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Crowd Culture

An Examination of the American Way of LifeBy Bernard Iddings Bell

ISI Books

Copyright © 2007 Bernard Iddings Bell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-882926-60-2

Chapter One

I. The Cultural Picture

"The spread of democracy will not necessarily help us, indeed it makes our task more difficult. To call the masses into power is to dilute existing culture. They must be humored and satisfied; attention must be paid to their interests and tastes and if these are trifling, ignoble and base, the level of civilization will fall. There is good democracy; there is also the democracy which is a social order in which a degenerate mass has no other care than to enjoy the ignoble pleasures of vulgar men."-Sir Richard Livingstone

The chief threat to America comes from within America.

It comes from our prevailing self-admiration, from indisposition to listen to adverse criticism of our way of life, disinclination to see ourselves as we are, an unwillingness to confess our sins which has come dangerously near to being an inability to see that there are serious faults to admit and remedy. Most Americans regard an insistence on national self-criticism as traitorous or near it. In consequence, our people as a whole have acquired and retain a false optimism about the ability of our way of life to survive and flower. Most of us have a juvenile trust in the permanence of an America whose people forget the transitoriness of the immediate and the superficiality of the obvious, pay scarcely more than a polite lip service to what the race has discovered to be changeless and humanly necessary.

By no means all of us are complacent in this fashion. There is a growing number of critics, though still only a minority of Americans belong to it, which sees not only that all is far from well in these United States but that what is wrong is more than incidental or accidental. This minority is as well aware as anyone can be of American virtues and abilities. It knows that we are competent to make, cheaply and for the most part well, almost anything we wish to make; and that we are as a nation incredibly, though not inexhaustibly, wealthy. It knows, too, that Americans are hospitable, kindly, generous, though they are usually unwilling to involve themselves, in order to assist others, in sacrifice which means pain. The minority is sure that our way of life is better than that which prevails in totalitarian countries, if for no other reason than that criticism of that which is tolerated in our land if anyone cares to go in for it, reluctantly tolerated but still tolerated.

But somehow or other more than a few of us begin to see that while wealth accumulates in these United States, man seems to decay. Corruption corrodes our political and industrial doings. In our private lives a pervading relativism, an absence of conviction about what is the good life, a willingness to seek the easy way rather than the way of integrity, blunts the proddings of conscience, takes the zest out of living, creates a general boredom. We are not a happy people; our alleged gaiety is not spontaneous. Our boredom results not only in a reluctant morality but in shockingly bad manners, which most of us do not even know are bad manners. We become increasingly truculent. Our way of life, while opulent and brash and superficially friendly, is less and less conducive to peace of mind and security of soul.

The minority which feels this way grows in numbers, in clarity of perception, in willingness to speak up even when to do so brings down on its head a clamorous scorn from those who flatter and exploit an ailing democracy and, not too rarely, mete out persecution in its name.

The critical group of patriotic malcontents is sure that what the United States must produce, if it is to manage our magnificent material achievement, is Americans who are more sane, more spiritually adequate, than the present crop. We need such Americans not only to prevent us becoming and remaining slaves here at home to an industrial and political machinery manipulated by the unscrupulous, nor merely to keep us from greedily snarling over the fruits of technology until we find ourselves at one another's throats. The critical minority knows that we must produce and educate more understanding and more spiritually adequate Americans if we are to insure even our survival as a people and protect from external attack those opportunities for freedom in an ordered society which our Founding Fathers envisioned and for which they made great sacrifices.

The minority recognizes that in the One World which is coming into being our nation cannot long secure itself from alien enemies if all it has to depend on is a continued threat to use armed force or an attempt to purchase global good will toward us. It knows, for instance, that Charles Malik, the Lebanese Minister to Washington, told the unvarnished truth in an address which he made not long ago in New York City. "In world affairs," he said, "there are two serious handicaps which it is difficult for the United States to live down. In massiveness, the old world has a decided advantage over the new, both as to population and to sheer quantity in matter. In time, therefore, the old world will certainly overtake you on the material plane. The second disadvantage is that whereas there are cultural and racial continuities between the Soviet Union and the whole of Asia, there are no such continuities between the United States and Asia. This is one of the most destiny-bearing facts of the world situation today. The only way for America to overcome these two disadvantages is by concentration on quality." "Can the United States develop," Dr. Malik asked, "a type of man who sums up in his character such a quality of understanding, of humility, of truth, of humor, of moral stature, of strength and resourcefulness of mind, of pregnant ideas, of universal sympathy and friendship and love, as to enable him, by the sheer weight of his being, to overcome the disadvantages of mass and discontinuity? It has not yet dawned upon America how much is required of her to develop this kind of humanity."

