from Culture for the Millions

I come not to bury mass culture but to praise it with criticism motivated by love—not rancor or the sullen almost surly stance characteristic of the humanist attitude toward the mass media. Shils has said that mass society is characterized by people making many new kinds of choices; that this has set loose the cognitive, appreciative, and moral potential of the population. He feels that curiosity, sensibility, and privacy are present in mass society and reminds us of the great differences in the cognitive, appreciative, and moral capacities within this society.

The function of the intellectual, I suggest, is not one that he chooses but rather one that society provides for him: in briefest terms, to clarify the many ambiguities that beset people who have not made these choices before, to help them develop their cognitive, appreciative, and moral potentials.

It seems to me that this whole discussion centers around the term “excellence.” When I try to come to any meaningful understanding of this word, I look for instances characteristic of the new kind of society. One of our problems is that we have some free-floating conformity. If we are to make any progress at all, we must be more precise in what we mean by these two words.

There is a continuum of excellence available in mass society; one man’s excellence is another’s mediocrity. The converse is also true. What we want is to get as many people as possible developing their own capacities along that continuum of excellence.

Furthermore excellence exists in a social context. It seem to me that the anti-business bias of most humanists makes it impossible for them to see what excellence exists in a mass society.

We ought to agree that the creation of material abundance is not a minor feat in human history. The problem in America is that there is a serious imbalance between our material productivity and our cultural productivity.

Much of the criticism of mass society reads like a coroner’s report. The humanist has been imprudent in the way he has invested his critical energies; humanist criticism is shamefully over-invested in literature. What most humanist critics mean when they contend that mass culture and excellence are incompatible is that the aesthetic forms that flourished in, say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe do not flourish in twentieth century America.

It is, of course, perfectly legitimate for serious artists in literature, painting, and music to be concerned with the effects of social change on their genres. But it is an insufficiently acknowledged virtue of our mass society that it is more permissive to a wider range of aesthetic forms than any other culture in history. Never have the elite arts had, in both relative and absolute numbers, larger and more sophisticated audiences; and it is my impression that the opportunities for both creation and appreciation are rapidly increasing.

I suggest that we start reinvesting our critical energies in the new art forms characteristic of mass society. To do this we have to examine the art forms that have come out of mass production and mass communication.

Let me take mass production, to begin with. I have rarely heard critics talking about Charles Eames, George Nelson, or Frieda Diamond. Yet Charles Eames is perhaps the most impressive of our industrial designers. His plastic innovations encompass forms as diverse as colorful building cards for children, chairs and a brilliant color movie popularizing information theory.

George Nelson is another important designer with an articulate rationale. The Information Center at Colonial Williamsburg is an excellent example of how a first-rate designer like Nelson not only humanizes the artifacts and milieu of an industrial society but also makes the past meaningful and accessible.

One reservation about the work of our important industrial designers is that it is so expensive. In recent years, however, this objection has become less significant as designers like Frieda Diamond have aimed for the five-and-dime market and have executed pieces of high quality and low cost for such firms as Libbey Glass. Paul McCobb’s furniture has also appeared in reasonably inexpensive lines. Alcoa’s Forecast collection—plastic speculations about everyday shapes of the future done by the best designers—promises the convergence of good design with a mass market.

The increasing visibility of these patterns of excellence is an earnest of a progressively more attractive physical environment. It is hard to imagine that a generation of school children reared on Eames classroom furniture will be complacent about the over-stuffy designs of the neighborhood furniture store.

Moving from design to mass architecture, Carl Koch in his Tech-built Homes has successfully used prefabrication and the modular principle to make good architecture available to low income people. He is an unsung hero of mass society. Another is Charles Goodman, who for some years has been designing fine homes for National Homes, Inc., of Lafayette, Indiana, the largest manufacturer of prefabs in this country. Their lowest price house is a striking structure within the reach of the least paid factory worker.

Urban planning is still another area in which mass production has its impact on the new society. I find very few people talking about Victor Gruen’s planned shopping centers in Detroit, Saarinen’s General Motors Tech Center, and the revival of downtown in cities like New Haven, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. At Northland and Eastland in Detroit, for example, thanks to Gruen, shoppers not only have a pleasant time about their business; but the green vistas with contemplative sculpture for adults and play sculpture for children present a strong argument for the indispensability of amenities. The General Motors Tech Center north of Detroit is a vision of what industrial America can be like to live and work in.

It is true that there are very few instances of this excellence, but why should the intellectual feels that its extension ought to be easy? I should think he would address himself to the arduous discipline of extending the beachheads of maturity rather than engage in cerebral whimpering about the lack of excellence.

It is a polite cliché in our circles to talk about advertising as intrinsically debasing to man. Yet recently at the New York Art Directors’ Club I saw forty-five minutes of television commercials that were extraordinary in their almost minor lyric art. Anchor Books were only a Jason Epstein away less than a decade ago. When the book clubs started in the 1920s, horrified shouts of conformity echoed through every bookshop in the land, but by now the intellectual has made his peace with this method of distribution in the Mid-Century Book Society. The Teenage Book Club of Scholastic Magazine sold over ten million paperback books in one academic year.

The essentially snobbish attitude that humanists have had toward the mass education system in America has contributed materially to its present crisis. Our educational system is part of our multipurpose mass communication system. It is long overdue for a series of imaginative innovations in instruction, such as the closed circuit TV system financed by the Fund for the Advancement of Education in Hagerstown, Maryland; or the fleet of 16 station wagons taking science teachers to small high schools in the Northwest financed by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Oregon. Who would have believed five years ago that Michigan State University, a school built around trips to the Rose Bowl, would found an elite campus at Oakland, Michigan to reassert the primacy of the academic?

Can one find a via media between the Pollyannas and Cassandras of mass culture? I should like to see some hard-headed idealism among my humanist colleagues where they use as much imagination trying to develop a new kind of society as they expend extolling what they think is a past one. The trouble with the coroners of mass culture is that they find a morbid fascination writing obituaries on a society just doffing its swaddling clothes. There may not be a satisfying surplus of excellence in contemporary America, but there is just enough around to confute those who don’t care enough to look for it, or who wouldn’t recognize the excellences of this new kind of society if they saw them.

The only significant agenda for the humanities in a mass society is to husband the few archetypes already achieved and settle down to the workaday regimen of seeing that these first faltering steps don’t go unnoticed and unimitated. In other words, instead of a doctrinaire Utopianism, I think we ought to have some kind of meliorism about mass society where we try to look for its characteristic excellence and do what we can to encourage its growth.

Reprinted from Culture for the Millions, Mass Media in Modern Society, Beacon Press; edited by Norman Jacobs, pp. 156-159