A Case of Uneven Development

...Life, of course, is not responsible for this crazy situation...

...But it seems to me perfectly sensible that a society, having decided that it is a good thing to have a proportion of its population living and working on the soil, should actively encourage this population to do so...

...Moreover, this country today, for all its egalitarian rhetoric and pretensions, is not exactly alien to the idea of special privileges for reasons of national purpose that have nothing to do with equality...

...The free market in culture works this way: In the United States today, every "little magazine" is forced to compete with Life—even though it has no such intention...

...In no nation, at no time, have quality periodicals achieved circulations of that dimension...

...It would be more accurate to say that the American economy—and especially its advertising sector—subsidizes Life at the expense of the small magazine...

...it is simply going about its business in the ordinary way...

...I have the impression that the special privileges which have been accorded to the farmers are not working out very well...

...For example, if the government should declare that everyone, rich and poor alike, will contribute the same proportion of his income to the tax-collector, it would technically be treating people as equals...

...No one seems to be responsible—and so we accept it as inevitable...

...True, many such magazines obtain subsidies that allow them to survive...

...There is no reason why printing establishments and paper suppliers should not get a tax rebate for cutting their costs to these magazines...

...Equality" and "special privileges" are not antithetical terms...

...their job is to sell products, and Life does that better than Partisan Review...

...As that great journalist, E. L. Godkin, observed many decades ago: "Men soon get accustomed to the evils of their condition, particularly if there is nobody in particular to blame...

...That is an utterly ridiculous figure to insist upon...

...This "privileged" class has already been quite adequately defined, and without any great commotion...

...if it were indeed the case that a democracy is incapable of ever making such official valuations and distinctions, then we should be asserting that, in order for popular government to be compatible with liberty, it must be inimical to civilization...

...The advertisers are not responsible...

...For instance: It is a favorite complaint that America will not support good (i.e., "highbrow") magazines of relatively small circulation...

...If these periodicals are to play their part in the nation's cultural life, they ought to be able to stand on their own feet, to pay their editors decent salaries and their contributors reasonable fees...

...It is only possible to say that "too few" Americans wish to read a quality periodical if by "too few" one means under, say, 250,000—which is approximately the "break-even" point under present conditions...

...In the same way, I believe that Life (or Look or Esquire or Playboy or the Reader's Digest) at the moment is the recipient of a special privilege in that the laws make no distinction between those periodicals which are, in the nature of 20th century things, more affluent and those which are not...

...Indeed, we are well aware that formal equality itself may in reality create special privileges—and that, conversely, the creation of special privileges is often a precondition of true equality...

...Now the reason that small magazines have such a tough time of it is not that too few Americans are interested in reading them...

...But it is not a law of nature, only a law of our own witless contrivance...

...Irving Kristol, a regular contributor to this department, is a former editor at Commentary and the Reporter and the first American editor of Encounter...

...Another bugaboo is the cry of "special privilege" that is bound to go up...

...To call such forced combat "fair competition" is to indulge in a bad joke...

...Of all the distortions of our welfare state, this must surely be the most striking— and the most pernicious...

...In the same way, the paper merchants arc not responsible, nor are the distributors...

...Nevertheless, that is the figure that American society now does insist upon—not for any good reason, but simply because that is the figure the marketplace comes up with...

...The advertisements in Life allow it to be sold far below the cost of production...

...In the field of economics, it is if anything overblown, and already shows signs of elephantiasis...

...There is no reason why advertisers with a budget of over $100,000 should not be required to direct 5 per cent of everything over this figure to these magazines...

...what is now needed is legislation that would make society the patron, rather than relying exclusively on the good will of a few high-minded individuals...

...After all, who is going to decide whether any particular journal is worthy of being classified as "cultural" or "educational...

...There are no such economies in small-scale printing, which is actually (and considerably) more expensive than it was 50 years ago...

...When quality must beg to live, there is something amiss in the affairs of the state...

...If ever there was a case of uneven development that calls for correction, this is it...

...And, in truth...

...I would, however, certainly defend the principle behind them...

...Would we not be establishing a class of cultural commissars whose reign would mean the death of the spirit rather than its invigoration...

...All societies, even those that are proudly committed to "equality," are a network of special and discriminatory privileges...

...If we should ever decide that quality mattered, and that this democracy has obligations to the life of the mind, there are all sorts of things we can do to translate this decision into a cultural reality...

...it is tantamount to a sentence of death...

...Yet, in our industrial order, the little magazine must pay the printers on the same wage-scale that Life does...

...The inactions or negligence or shortcomings of great numbers assume the appearance of a law of nature...

...There is no reason why authors' fees for contributions to these journals should not be tax exempt...

...There is no reason why the little magazines, including all the academic journals, should not be exempt from postal charges of any kind...

...These latter need special privileges to become equal...

...The answer to such questions is, quite simply, that this process of decision-making is already at work, with no such calamitous consequences...

...He is currently senior editor of Basic Books...

...Of course, there is a sense in which I am demanding a special privilege for a minority...

...I should not like to have to defend all the privileges that are now conceded...

...In the realm of the spirit, it refuses to be born, and laissez-faire and a purely formal "equality" reign supreme...

...we pay no heed to intellectual growth and turn a blind eye to the cultural casualties of modern technology and of the affluent society...

...One such bugaboo is the notion that such indirect sponsorship of the arts and of learning by the state must lead to a neo-totalitarian form of control, and eventually to censorship, brainwashing and all the rest...

...ditto for subscription fees...

...We worry over every decimal point of economic growth, and expend due compassion on every man who is rendered unemployable by technological innovation...

...but I should say it nevertheless constituted a special privilege for the rich to pay the identical rates as the poor...

...for human beings are never equal in all respects...

...a little magazine must compete with Life for advertising, and naturally failing to get any, must therefore sell far above the cost of production...

...one can hardly expect them to decide that some of their members must make a financial sacrifice for the greater benefit of Culture...

...To begin with, the fact that their readership is not larger is itself only the endproduct of a longer chain of events—of the fact, for instance, that they are comparatively high-priced, that they have no money for promotion, and not enough money to be able to ask important writers to take the time to explore and write about important subjects...

...There is no reason—well, there is no reason why these and many other things are not done except that there are bugaboos abroad in the land that frighten us away from doing them...

...Nor do I see anything wrong with it...

...but no one can believe that is a truly healthy state of affairs...

...Besides, even now their circulations are not always so low by historical standards...

...In addition, a little magazine must pay, per copy, exactly the same mailing costs as Life, exactly the same promotion costs, exactly the same distribution costs, and it pays considerably more for its paper...

...The root of our confusion is that, while we are willing to use the powers of government to try to assure economic prosperity to everyone, we are loath to use even a shadow of these powers to assure moral or intellectual prosperity to anyone...

...The Internal Revenue Service even now decides which publications can be called "educational" as against "commercial," in order to determine whether their subsidies are "charitable" (and tax-exempt) contributions...

...The economies of large-scale printing allow Life to pay its printers a quite handsome wage...

...The printers are not responsible either...