Posted on 05/21/2002 11:06:53 AM PDT by aconservaguy
Rise and decline of mass culture? Stanley Rothman Society, July-August 1993 v30 n5 p29(7)
Stanley Rothman is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Government at Smith College and Director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change. He is author of Roots of Radicalism; The Media Elite; The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy; Watching America; and The Mass Media in Liberal Democratic Societies.
Brief Summary: American mass culture has changed from one that rewards restraint and Protestant work ethics to one that encourages the pursuit of power and control. The disorder caused by the many conflicting demands of immigrants, feminists and other minorities has broken down cultural values.
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During the 1950s and early 1960s social scientists and social critics engaged in a vigorous debate regarding changes supposedly taking place in American society. To at least some social critics traditional cultural and social structures were being replaced by a mass society and a mass culture in a radical break with the past.
Until fairly recently, they argued, Americans had been embedded in kinship networks, neighborhoods, religious institutions, and the workplace which were seriously weakened by new modes of mass communications and the pressures of industrial capitalism. Americans were becoming rootless; traditional ties were being undermined. The mass public lacked a ground on which to stand, and was, so some feared, becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by demagogues. (Mass culture had played a role in the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany.) The other side of the coin was the conformity produced by a media-dominated mass culture. Deprived of alternate moorings and subject to the same stimuli produced by the wasteland of television and motion pictures, American diversity was being replaced by a bland conformity. Liberals and radicals, distressed by the cold war and the "blandness" of the Eisenhower decade, saw little or no hope of change. As late as the early Kennedy years, liberal and radical cultural critics maintained that the masses were being brainwashed by a conformist repressive society.
Mass culture was not a central focus of sociological or cultural debate in the period between the late 1960s and the 1990s. Other problems, the Vietnam War, racial conflict, feminism, cultural diversity, and so on seemed of far greater moment. In addition, mass culture theorists had been proven wrong. The student and civil rights movements and the rise of feminism made it clear that, whatever its problems or evils, America was not simply a "conformist" mass society.
The issues raised in the 1960s have recently reemerged with a new twist. The development of cable television and video cassettes as well as other technical advances presage even greater diversity in mass communication and the threat of further fragmentation in a society now seen as unraveling. The end of mass society, it is argued, will not witness the re-emergence of viable communities but rather, if one can conceive of this, a series of mass publics marching to their own drummers and increasingly isolated from each other.
This analysis may ring true. However, some pieces are missing. For example, just how did this mass conformist society, described by Kenneth Kenniston (among others) in the 1960s, begin to fragment, when it should not have? This and other questions lack adequate answers, because of the biases of those who coined the term mass culture and applied the analysis in the first place. They were partly and brilliantly right, but they were also wrong. They underestimated their own role in the changes in American society over the past thirty years. More importantly, they failed to recognize that the emergent mass society was an American mass society and that it was at least in part a natural function of peculiarly American variables. In short, the concept itself must be placed within a broader framework.
Culture Shift The classic American ideology was built on the Calvinist ethos which stressed both economic individualism and personal self-control. In A Model of Christian Charity, John Winthrop describes the activities of the "city set upon a hill":
We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body. Liberty, success, wealth, and the other virtues of this world, were part of an explicitly religious metaphorical system. Natural law was that moral liberty "in reference to the covenant between God and man." The pursuit of economic well being always took place within the framework of a set of communal assumptions describing the moral obligations of each member of the community and calling for philanthropic assistance to the unfortunate.
American Calvinism provided the larger cultural context in which the personal virtues associated with capitalism, like philanthropy but also certain psychological restraints on social behavior, could flourish. Although transmuted considerably since the days of John Winthrop, the traditional American ethos still demands a moral and spiritual life that emphasizes measure and achievement.
Daniel Bell has pointed out that the religious values which underlay American culture began to erode during the late nineteenth century, partly as the result of rationalizing tendencies inherent in liberal capitalism itself. As they decayed, religious justifications for the goals and limitations imposed by the culture were replaced by a belief in material progress as an end in itself. Hard work and self-restraint in a liberal capitalist system would lead to secular progress and ever better tomorrows for all.
By the 1940s Leo Lowenthal could report that in America the "idols of production" were being replaced by the "idols of consumption." Highly visible and successful writers such as Sinclair Lewis, in Babbitt, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in 7he Great Gatsby, had leveled powerful critiques on the old ideology. One no longer lived to work; and if affluence itself was now the goal then life must eventually come to revolve around consuming things. And, of course, it did, especially after the Second World War. By the 1960s consuming things had begun to lose meaning. For the children of the affluent it no longer provided a frame-work for a meaningful life, and American culture underwent yet another shift.
