers literally hundreds of examples of the qualitative difference between mass culture and other types of culture...

...It turns out, I submit, that not Professor Shils, the self-professed defender of tradition and conservatism, but the radical critic is genuinely concerned with cultural survival...