Mass Society Lecture by Buckley

Somewhat different lecture, going to address a deeply rooted concern of the first half of the twentieth century, that one doesn't hear much about anymore ---mass society...and its stepchild mass culture.

This week I've asked you to read a chapter from perhaps the central text of the mass culture thesis, the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses , published in 1930

Gasset makes a number of claims about modern society you may find uncongenial. He identifies a new psychological type of the common man who believes that life should be comfortable, knowledge is easy. This type has the presumption to believe that he is always right, that he has the right to impose his views on others. He has little respect for the higher culture cynicism and indifference. He is in fact a new boorish barbarian.. He is not only appearing in the fascist and communist movements but everywhere that consumer society and functional specialization takes command. Notions about mass society, and its primary figure mass man...were advanced to fit the new conditions on the consumer society, ones in which the problems of production and distribution had so to speak been solved. a condition of post-scarity. Mass society had appeared to take over from class society.

The problem of the second half of the nineteenth century had been the relations between the working and bourgeois classes. this was so self evident it was simply termed the "social question" Marx, for course had made that a central feature of his political analysis but you didn't have to be a Marxist to believe that the relations between capital and labor were at the very center of late 19th century politics. Capitalists believed that too. Our own Abram Hewitt, Cooper's son in law, made something of an intellectual career talking about that problem, suggesting, unlike Marx, that both labor and capital should make an effort to understand and accommodate each others social needs thereby avoiding the violence and perhaps the revolutionary activity Marx had predicted. Social Democratic such as Eduard Bernstein, suggested that the state had become the mediator of class conflict and that we were moving towards a version of evolutionary socialism in which a revolutionary transfer of power would be avoided. Anyway class had been the largest social fact of the 19th century, far outpacing issues of gender and race that now, together with class, form something like the holy trinity of social theory. The new theories of mass society were supposed to eclipse the older rhetoric of class. What might it mean to live in a society that was, for the first time in human history post scarcity, when the basic wants of most people could be fulfilled either by the labor market, or by the safety net that the state had erected certainly after WW1 covering pensions, workers insurance, universal schooling and ever greater quantities of medical care? "Postmodern."

The greatest immediate fear, one we don't seem to share nowadays was overproduction that would produce a glut of goods and lead to chronic economic depression. We have seen that part of the justification of European imperialism after 1890 was the creation of captive markets abroad to siphon off potential overproduction as well as providing lands for immigrants who could indeed overproduce in the motherland. One obvious solution might have been to programmatically increase consumption by raising domestic wages and perhaps by shortening working hours but this was viewed in 1900 at least as an both economically disastrous and morally problematic. Almost everyone held to the distinction between real needs..housing and food and artificial wants. If the working classes had too much cash that would spend it frivolously and viciously on booze, cigarettes, candy, sex and licentious reading material. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs undertook studies in the 1920s to show that the average workers would spend any extra money or time on the street rather than at home. Employers would lose the capacity to regulate working habits and society would lose its core of social control. Consumption indeed was still a dirty word, suggesting the using up of resources that would better be saved for later. Fires consumed, people should save. Luxury also still carried negative moral connotations. Luxury was the vice of wasteful expenditure on goods and services that encouraged moral degeneration. Events largely overtook the gloomy predictions of economists. While industrial production rose at a general rate of a little under one percent in America between 1899 and 1914 it jumped to about 4 percent per annum between 1919 and 1926, a rate which astonished contemporaries. Even Herbert Hoover believed that such gains should be rewarded by an eight hour day in the heavy industrial good sector and that shorter hours might raise both productivity and welfare. But oddly it was Henry Ford, who in his position as America's premier manufacturer, managed to channel the ideas of several radical economists who suggested that increased productivity, shorter working hours and increased consumption would bring about their own new form of worker discipline. Workers would work hard in the new rationalized factories to answer the new sets of needs that a consumer economy brought about. Even after they had secured shelter and food they would look to buying a car, an icebox or any other fantastic convenience that technology brought about. Free time and high wages brought about their own disciplinary potential. In 1926 Ford called for a universal five day limited hours working week...something only trade unionists had suggested before.