The movement from small town America to the city and the emergence of the metropolis contributed to a shift in values. In small towns people had lived in close proximity to each other. There was, if not private, at least public obeisance to a modified Calvinist morality that thus enforced that morality to some extent. Much the same pattern obtained in the ethnic enclaves of large cities. The morality enforced may have been oppressive, parochial, and exclusionary in many ways, but in comparative and historical terms it sustained the communities' sense of themselves.
As America became a socially and geographically mobile metropolitan society and ethnic enclaves in the cities crumbled under the impact of social change, traditional attitudes and traditional, highly personal community controls also eroded. By the late 1950s the idols of consumption had been enthroned for large segments of the population. This in turn furthered the transformation of the Calvinist ethos. Bourgeois, traditional, "square" values and attitudes were attacked in the writing of the "Beats" of the 1950s.
Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road is one example. But there were many others, as the writings of Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow attest. The tattered remnants of the traditional American cultural ethos were clearly challenged by what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture," and Daniel Bell termed the "culture of modernism."
Expressive Individualism What are the main components of this new culture? In its current form, three distinct strands emerge. The first, drawn from the movement of the 1920s is "expressive individualism" to borrow a phrase from Robert Bellah. The second derives from the "collectivist liberalism" of the post-depression era. The third, "alienation" from both the culture and the social system, developed out of the socio-political eruptions of the 1960s, which coalesced in the ideology of the New Left. However, only the first of these ideological strands is of concern here.
Many social theorists, among them Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Alvin Gouldner, and the German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, take the view that the cultural "contradictions" of capitalism are themselves the cause of the rise of the adversary culture. These theories accord the cultural sphere a certain neo-Hegelian autonomy and closure of its own. Change in the cultural sphere is endogenous to the cultural system. Changes in cultural ideas possess immanence and autonomy because they develop from the internal logic of a cultural tradition. New ideas and forms derive from a kind of dialogue with, or rebellion against, previous ideas and forms. The disjunction between the culture of the Puritan ethic and the success of capitalism brought about the decay of the traditional culture and erosion of its legitimacy.
Further, as Bell states, changes in the culture as a whole, particularly the emergence of new lifestyles, are made possible not only by changes in social sensibility, but by shifts in social structure. In American society, one can see this most readily in the development of new buying habits in a high consumption economy and the resultant erosion of the Protestant ethic and the Puritan temper, the codes that had sustained the traditional American bourgeois value system. As always affluence is the enemy of self-discipline.
Affluence is both the product and source of transformation in American culture. The economy of capitalism produces the affluence, the technology, the corporate structure, and the consumer lifestyle that undercut the very system of norms and values that underpin capitalism. We are living, claims Irving Kristol, on the cultural capital of an earlier period. Cultural innovations such as expressive individualism-emerge to fill the void left by the underlying disjunctions between the Protestant ethic and the economic order. New cultural systems must inevitably arise because the economic order has undercut its own justifications.
The rise of "expressive individualism" has provided a way for new elites to codify and promulgate their adversarial relationship to the larger society, and the relationship between high culture and the American social order. The origins of expressive individualism are to be found in the 1920s. As a cultural system, it is characterized by a shift in the meaning of the individual from a being to a self--a shift from restraint of impulse to its free expression, and the rejection of the traditional for the new.
The culture of expressive individualism is centered around the exploration of experience and sensation--unfettered, impulsive, and non-rational. In the arts, humanities, and letters, it rejects traditional standards in favor of the avant-garde. It emphasizes the search for new and, what it claims are, superior modes of artistic and literary representation. The shifts are interrelated. In Catholic, and even traditional Calvinist, thought all human beings possess a common nature relating to their humanity, and their place in the cosmos. Their humanity and their place tie them to, even as they separate them from, other species. However, as unique individuals realizing themselves through a set of freely chosen meaningful experiences, men and women lack a fixed nature which defines them. They are merely the creations of themselves and/or the societies of which they are a part. Thus all aspects of human experience come up for review and critique does not focus merely on the traditional radical concerns of economic and political structure.
The creation of the modern American self stands in relation to what preceded it in Calvinist, and then liberal, ideology. By the late 1950s this ideology of self had become qualitatively so different from the earlier forms that many began to use it to develop a radical critique of the dominant culture. In the 1960s an opportunity to integrate the previously amorphous ideological critique emerged, and it is no accident, to use a standard Marxist phrase, that the leading cadres of the New Left came at first primarily from the most "liberated," self-realizing segment of what is the professional middle classes.
