INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
521
I want to try to explain what has changed between then and now.
Then, the
Partisan Review
intellectuals were very concerned about mass
society. A number of them addressed its impact, and Irving Howe asked
whether "either democracy or genuine culture [had] been fully tried or
made sufficiently available? To look down one's nose at the delights of
the masses is an absurd snobbism; to find in mass culture a vigor and
liveliness no longer present in serious literature is demoralization and
betrayal. "
To a future generation of academic radicals, the study of mass culture
would be neither demoralization nor betrayal. But the
Partisan Review
intellectuals saw mass society as problematic, as standardization, organi–
zation, routinization, conspicuous consumption, and social conformity,
with passive citizens mesmerized by the media and youths so "other–
directed" they are ready to believe anything they are told or taught. That
was then; now, however, a new discipline called "Cultural Studies" has
challenged the critique of mass society. Today we are told that there is no
distinction between "high" and "low" culture, that Seinfeld is as worthy
as Shakespeare, that Madonna arouses more response than Mozart, and
that the replications of hip-hop are as significant as the syncopations of
Bartok. Presently films, television programs, popular entertainment, and
the routines of daily life are scrutinized for evidence of resistance to
American values, what is termed "oppositional" or "transgressive."
A few years back a young scholar wrote a book titled
Cheap Enter–
tainments.
Students in a seminar told me that the author argues that
Partisan Review
intellectuals and the Old Left could not find socialism
in America because they were looking for it in factories and labor
unions, rather than in working-class taverns; there one finds the spirit
of "solidarity" as everyone buys the house a round of drinks. I then
asked these students if they had ever spent time in a working-class tav–
ern. None had. I asked them if they had read Eugene O'Neill. None had.
I asked them if they had read James
T.
Farrell. None had. Then I
explained that the impulse to buy rounds of drinks takes place when the
bar is beginning to empty out; and because the remaining lost souls do
not want to be left alone, they entice their cronies to stay with one more
for the road. They are not affirming solidarity, but fearing solitude.
The philosopher Sidney Hook did not go to the saloon but to the
library to find socialism. His early works on Marxism hold up remark–
ably well. I was told that his book
Toward an Understanding of Karl
Marx
was so lucid that it was used in Eastern Europe to introduce stu–
dents to Marxism. In the
1952
Partisan Review
symposium, he tells us
about the various meanings of alienation, going from Hegel to Marx,
