LONDON LETTER
265
criticism tliat American radical periodicals have been carrying since
the 1930's. Compare, for instance, a copy of the
New Left Review
of
t<r
day with a copy of
Dissent
of yesterday, and one
is
immediately struck
by the syntactical similarity. And not just syntactical either. The same
vocabulary bears the same ideas, or at any rate the same underlying
doctrine; in which the most obvious element is the total rejection of
mass culture as something contaminated beyond redemption by its com–
mercial origins, and alongside this there is a quasi-mystical reverence for
the folk and the
racine.
On the Right the parallelism between the new British self-interest
and its American counterpart goes deeper, and just for that reason is
rather harder to convey. Fundamentally it relates to the particular social
use or function to which the phenomenon is put. What, say, something
like
Time-Life
has been teaching us over the years is that the constant
exposure of fact can come to serve as a kind of social palliative, no matter
how brutal or disturbing the fact may be in itself: and it now seems
that there are editors, proprietors and publicists over here who have
learnt the lesson. Society may be degraded, poor, unloved, unilluminated,
but in the hands of professionals, of experts, of men who know their job,
it can be so presented that the citizens of the society will thereby be
reconciled to, rather than roused against, their lot. Schematically, we can
see this process as occurring in three distinct phases.
First of all, the reader is lulled into indifference by the mere bulk
of what is revealed to him. However shocking or disagreeable the facts
may
be
in themselves, a certain security lies always in number for the
simple reason that no one can be indignant against everything. Once
enough 'revelations' have been made, the reformer in us all, the reformer
in the most reforming of us all, becomes somehow poised or suspended
between them, like the proverbial ass. In the old days priests and tyrants
kept their peoples in submission by suppressing facts. Today their suc–
cessors have as good-<>r perhaps better because more respectable-a way
of achieving the same end: by publicising facts, provided only that there
are enough of them.
Secondly, the very quantity of fact that led the reader into indif–
ference leads him on from indifference to admiration. He begins to
think that there must
be
something to a society that can
be
so rich, so
versatile, so many-sided as to keep his curiosity endlessly supplied with
new and diverse revelations. Poverty, crime, corruption, may be unlovely
things -in themselves, but produced in such profusion they elicit from the
citizen of the self-conscious society the kind of awe that, for instance,
Marx felt before the wonders of capitalist society.