The shift in cultural values was accompanied and encouraged by the growth of a stratum of service personnel, themselves products of economic and social as well as ideological developments in American society. Many of these people were highly educated professionals working either in the public sector, or, if in the private sector, in areas associated with the production and transmission of knowledge. The growth in size of this stratum is indicated in data provided by Daniel Bell. In 1889/90, 382 doctorates were granted in the United States. The total number of such degree recipients as of 1967 was close to 400,000. In 1940 only 5 million Americans had completed four or more years of college. By the mid- 1960s, the figure had jumped to some 12 million. These are quantum jumps even when allowance is made for the increase in population.
These "Metro Americans," as Eric Goldman called them, tended to be rather skeptical of traditional values, of the economics of liberal capitalism and of American foreign policy. They constituted the readership for new, sophisticated critical journals such as The New York Review of Books and, on another level, of such magazines as Playboy, whose combination of liberal politics and promotion of sexual "liberation" strongly appealed to college-educated professionals.
Intellectuals, broadly defined, and more specifically academics were an important segment of the new stratum. By the mid- 1960s, American universities had a combined faculty of half a million teachers. In addition, the graduates of these universities were providing audiences for their books and essays. Most studies indicate that, while the academic profession has been somewhat more liberal than the population as a whole since the turn of the century, the gap grew markedly in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, in 1944, college faculties were only three percent more Democratic than the general public; in 1952 they voted 12 percent more Democratic, and in 1972 they gave George McGovern 18 percent more votes than did the general public.
But election statistics tell only part of the story. Academics, especially those in the social sciences, were gradually replacing the vaguely Protestant milieu at elite universities with a particular kind of secular humanism. They tended to be fairly critical of traditional American institutions, emphasizing the inequalities which, they argued, were concealed by national rhetoric and the negative effects of an impersonal capitalist society whose heritage still emphasized authoritarian repressiveness.
It was from the academic community that the children of traditional elites as well as those of the newer elites learned of the advantages of a democratic, egalitarian society, characterized by the free (and thus healthy) expression of emotion. They also learned that the society itself was responsible for social problems which once had been blamed on individuals, and that the society should take the responsibility for solving these problems. The lessons were reinforced by large numbers of books and articles demonstrating these and other propositions. They also learned from intellectuals and professionals (including social workers and psychologists) that democratic families and democratic child rearing practices were superior to the rigid, authoritarian rule of a patriarchal father.
If the universities had any influence on the ideas and behavior of the middle class, it was magnified by the postwar revolution in communications and transportation. Key elements of change included the widespread availability of automobiles, jet aircraft, and television. The last, especially, meant that what happened in New York and a few other urban centers became the common property of the nation within a relatively short time. In earlier time, the "bohemianism" of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles had little impact on small towns or even the ethnic enclaves of large cities. Now, new lifestyles swept across the nation almost overnight. In the 1950s and 1960s, America developed a network of national news media. Those who staffed the television networks and the national print media--Time magazine and The New York Times, for example--were increasingly college-educated liberal cosmopolitans who gradually came to share the views of liberal intellectuals, at least in part because they lived in New York or Washington. By the late 1950s, they were becoming a powerful force. They provided intellectuals with a larger audience, and, thus helped extend the intellectual community's influence to ever broader audiences.
Television probably played a more important role in these shifts than any other single factor both because of the nature of television as a medium of communication and of the values of those elites who controlled the production of news and entertainment. During the 1960s and 1970s the influence of television grew exponentially. Limited at one time by large-scale equipment needs, technological change permitted television to cover the whole world on the fly, and to transmit images almost instantaneously from and to all parts of the globe.
As television became more ubiquitous, its credibility grew. No one could deny the power of its portrayals of reality when it was showing events "as they happened." In addition, television now could call upon experts to add to its credibility. Indeed, television created experts by defining them as such on news and talk shows. Television was used by various groups, including terrorist groups, to gain national and worldwide attention, and hence influence. Again and again, the news departments of the major networks set agendas by defining issues as important. Television even established the parameters within which issues would be discussed.
News anchormen became superstars, as well known as the president himself, and often more trusted. It is said, for example, that Lyndon Johnson became convinced that the war in Vietnam was lost when Walter Cronkite turned against it. On a February 27, 1968 special, Cronkite concluded that Vietnam was at best a stalemate.
