MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
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this direction because (a) he himself also "wants" it-never
underestimate the ignorance and vulgarity of publishers,
movie producers, network executives and other architects of
Masscult-and (b) the technology of producing mass "enter–
tainment" (again, the quotes are advised) imposes a simplistic,
repetitious pattern so that it is easier to say the public wants this
than to say the truth which is that the public gets this and so
wants it. The March Hare explained to Alice that "I like what
I get" is not the same thing as "I get what I like," but March
Hares have never been welcome on Madison Avenue.
For some reason, objections to the giving-the-public-what–
it-wants line are often attacked as undemocratic and snobbish.
Yet it is precisely because I do believe in the potentialities of
ordinary people that I criticise Masscult. For the masses are not
people, they are not The Man
in
the Street or The Average Man,
they are not even that figment of liberal condescension, The
Common Man. The masses are, rather, man as non-man,
that
is
man in a special relationship to other men that makes it impos–
sible for him to function as man (one of the human functions
being the creation and enjoyment of works of
art).
"Mass
man," as I use the term, is a theoretical construction, an extreme
toward which we are being pushed but which we shall never
reach. For to become wholly a mass man would mean to have
no private life, no personal desires, hobbies, aspirations, or aver–
sions that are not shared by everybody else. One's behavior
would be entirely predictable, like a piece of coal, and the
sociologists could at last make up their tables confidently. It is
still some time to 1984 but it looks unlikely that Orwell's anti–
Utopia will have materialized by then, or that it will ever
materialize. Nazism and Soviet Communism, however, show us
how far things can go in politics, as Masscult does in art. And
let us not be too smug in this American temperate zone, un–
ravaged by war and ideology. "It seems to me that nearly the
whole Anglo-Saxon race, especially of course in America, have
lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects
