MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
.627
that-as in the case of the "responsibility" of the German (or
Russian) people for the horrors of Nazism (or of Soviet Com–
munism)-it is unjust and unrealistic to blame large social
groups for such catastrophes. Burke was right when he said you
cannot indict a people. Individuals are caught up in the work–
ings of a mechanism that forces them into its own pattern;
only heroes can resist, and while one can hope that everybody
will be a hero, one cannot demand it.
I see Masscult-and its recent offspring, Midcult-as a
reciprocating engine, and who is to say, once it has been set in
motion, whether the stroke or the counterstroke is responsible
for its continued action? The lords of
kitsch
sell culture to the
masses. It is a debased, trivial culture that avoids both the deep
realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple,
spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and
the pleasures too lively to induce what Mr. Seldes calls "the
mood of consent": a narcotized acceptance of Masscult-Midcult
and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling
and unpredictable (hence unsalable) joy, tragedy, wit, change,
originality and beauty of real life. The masses- and don't 'let's
forget that this term includes the well-educated fans of
The
.Old Man and
the
Sea, Our Town,
I.E.,
and
John Brown's
Body--who
have been debauched by several generations of this
sort of thing, in turn have come to demand such trivial and
comfortable cultural products. Which came first, the chicken or
the egg, the mass demand or its satisfaction (and further stimu–
lation), is a question as academic as it is unanswerable. The
engine is reciprocating and shows no
signs
of running down.
XX
"Our fundamental want today in the United States," Walt
·Whitman wrote in 1871, "is of a class and the clear idea of
a · class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher
in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope
with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of Amer-