According to Ron Powers, Johnson turned to an aid after viewing the broadcast and told him that if he had lost Cronkite's support, he had lost the nation. The pattern has continued since Cronkite's time, though no one has quite achieved his credibility. Nevertheless anchormen and -women are powerful influences in America and network executives are aware of it. They command huge salaries and are more or less their own masters. Within broad limits they can say whatever they want.
What television did was to nationalize and standardize communication as never before. New York, Los Angeles, and Washington styles and modes now became national styles and modes. And if The New York Times was read by elites in New York and Washington as well as those who produced the news for the television networks, then the issues that were considered important, and the approach that was taken to present them, would become national currency.
Cable television, which dramatically increased the number of broadcast channels available, was expected to produce a return to localism as well as encourage special interest broadcasting. Certainly, the development of satellite and other technologies encouraged the independence of local stations from the networks to some extent in news broadcasting. Other new technologies, including fiber optics, which permit an expansion of available telephone lines, may encourage decentralization in information processing and distribution. So far, however, national patterns and influences continue to predominate.
This is true, in part at least, because cable television has also tended to become concentrated in a few hands. It is also true, one suspects, because the nationalization of television communication has gone too far to be easily reversed. By the middle 1960s, most Americans owned television sets and adults and children were watching television programs three or more hours a day. Television had become an integral part of American life, a genuine national news and image source. That continues to be true in the 1990s.
Television and Sensibility The effects of television as an instrument of communication are difficult to separate from the fact that it is a commercial enterprise. Still one need not accept McCluhan's hyperbole to recognize television's profound influence on American life. By its very nature television adds new dimensions to the communication of information, and radically changes the rules of the game. The consequences for certain aspects of American life are clear. Far more than newspapers, radio, or motion pictures, television creates a sense that what is seen on the screen is true and teal. Stories, documentaries, even drama take on a reality with which other media cannot compete. The written word and even the spoken word tend to remain abstract to most readers and listeners, but moving pictures seen in the privacy of one's home are extremely compelling. Even if one knows that footage may have been spliced together and that it conceivably may present a distorted perspective of events being portrayed, it is hard to escape the perception that one is viewing reality.
Television has broken down class and regional boundaries to a far greater extent than have other media. Books and newspapers are segregated by area and readership. Only the well-educated can read serious books, and the style of The New York Times only appeals to those with a certain level of education and affluence. Thus, to some extent, newspapers and books encourage the segregation of knowledge. Radio began to break down that segregation. Television goes much further. There are programs which cater to more elite audiences and are watched only by them, but insofar as television seeks the lowest common denominator and finds it, Americans as a group are introduced to the same themes in the same way. Docudramas, of which the series Roots is a prime example, as well as the six o'clock news are watched by millions of Americans of all educational and social backgrounds. Everybody sees the same pictures and receives the same information.
The process begins early in childhood. As Joshua Meyrowitz has pointed out, cultures in which knowledge is dependent on the ability to read require substantial preparation before one can penetrate many of the secrets of adult life. Television has broken that barrier. Children are exposed to television programs that tell them about off-stage behavior of parents and introduce them to themes which in the past they may not have encountered until much later in life. Young children watch the news almost every day along with their parents. Most so-called family programs deal with concerns with which children would not have been familiar even twenty-five years ago, and millions of children are still awake at hours when more "mature" programs are shown. It is impossible to understand the revolution in American values and attitudes that has occurred during the last three decades without taking into account television's influence in breaking down of old barriers and weakening of old ties. For the first time, metropolitan America was becoming all of America. In the 1920s the then new therapeutic ethic of self-realization permeated only a small section of America's metropolitan upper middle class.
By the 1970s, as the authors of Habits of the Heart point out, it had spread far more widely. The events of the 1960s, including the rapid loss of faith in American institutions and the legitimation of lifestyles once considered deviant could not have occurred in a pre-television age. The Reagan administration conceivably slowed change a little; it clearly did not reverse the direction of change not did it stop it.
America has become, as Richard Merelman points out in Making Something of Ourselves, a "loose bounded culture." The primordial ties to family, locality, church, and what is considered appropriate behavior have eroded. Americans have lost their sense of place. They are not alone in this, of course. Their experience is increasingly shared by Europeans, Japanese and, perhaps, even Russians. Certainly mass television is not the only factor at work. The revolution is, nevertheless, teal and the epoch we live in is quite new.
