POST-MODERN FICTION
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amiability and meanness. I would venture the guess that a novelist
unaware of the changes in our experience to which the theory of
mass society points, is a novelist unable to deal successfully with re–
cent American life; while one who focussed only upon those changes
would be unable to give his work an adequate sense of historical
depth.
This bare description of the mass society can be extended by
noting a few traits or symptoms :
1) Social classes continue to exist, and the society cannot be under–
stood without reference to them; yet the visible tokens of class
are less obvious than in earlier decades and the correlations be–
tween class status and personal condition, assumed both by the
older sociologists and the older novelists, become elusive and prob–
lematic-which is not, however, to say that such correlations no
longer exist.
2) Traditional centers of authority, like the family, tend to lose some
of their binding-power upon human beings; vast numbers of people
now float through life with a burden of freedom they can neither
sustain nor legitimately abandon to social or religious groups.
3) Traditional ceremonies that have previously marked moments of
crisis and transition in human life, thereby helping men to accept
such moments, are now either neglected or debased into mere oc–
casions for public display.
4) Passivity becomes a widespread social attitude: the feeling that life
is a drift over which one has little control and that even when
men do have shared autonomous opinions they cannot act them
out in common.
S)
As perhaps never before, opinion is manufactured systematically
and "scientifically."
6) Opinion tends to flow unilaterally, from the top down, in measured
quantities: it becomes a market commodity.
7) Disagreement, controversy, polemic are felt to be in bad taste;
issues are "ironed out" or "smoothed away"; reflection upon the
nature of society is replaced by observation of its mechanics.
8) The era of "causes," good or bad, comes to an end; strong beliefs
seem anachronistic; and as a result, agnostics have even been
known to feel a certain nostalgia for the rigors of belief.
9) Direct and first-hand experience seems to evade human beings,
though the quantity of busy-ness keeps increasing and the number
of events multiplies with bewildering speed_
