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as compared with intellectuals in Europe. But then he begins to find
explanations that entirely subvert the force of this observation. Intel–
lectuals, he explains, are "cut off' because there are so many of them,
dispersed throughout the country; and they are certainly not under–
valued since, by the only standard that is truly objective, their remu–
neration is quite high. Besides, the situation may
be
temporary-by
which he apparently means that it can only get better, not worse. And
in any case, what do intellectuals expect: for one thing, it is natural
that they should be attacked since they have always represented a left–
wing minority; in addition, intellectuals have to reconcile themselves to
the historic truth that political democracy-and egalitarianism-must
be accompanied by cultural democracy, with the inevitable spread of
mass culture and debasement of taste. To be sure, Lipset is right in call–
ing attention to the ticklish and unsolved problem of the relation of
po–
litical to cultural egalitarianism, but the fact is that what Lipset,
him–
self, is really arguing for is an adaptation to a popular and democratic
culture.
A more rounded view is that of Edward Shils, a distinguished so–
ciologist and political observer, in a review of
Mass Culture/
("Day–
dreams and Nightmares,"
Sewanee Review,
Autumn 1957). Shils sticks
mainly to mass culture and largely ignores the whole question of middle
culture, but he does express certain opinions about art and society that
have wider implications. His main argument, made in the course of a
running attack on Dwight Macdonald, Ernst Van den Haag, Leo Lowen–
thal, Czeslaw Milosz and other critics of "mass culture," might
be
sum–
marized as follows: mass culture, however debased-though it is in fact
not as debased as its critics claim-is merely the result of the spread
of literacy and education and does not seriously interfere with the nor–
mal pursuit of artistic and intellectual life. The critics of mass culture,
says Shils, take a dark view of the situation because they have been in–
fected by three false and negative ideologies, Marxism, Romanticism,
and the aristocratic tradition. As Marxists or ex-Marxists, they connect
the cheapness of popular and commercial culture with the alienation of
modern man and the breakdown of bourgeois society; their romanticism
consists in an idealized image of the past ; and their aristocratic leanings
are responsible for the notion, traceable to figures like Ortega y Gasset
and T. S. Eliot, that culture belongs to an elite. Naturally, as Shils
swings his polemical axe, he catches his conglomerate opponents in many
inconsistencies and absurdities, though he never disproves the theories
he attributes to them. However, my concern here is not with the critics
2. Edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White. Free Press, $6.50.
