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IRVING HOWE
grasp of what their material signified and with an inclination to
transform their exposures into mere amusements for middlebrow
readers. The intellectuals, having virtually ceded this area of work,
largely confined themselves to criticizing the superficiality and
vul–
garity of such journalism, without recognizing that their own abdica–
tion was in part responsible for its influence.
Moods and theories of political resignation, and sometimes
assertions as to the inherent recalcitrance of social problems,
became frequent among the older or more sophisticated
intellectuals.
The welfare society throws up certain kinds of social troubles
which cannot be as precisely delineated-nor can solutions
be
as
.confidently proposed-as we felt it possible to do for the economic
problems of a few decades ago. These new social troubles seem
so endemic and pervasive, so much a matter of tone, atmosphere
and
malaise,
that an impression grows up that neither revolution nor
reform, and not even social engineering, can significantly affect them.
And some intellectuals proclaimed during the fifties what was
presumably never known before: that solutions to problems engender
further problems; there is no end to the chain. All of this reflected
a decrease of confidence in the powers of human reason, and a
growing doubt as to the uses of human will.
One of the main avenues for intellectual activity and self–
assertiveness-our common opposition to the products, the
very idea of "mass culture"-has recently been little taken.
Not that intellectuals became noticeably slacker in their critical
standards or less contemptuous of popular trash. The problem
is
rather that, almost unwittingly, they resigned themselves to the sup–
posedly intractable evils of "mass culture," just as some have learned
to resign themselves to the supposedly intractable evils of society in
general---or (in a response to which I am more sympathetic) they
became weary with the Sisyphean task of cultural hygiene. The once
numerous and, up to a point, fruitful discussions of "mass culture"
have by now almost disappeared from the serious journals. And in
truth the problems connected with "mass culture" have become
more slippery than they were, or seemed, a few decades ago. It
is
increasingly difficult, in that no-man's-land where the middlebrow
abuts upon the serious, to draw a line between the authentic and a
skillful simulation of the authentic. The theoretical analyses of "mass
