The Problem of High Culture and Mass Culture

Extract

It would be idle to pretend that Mr. Macdonald's article is not about a most serious problem. In this age of disillusion one of the most serious grounds for concern, one of the deepest sources of the disillusion is the state of popular culture, if by culture we mean anything more than the sum of intellectual, moral, aesthetic habits of a people in any given moment of historical time. For to many observers who are hostile to the political movement of democracy, the present state of popular culture justifies all their fears, and to believers in democracy, the state of popular culture deceives some of the most profound hopes of the democratic movement since the French Revolution. And at this stage of the argument it is not, I think, worth making the distinction between popular and mass culture that Mr. Macdonald usefully insists on. Where the optimists have been deceived and the pessimists confirmed in their pessimism has been in the kind of culture that the people now choose or accept, and it does not, at the moment, matter whether the ‘people’ and the ‘masses’ are identical concepts.