A new approach to consumer economics began to assume the plasticity of human needs. Hazel Kyrk's A Theory of Consumption (1923) and Paul Nystrom's Economic Principles of Consumption (1929) both began with the conflict and inequality between the producer and consumer. Kyrk and Nystrom were less certain about the natural limits of consumer needs. Their problem with orthodox marginal utility theory was its lack of a psychology that explained the non-rational and social character of consumer decisions. Kyrk insisted that `The process of consumption is organized according to certain standards of the appropriate and the necessary. Luxuries thus can become necessities in the evolution of that standard . But a major implication was that moral constraints could break down under affluence. Surplus removed limits on the natural quest for variety in consumption and gave full play to the desire for `distinction'. This process was accelerated by the presence of both social stratification and mobility: `The more democratic the social spirit, the less restricted and limited is the concept of what is or is not permissible for individuals of the different classes to do and to enjoy.' While science and education might encourage consumption of health-giving goods, Kyrk was clearly skeptical that growth meant progress up a hierarchy of needs: What safeguards are there that changes will be in the direction of progress, or that a dynamic, expanding standard is really the development of a higher rather than a more expensive standard? The overriding problem was, as John Dewey noted, how to turn a democracy whose main effect seemingly has been to multiply occasion for imitation' into a more rational society based on clear and limited needs. While economists worried about the relations of producer and consumers, a whole new raft of bankers, merchants and brokers thought of new ways to fund and ease those relations...to move as it were the whole world of purchasing goods out of the dreary world of cash into a new landscape of fantasy and desire.

I'll just mention one figure because he neatly fuses the world of Freudian psychology and the new consumer economy. The Father of public relations Edward Bernays; For Bernays selling a good or promoting an institution you were presenting a theatricalized image, and purchaser was not just buying an object but a piece of objectified desire. old hat to us but then a totally new way of looking at transactions As early as 1917, Bernays had learned skillfully how to make imaginative connections and convey powerful messages and images. In his mid-twenties, he worked for the United States Information Committee on Public Information under George Creel during World War I. This Committee "excelled" in its collaborative work and "opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind," It was during the war that the full "value of associative processes" in forming taste and determining choice dawned on Bernays.. ( W.W.I psychology had become part as it were of official state belief.) After the war Bernays joined a swelling number of men and women who were aggressively carving out new independent careers in public relations and who were shaping it to respond to the distributing needs of America's ever-expanding mass-market merchants. According to Bernays, the ordinary merchant no longer knew what the public wanted, who the "publics" were, or how to present the most "truthful" image of himself or of his product. A new void, Bernays believed, had opened between the people who manufactured and sold goods and the people who bought them. Something had to be done. Trained "intermediaries" like Bernays had to intervene to interpret reality for the public, to provide "truthful" information, and to connect the various publics back together again into a cohesive whole. Bernays conceived of public relations as a nonjudgmental technique, similar to psychoanalysis, that could be applied to any institution, person, or commodity needing to have its "image" (ego) bolstered in the public arena. He began by studying his client, although like most psychoanalysts he refused to "treat" pathologically "antisocial" clients (Bernays rejected Hitler, for example, as an impossible client to "treat. ") Next, he researched the "mental equipment" of his client's targeted public, hoping to find there the "stereotypes" that might be "tapped" and exploited by his client. Then Bernays interpreted the client's product. He created associations between the product and ideas, drawing on his knowledge of the -stereotypes." Finally, he "crystallized" these associations for the public through a coordinated. mobilization of largely visual media. In the spring of 1924 Bernays mounted a "saturation campaign" for "transparent velvet" intended to "titillate the spending emotions of 31 million women, all potential consumers." His purpose was not only to increase sales but to encourage the manufacturer, Sidney Blumenthal, to adopt new methods of style and fashion. Bernays persuaded Blumenthal to "change his approach to the public." He researched the market and found out that many women carried a "stereotype" of "style and beauty" around in their "heads." He set out to establish. connections. He "tied up" velvet with the "sex and glamour" and "sophistication" of New York and Paris. He brought several media together to project a coordinated cluster of images. He sent letters to theatrical agents and movie producers, offering dresses of transparent velvet to the female stars, who took them and, at Bernays's invitation, wore them in public and on stage and screen. At the same time, photographs of velvet gowns were published in fashion magazines and in the photograph sections of newspapers. Bernays and Blumenthal also "worked out a deal" -with several chains of movie theaters ,,in 24 key cities"-including the Paramount and Loew's theaters on Times Square-to present The Velvet Revue, a "tabloid musical comedy" as an "adjunct to movie bills." In this advertising "short," all the female performers were dressed in transparent velvet.' ° Bernays reduced "public relations" to two basic components-"continuous interpretation and dramatization by high-spotting," terms he doubtless picked up from the Broadway stage. "Continuous interpretation," he explained, is achieved by trying to control every approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives the desired impression, often without being conscious of it. High-spotting, on the other hand, vividly seizes the attention of the public and fixes it upon some detail or aspect that is typical of the entire enterprise. Bernays was the first well-known architect of what Daniel Boorstin has called "pseudo-events." A finagler of the truth, he staged happenings carrying packaged information for immediate public consumption. His promotions. which marshaled the forces of many different kinds of institutions and media, had the effect of driving out the more significant and "real" events of the times. His image-brokering business belonged to that new array of institutions-the professional consultancies and syndicates-that worked behind the scenes to speed up the flow of corporate made consumer goods.

