Intellectuals and the Mass Media

...By and large we are in a society which gave us some chance to get them...

...High culture may be high-minded, but its advocates are also human, and they enjoy attacking their enemies as much as the people who spin tales about absent-minded professors...

...Unless and until it is proven that popular culture is emotionally or socially harmful—and no one is likely to be able to prove it—the only democratic solution is a pluralistic one...

...A few voices cry out against this stereotypical morality play—notably that of Edward Shils, whose paper on "Mass Society and its Culture" is the most thoughtful and comprehensive treatment of the subject to appear in many years...

...they picture boorish and grasping consumers luring the artist away from high culture, and reducing it to middle-brow tastes...

...Stanley Edgar Hyman suggests that the media audience is in the grip of meretricious entrepreneurs who can—and will—sell it anything they wish...

...Between them, the papers restate most of the dominant stereotypes, and most of them do it well...

...This ought to be admitted...

...Most important, he is justified in advocating and lobbying for his own values, but he does not have the right to heap scorn, a priori, on all non-intellectual values and to stereotype their advocates...

...Nor are they as brutal or mediocre as most of the folk culture which they are in the process of replacing...

...The conservative intellectuals of European background, represented by Hannah Arendt and Ernest van den Haag, raise the specter of Ortega y Gasset's mass man...

...they should not be limited to solutions of primary benefit to the intellectual and his friends...

...Reviewed by HERBERT J. GANS Assistant Professor of City Planning, University of Pennsylvania Who has not been annoyed at one time or another by the inaccurate, hostile stereotypes by which the mass media depict intellectuals as absent-minded, artists as unkempt and high culture as boring and effete...

...The writers, especially a strident Randall Jarrell, view the American people as homogenized and standardized by mass culture, while the historian Oscar Handlin argues that they are unable to find meaning or satisfaction in it, and mourns the passing of folk culture...

...The conference concluded that cultural democracy is inevitable in a political democracy, and that political democracy was desirable, although several participants came close to implying that they might not be averse to exchanging it for cultural aristocracy...

...It might come as a surprise to some, though, that intellectuals and.artists have their own equally inaccurate and hostile stereotypes of popular culture and the mass media audience...

...His observations should, however, be geared to that society, and not to a now departed one...

...I am not suggesting that the intellectual should become a public relations man for modern society, that he defend the business society's concept of political and cultural democracy, or that he embrace low and middle-brow culture...

...This mixture is harder to put together in popular culture than in high culture, mainly because the popular audience is so much larger and more diverse...

...Indeed, the complaints of some mass culture critics and the remaining aristocrats are often quite similar...

...Both compare what they perceive to be a declining society with the glories of a highly distorted golden past, and both decry the temerity of the masses invading domains which were once closed to them...

...They must surely exist, but their point of view is very much in the minority, both in this book and in the intellectual community generally...

...What is most depressing—and alarming—about the prevalent attitudes towards popular culture and its audience is the intellectuals' barely suppressed yearning for an aristocratic society...

...Modern lowbrow and middle-brow culture have emerged from this social transformation, but neither are as chained to the mass media, nor as important in the lives of the people, as intellectuals claim...

...The intellectual is and must be a marginal person, who stands apart to offer society his analysis and criticism of its defects...

...We need intellectuals who have some empathy for the popular audience and for modern society...

...A person's choice of a standard, a predominantly unconscious process, is affected by his socio-economic level and especially by his educational achievement...

...High, or refined, culture has been pursued by a minority from time immemorial, and it has always led an uncertain existence...

...Shils' optimism about the future of high culture was not particularly well received at the conference...

...His final statement summarizes the discussion quite accurately: "The contention has been made frequently that mass culture is bad because it serves as a narcotic, because it affects our political democracy, because it corrupts our high culture...

...The mass of people should be able to choose from a wide variety of cultural forms, so that they can freely select those which live up to their own standards...

...The evidence is available in a collection of papers presented at a Seminar on Mass Culture and the Mass Media, sponsored by the Tamiment Institute and the journal Daedalus...

...He begins by noting that the masses have been incorporated into society for the first time in history, giving them both a voice in the political system, and the wherewithal to make choices in the cultural arena...

...but I think it would also relieve our minds from the necessity of making up fictions about the empirical consequences of mass culture...

...In actual practice, this means culture which is a mixture of what people think is good, and what artists—be they of high or popular culture—want to create...

...He is entitled to demand more power and prestige, but he should not be simply self-seeking...

...Indeed, the intellectual's most significant social functions are to comment intelligently on the values of the non-intellectual majority, and to point out the institutions which are performing poorly in the pursuit of these values...

...I don't think there is any empirical evidence for these contentions I think we are not confronting the real problem: why we don't like mass culture...

...These essays, originally published in Daedulus, now appear in book form, together with the highlights of the conference discussion and a number of additional background articles...

...Is it partly because we don't like the working classes and the middle classes...

...Shils questions the prevalent view that high culture is really on the decline in our time...

...Similarly, his proposals for social and cultural reforms should accommodate such values...

...The papers are more moderate than my summary of them, but the discussion at the conference made the point less politely: Popular culture is created by greedy and villainous businessmen to entertain and hypnotize a dull, unmannered and uncultured populace...

...Moreover, neither the entrepeneurs nor their audiences lift a finger to help high culture or its intellectual and artist heroes...

...This implies that the intellectual must have some respect and understanding for values other than his own...

...James Johnson Sweeney, museum director and art critic, rejects the popular audience entirely, complaining that it has sabotaged the proper function of museums...

...The problem, it seems to me, is how do you create a society which gives those people who want it a chance to be cultured...

...To do so will help us select an aesthetic viewpoint, a system of moral judgments which would also be applicable to the products of mass culture...

...Here then is a useful role for the intellectual: to inquire into the values and standards of all sectors of the popular audience, to analyze as well as to criticize, and to make the results available to the institutions that provide society with art and entertainment...

...Thus, high culture and popular culture are not hero and villain in a morality play, but alternate forms through which people with diverse esthetic standards seek beauty, pleasure and insight...

...Daniel Bell's skepticism about the benefits of aristocracy fell on many deaf ears: "I do not think that many of us here inherited our culture, our education and Our books," he said...

...Sociological research has shown that modern society is composed of a number of subcultures, each with somewhat different esthetic standards...