It is, of course, impossible to indict a whole nation; but by and large Americans are not today the sort of people whom Dr. Malik rightly says we need to be. Our dangerous inadequacy is due not so much to deliberate iniquity on the part of individuals as to the compulsions of a culture which shoots wide of the mark in its estimate of human values.

A culture is that complex of attitudes and resultant actions in which are embodied and revealed the prevailing aspirations and desires of that congeries of human beings in the midst of which one lives. It is exceedingly difficult for anyone to escape the pressure of public opinion. It is hard to free oneself from it even in matters of minor and incidental importance. In a democracy like ours it is, indeed, commonly considered unforgivable to wish so to escape. But there must be those who know freedom from the clamorous crowd if there is to be any considerable improvement in the complexion of the common life. To better American character there must be those who understand the prevailing American culture; those who have discovered what ends our citizens chiefly pursue and train their children to pursue, and what means of pursuing these ends are deemed respectable. If the ends seem inadequate or the means reprehensible when viewed and evaluated in the light of the agelong history of human behavior, the patriot must reject and attack them, no matter at what risk to himself. He must refuse to swim with the current for the sake of popularity or ease.

The shrewd examination and stout resistance required make demands which are almost invariably too great for the intelligence and fortitude of the Common Man. He needs to be led by those who are more than usually percipient and courageous. Social reformation never originates with majorities. Always there must be those who have the wit and the temerity to oppose the majorities-a difficult and dangerous procedure. The least useful of would-be patriots is he who, when he knows better, uncritically conforms to the mores and condones such conformity on the ground that it is "democratic" to run with the pack whithersoever the pack desires to run. There must be those who resist our culture, the present culture of the Common Man.

One hears a great deal about "the American way of life"; but what does the phrase mean? Ask this question of the next twenty-five people you talk with and you will get almost as many variant answers. Probably most of those you ask will never have taken the trouble to define it. Some of them will be sure to regard you with suspicion. Because you insist on knowing what the American way of life is, you are supposed to be against it, whatever it is; you are probably a Fascist or a Communist or some such reprobate. One or two may tell you to go read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, forgetting that these deal with a way of government rather than a way of life. The suggested inquiry may be full of surprises for you, may amuse you, possibly may shock you into realization of the moral confusion of the American mind.

The culture that determines our way of life is a generalization of the definitions of proper and fruitful objectives that are held by the usual American and of his actions resultant therefrom. This generalization reflects us. It reveals what notions prevail in the United States about the nature of the good life and how to come at it.

But are there not, perhaps, many cultures existing side by side in America? One hears it said occasionally that the chief problem in this country is one of cultural multiplicity. Is it not a melting pot for those who hold dear many ways of life which originated in other lands: the culture of Great Britain, that of Ireland, that of Northern Europe, that of the Mediterranean countries, that of the Near East, that of the Far East, the many cultures of Africa? This notion of various ways of life as yet not fused, or slowly fusing, once did have some foundation in fact; but this is not so any more, at least not to a significant degree. We have grown beyond the end-of-the-century comparison of many cultures being boiled up in a caldron of Anglo-Saxon origin. The contents of the pot have been so well melted by now that points of difference have become incidental. Nor has the residuum taken on the complexion of the pot, as many thought it would. The pot itself has been melted up, largely, lost in the amalgam. Our way of life is not predominantly Anglo-Saxon, not any more; neither is it the confused and confusing sort of jumble which a half century ago many feared it would become.

Nor do we have much left of geographical diversities of culture in these United States. There was a time when it meant something to speak of the culture of New England or the culture of New York or Virginian culture or that of the Middle West or that of Texas or that of California. A few faint and accidental differences linger on here and there; but the formerly substantial variations are mostly outgrown. Life is essentially evaluated nowadays much the same way in Atlanta and Spokane; in Richmond, Virginia, and Richmond, Indiana; in Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine; in Chicago and Philadelphia and New Orleans; in Milwaukee and Manhattan and Miami. The country is all of a piece. This is why to many foreign visitors the United States seems to be, as one of them once put it, "a homogeneity, so united as to be monotonous."

