S92
PARTISAN REVIEW
too catastrophic terms. Yet the rise of what Gilbert Seldes has called
the Great Audience is one of the awful facts of our modem life.
As
Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, put it: "A mass medium must
concern itself with the common denominator of mass interest . . .
[ItJ can only achieve its great audience ... by giving the majority
of people what they want." The presupposition of the mass media is
that Americans constitute a uniform audience. The more the mass
media act on this presupposition, the more they tend to manufacture
this uniform audience and thus strike at the roots of democracy.
The only answer to mass culture, of course, lies in the affirma–
tion of America, not as a uniform society, but
a~
a various and
pluralistic society, made up of many groups with diverse interests.
The immediate problem is to conserve cultural pluralism in face of
the threat of the mass media. In many
c~es,
this becomes a tech–
nical problem- the problem of developing markets for cultural
'minorities'; the problem of devising means by which media geared
to mass consumption can shift over to the satisfaction of more spe–
cialized interests; the problem of getting at the economics of book
and magazine publishing so that a 10,000-copy sale or a 20,000
circulation is not essential for survival. One would hope (rather
feebly) that the foundations might try to tackle these problems; but
they are more likely to press on with their policy of forcing the col–
lective approach into the remotest comers of our intellectual life.
The task of maintaining and enlarging our cultural pluralism
is not perhaps hopeless. Still, the situation can be bettered only if a
number of people make a deliberate and sustained attempt to better
it. There can be no final solution, of course; and who would want
one? A moderate degree of 'alienation'
is
indispensable to the artist
and writer.
Above all, the survival of cultural pluralism depends on the
preservation of an atmosphere congenial to free inquiry. We can
maintain the American 'tradition of critical non-conformism'; but
only if we determine to do so. The trouble is that intellectuals today
are not united
in
that determination. Some have forgotten the wisdom
of Tocqueville when a century ago he identified the antidote to the
new power which democratic equality bestowed upon mass opinion.
"Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one evil,"
he wrote, "and political freedom as a second. When they are obliged