What had this done to the general level of culture. It had not brought vitiation of working class life. this led to a democraticisation of leisure time, not taking to the barricades, or to the strike but to the movie halls, vaudeville, cheap newspapers, and by 1920 the radio, chain stores such as Woolworth's and department stores such as macy's. A wholly new landscape of desire was opening up before the average man, women and indeed, most disturbing of all the average child... but what was happening to middle class standards or more worryingly was everything descending into a kind of crass commercial sameness, a mass culture devoid of any real differentiation or innovation and worst of all through the 1930s subject to the manipulation of tyrants and their propaganda A surprising number linked mass culture to both capitalist manipulation and to totalitarianism.

A) atomization, fragmentation of experience...locked in ever more power acts of private consumption. Mass consumption to the rather negative interpretation of the working class experience in the mechanized factory. Others, like Erich Fromm or C. Wright Mills, are democrats or socialists argued from the precisely opposite point of view that mass societies dissolve those proximate units that cushion and envelop the individual and therefore make meaningful participation in public affairs possible.-

b) Technological reproduction and transmission is itself corrosive of authentic cultural experience? When the size of any audience increases the level of aesthetic taste deteriorates. There is an inbuilt tendency for vulgarization; It is an interesting claim because it allowed the right wing theorists of mass culture to claim that capitalist ownership of the means of cultural production was not the root cause of declining taste. The Soviet Union displayed equal if not greater debasement on the cultural front. The only barrier is for intellectuals to set standards...but how to do that now that information was begging dispensed beyond the school room. As late as 1935 Paul lazarfeld was worried about the political future of a nation in which the average citizen listened to three hours of radio a day. Certain writers in this tradition-we think of T. S. Eliot, or Ortega y Gasset-espouse an elitist approach to the problem and claim that mass society has come about through the decay of elites that, in previous ages, held special responsibilities for maintaining cultural standards. Bernard Rosenberg As Toynbee's Great West Wind blows all over the world, which quickly gets urbanized and industrialized, as the birth rate declines and the population soars, a certain sameness develops everywhere. Clement Greenberg can meaningfully speak of a universal mass culture (surely something new under the sun) which unites a resident of Johannesburg with his neighbors in San Juan, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris, Bogota, Sydney and New York. African aborigines, such as those recently described by Richard Wright, leap out of their primitive past-straight into the movie house where, it is feared, they may be mesmerized like the rest of us. First besieged with commodities, postmodern man himself becomes an interchangeable part in he whole cultural process. When he is momentarily freed from his own kitsch, the Soviet citizen seems to be as titillated as his American counterpart by Tin Pan Alley's products. In our time, the basis for an international sodality of man at his lowest level, as some would say, appears to have been formed."

But no matter what the political or ideological stances of these critics, no matter what traditions they draw upon, they were all united in deeply pessimistic diagnoses of the possibilities for creative achievement in mass society. By destroying articulated groupings, mass society, according to their indictments, had made it impossible for elites to maintain standards; it has eroded the public at large and communal audiences as well. The weakening of traditional bonds, the growth of rationalization, and the highly developed division of labor created societies in which individuals are only loosely bound to one another by increasingly attenuated and fragile ties. In mass society, the individual becomes a faceless cipher, and those who hold the levers of control increasingly resemble the totalitarian masters so frighteningly depicted in the anti-utopias of Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.