Nor do cultures vary greatly in the United States according to occupational or class backgrounds: rural and urban and suburban, agricultural or technological. There is among us no peculiarly bourgeois culture; everyone is bourgeois. There is no proletarian culture as distinct from middle-class culture; the two have become indistinguishable. And there are only faint traces left of that culture which once characterized the older elite. Those who have a hankering for old-fashioned patrician pleasures find it easier to go in for them mostly alone, secret drinkers of that which flows from classic springs, with just enough of the real thing in the potation to make it smell and taste a little as of yore, but adulterated with crude spirits for the sake of a popular kick. This is not the place to deplore these changes or to praise them; our present business is to understand and describe.

The children in American schools stand every day with one hand on the heart and the other stretched out toward the flag and say that they are pledged to serve an America which is "one and indivisible." This is not an aspiration any more; the oath involves only a statement of simple fact. We have moralized, unified, equalized, standardized our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. This may turn out to be a blessing or it may turn out to be a curse; but at any rate it makes American life much easier for the thoughtful to examine and evaluate than was the case at the turn of the century, easier too for the unthinking to accept that which is with an unchallenging complacency. America is a very large country but its cultural pattern is single, becomes more so every day.

The way of life in any culture is revealed not by what is emotionally said or written about it by the boastful or by the scolding, but through examination of certain indexes. Among the ones usually relied on by social scientists as most revealing are the press (with its modern variants, radio and television); books and magazines commonly read; advertising; sports and recreation; music; the pictorial arts; the theater, including again the movies, radio and television; divorce and the permanency of the home; good or bad manners, including general attitudes toward disorder and noise; education and its objectives; religion and the concern or lack of esteem in which it is held. If anyone examines such indexes dispassionately, objectively, he will speedily discover what is the American way of life in these mid-century years. He will come to understand what the pressures are which have most to do with making him and you and me and the neighbors and the children what we all are, the pressures from which there is no chance of easy escape for anyone who believes in the sovereign rightness of the multitude. To understand our culture no special shrewdness is required-only honest observations of the indexes.

Read the newspapers, for instance. There are not more than a dozen of them among the thousands of local journals which show independent character or integrity, or which indicate a reading public that it would pay one to trust with his wallet, his wife, or his good name. Observe what they regard as the news that is important, the news that deserves to be featured; how gossip and scandal and crime and sensation are played up. See, also, how like as buttons they are in the way they tell what is happening nationally or internationally, and why it is happening. Most of the extra-local news is collected and distributed by syndicated agencies, agencies which can color the material just about as their governors may desire, by virtue of which fact American opinion and action are manageable as truly as in any censor-controlled totalitarian state, perhaps more effectively than in such a state because the reader in this country thinks he is perusing independent journals while, with rare exceptions, he is not. His suspicion of being manipulated is thereby lulled.

One interesting and typical example may be worth recalling. When Russia was Hitler's ally in World War II, the American people were told by the papers, and believed, that the Russians were little short of fiends. Suddenly Russia changed sides. For reasons not too credible either to her or to us, she became our ally. At a dinner in New York at that time, I sat next to a high-up officer of one of the great news-collecting agencies. "I suppose," I ventured, "now that the Muscovites are on our side, the American people will have to be indoctrinated so as to stop thinking of them as devils and begin to regard them as noble fellows." "Of course," he replied. "We know what our job is in respect to that. We of the press will bring about a complete and almost unanimous volte face in the belief of the Common Man about the Russians. We shall do it within three weeks." He was right about it. The papers, fed by the news agencies, did just that; and in less time than he said it would take we were cheering for Papa Stalin and the Politburo who were, we now felt sure, liberty-loving democrats and entirely trustworthy. What extraordinary power! As Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts." The point here is merely to note that we are led about by the press, and with what ease.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Crowd Cultureby Bernard Iddings Bell Copyright © 2007 by Bernard Iddings Bell. Excerpted by permission.
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