Working-class parochials may continue to identify with those they know and with whom they work and live; but public reality is now such that we also know and develop ersatz intimate and intense relationships with public figures of all kinds, from anchormen to rock performers to politicians. The liberal cosmopolitanism of journalists is reflected in the manner in which they describe the world, with significant consequences for the larger culture. The same is true of television drama. To be sure television entertainment does seek the lowest common denominator and stresses sensationalism in order to sell. However, that factor alone cannot explain the changes that have taken place in the stories told on television. Television's America once looked like Los Angeles' Orange County writ large-Waspish, businesslike, religious, patriotic, and middle-American. Today it resembles more the "liberated" upper-middle-class world of San Francisco's Marin County--trendy, self-expressive, culturally diverse, and cosmopolitan. Pace neo- Marxist arguments, this limited sector of American society has accelerated the acceptance of a liberal cosmopolitan perspective by other segments of the population.
In a survey of television's creative elite my colleagues and I found that they reported attitudes and values consistent with our definition of a liberal cosmopolitan ideology. Also, two out of three believed that TV entertainment should "play a major role in promoting social reform." This is perhaps the single most striking finding in our survey. According to television's creators, they are not in it just for the money. They also seek to move their audience toward their own vision of the good society.
Affluence and Rationality American social life, then, is in a state of ferment. Affluence and rationality have eroded the unconscious restraints that underlie the rationality of action in liberal capitalist societies. Rationality undermines the religious foundations of that restraint while affluence undermines the need to discipline one's behavior in the marketplace. Thus rational self-interest, restrained by unconscious assumptions about the legitimate parameters of behavior, is replaced by the pursuit of any sensation or experience that gives satisfaction from sado-masochism to wealth or power.
Metro Americans, whose children formed the leading cadres of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were the first to adopt these new lifestyles which gradually spread to other segments of the population especially to other elites. The consequences for personality structure are not difficult to discern. They fit in with the requirements of the new ideologies. Power replaces achievement as an ideal goal, even as the number of narcissistic personality types increases, and with it heightened mutual suspiciousness.
There is good reason to believe that the patterns of ego control, so laboriously constructed in Europe and the United States, are breaking down even as are conventional superego restraints. The result is an erosion of the capacity to sublimate both aggressive and erotic drives in the service of civilization, and the replacement of bourgeois commitments to achievement and constancy by increased defensive projection, "acting out" and drives for power and control. There is at least some evidence that the number of people of this type is on the increase in the United States.
The question is what is there now in place of the Protestant, bourgeois ideology that once characterized so much more of American society, and appears to have been associated with certain personality types. The evidence all around suggests that many of those in the middle and upper middle classes, having lost the internal gyroscope (and metaphors) that gave the lives of previous generations structure and meaning, feel tom between the desire for power and gratification and the fear of losing control. They lurch between longings for complete autonomy, that is, the destruction of an already weakened ego and superego, and the wish to lose themselves in something that will give their lives order--hence the proliferation of cults, from New Age channeling to Scientology, that have such great appeal among these social strata in our era. I am not persuaded that the change bodes well for the future of liberal capitalism or, for that matter, a liberal democratic order in the United States.
Nor is it only the middle class that is affected today. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the new civic virtue has played at least some role in undermining of the capacity for self-restraint of what has come to be called the "underclass." Indeed the cultural ideals of the underclass are increasingly becoming those of the middle class. This too must be partially, but only partially, laid at the door of the purveyors of ideas. They are clearly winning the battle to replace traditional bourgeois culture with the culture of Manhattan and Los Angeles, and express little but contempt for traditional values. It is no longer considered appropriate, for example, to encourage new waves of immigrants to adopt the American way, nor can such immigrants, or just about anyone else except straight white males, be held responsible for their behavior. All these others are victims of a patriarchal, bourgeois, homophobic, Eurocentric society and they are entitled to live out their impulses and to receive society's support if they injure themselves in so doing.
These are, then, both the best and the worst of times. The revolution of the past thirty years has transformed America into a more cosmopolitan and more tolerant society. On the other hand, the fragmenting of America into corporate pseudo-communities, each of which demands public support to meet its perceived needs, bodes ill for the future. Most of these fragments--feminists, homosexuals, and so on--do not constitute communities. This is also true of African Americans and large segments of the new Latino migration. In a very short time the migrants become mere fragments of the mass society of which they are part.
And the culture now supports, or at least fails to inhibit, violence in American society. In short, American society seems to have entered a volatile period of decay and disorder which will continue until a cultural renewal occurs, or until a new set of cultural understandings, which support the maintenance of a coherent social order, is institutionalized.
Yeah, started in '92.
I'll reserve judgement until I hear of the first suicide bombing on US soil where multitudes of Americans are murdered.....then I'll watch the reaction, and decide. Me thinks that murderous type of action MAY cause a "cultural renewal".....
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