To all of them, industrialization and the mass society that grew in its wake have led to the destruction of common sensibilities once rooted in a shared community of culture. Gesellschaft, to use the German idiom of analysis, has destroyed Gemeinschaft, and the immense, objectified cultural process now stands, like an overpowering monster, over individuals deprived of communal protection, isolated, unable to find anchorage in tradition or community, overwhelmed by processes that they can no longer influence or control.

Why were the predictions wrong

A)The disgruntled critics of modern society focus their attention upon the loss of the individual's communal embeddedness and complain about conformity in mass society. The critics were too keen on seeing the common man as a passive recipient of mass culture, unable to make choices This focus leads them to bypass the major gains for societies-and for individuals as well that increasing differentiation has brought about; they do not acknowledge that there can now be greater freedom of choice for more individuals, that more individuals than ever before can pursue goals they consider desirable. Even if it is true that no individual can encompass any longer the great variety of intellectual tasks once performed by a Voltaire, for example, or a Newton or a Diderot, it is also true that in our age an incomparably greater proportion of the population has a choice of occupations that permit the development of mental capacities to the fullest. Far from leading to leveling, modern trends have in fact led to the proliferation of differentiated tasks. Furthermore, the very division of labor about which the critics complain has made possible a mobilization of resources and therefore an economic abundance that enable all men to attain comforts hitherto reserved for the elite few. Finally, by reducing work loads, technical civilization has increased in revolutionary ways the leisure time available to all. The bulk of mankind in highly developed societies is no longer forced to spend its life in backbreaking and uncongenial labor; the hours devoted to work have been drastically reduced, and the increasing range of career choices available enables people to work in areas truly in tune with their personal desires. All such change is laying the groundwork for a future flowering of cultural life, that is, for a wide expansion of the horizon of cultural creation. Dire predictions about conformity and uniformity to the contrary, we have witnessed in recent years a qualitative upgrading, as well as a wider spread, of cultural offerings. What has past, since the 1960s, is that the intellectual classes no longer have a firm command over where high culture ends and popular culture begins

B) In answer to the atomizers the assertion that ours is an "atomized" society rests on foundations as shaky as those of the conformity thesis. "It is asserted," writes Daniel Bell, "that the United States is an atomized' society composed of lonely, isolated individuals. One forgets the truism ... that Americans are a nation of joiners. In no country in the world, probably, is there such a high degree of voluntary communal activity, expressed sometimes in absurd rituals, yet often providing real satisfactions for real needs Men are no longer enveloped by restricting communal institutions that claim all their loyalties in return for protection and security, but instead a huge number of fragmented and differentiated groupings now allow the individual to pursue his aims, make his choices, and allocate his loyalties and allegiances. There may be strains and conflicts in such pluralistic societies; individual life may be more complicated now than when men pursued their careers within the predictable routines prescribed by uniform communal associations. But the varieties of choices, of pathways, of challenges in associational and pluralistic society allow men to live more variegated and more stimulating lives.

C) A third possibility is that we are so far into it we fail to see it. Like the proverbial fish we cannot really feel or see the water in which we swim. Rather than the problem disappearing, we have disappeared into the problem. How many of us really question the cult of the celebrity in which the activities of people of no particular talent are paraded before us with a seriousness previously reserved for saints? How many people notice that a regular feature of Monday mornings news is to examine the gross receipt of that weekends movie releases without any mention of their merit or content. In Weber's "cage of the future," in the disenchanted ice age of managerially dominated mass societies those who practice autonomy, creativity, or substantial rationality perhaps will be regarded as potential disturbers of peace of mind. Much like hunchbacks today, surviving intellectuals would meet a mixture of pity and awe on the part of the settled denizens of the world. Such a society would truly resemble the nightmare that Irving Howe predicted in 1947 as one possibility for the development of the modern world: "We are moving toward a quiet desert of moderation where men will forget the passion of moral and spiritual restlessness that has characterized Western society ... The human creature, no longer a Quixote or a Faust, will become a docile attendant to an automated civilization . . . The ,aura of the human' will be replaced by the nihilism of satiety. . High culture as we understand it will become increasingly problematic and perhaps reach some point of obsolescence."