Republicans don’t annoy me; Democrats don’t either. Conservatives don’t annoy me, neither do Liberals or New Democrats. But…. technocrats annoy me. And the farther mass society creeps into every corner of life, the more the technocrats proliferate. Technocrats are the scholars of mass society.
I remember the differences between the scholar and the philosopher archetypes – that is what we were exploring. In fact, in my 10+ years as a post-secondary student, this debate came up only twice. It came up only twice – in my undergraduate studies at the University of Winnipeg and graduate school at the University of Windsor. The latter focused on how a truly original philosophical idea is rare in publishing. The former focused on how philosophers rarely responded to genuine human needs. The latter at the University of Windsor lamented that philosophy wasn’t entertaining enough. The exploration at the University of Winnipeg lamented that philosophy was seldom relevant enough. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, since the automotive industry had reached far into the corners of people’s lives in Windsor, Ontario. My classes there were held in the Chrysler Building. The rise in mass entertainment seemed to coincide with a ballooning technocratic population. In Windsor and Detroit, it was an epidemic of adult establishments, but I had the same experience in South Korea, where K-pop was reaching larger and larger regional audiences, all on the sponsorship of one of the oligarchic organizations known as chaebol.
At the same time, I have, in some form or another, been culturally theorizing, which relies quite heavily on philosophy. Over the last few years, I have been writing a blog – the form of which needs to be both entertaining and relevant. My most viewed blogs have been about the most famous names – Charles Taylor and Jordan Peterson. And have been consumed rather than absorbed. They jump to the top of a view count like a greatest hit list by the Beatles – everyone listens to “Hey Jude,” but “Revolution” is preserved as if in an archive. Likewise, the most relevant criticisms of Society and Mass Society derived from thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin are archived not because they aren’t relevant, but because they exist as unentertaining; i.e. they are not shaped in a way that makes them easily consumed as entertainment. So be it.
The world of entertainment is a degraded form of the “good and honorable society” out of which the antagonism of the individual and the community emerged. ”Mass society” and “mass culture”, a few years ago, implied that mass society was a depraved form of society and mass culture a contradiction in terms. Mass culture and mass society are considered by almost everybody today as something with which we must come to terms, and with which we must discover some “positive” aspects if only because mass culture is the culture of mass society. And mass society, whether we like it or not, will stay with us into the foreseeable future. No doubt mass society and mass culture are interrelated phenomena. Mass society comes about when society has indeed incorporated nearly every one of the masses of the population. Since society originally comprehended those parts of the population that disposed of leisure time and the wealth that goes with it, mass society does indeed indicate a new order in which the masses have been liberated “from the burden of physically exhausting labor.” Both historically and conceptually, therefore, mass society has been preceded by society, and society is no more a generic term than mass society; it too can be dated and described historically. It is older, to be sure, than mass society, but not older than the modern age. In fact, all the traits that crowd psychology has meanwhile discovered in mass persons: her loneliness (and loneliness is neither isolation nor solitude) regardless of her adaptability; her excitability and lack of standards; her capacity for consumption, accompanied by her inability to judge or even to distinguish; above all, her egocentricity and that fateful alienation from the world which, since Rousseau, she mistakes for self-alienation – all these traits first appeared in “good society,” where there was no question of masses, numerically speaking. The first mass people, we are tempted to quantitatively say, so little constituted a mass that they could even imagine they constituted an elite, the elite of good society.
So, let me introduce the older phenomena of society and its relation to culture, not for historical reasons. Instead, they relate facts that are little known in North America. I consistently run into large swaths of technocrats who think individuality has flowered in mass society. Unpopular as it may be to articulate, the modern individual was actually defined and discovered by those who, like Rousseau in the eighteenth or John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, found themselves in open rebellion against society. Individualism and the “sensibility and privacy” that go with it, the discovery of intimacy as the atmosphere the individual needs for his full development, came about at a time when society was not yet a mass phenomenon but still thought of itself in terms of “good society” or of “educated and cultured society.” And it is against this background that we must understand the modern (and no longer so modern) individual who, as we all know from nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, can only be understood as part of the society against which he tried to assert herself and which always got the better of her.
Unlike the rugged individualist, who mysteriously pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, the chances of this individual’s survival lay in the simultaneous presence within the population of other non-society strata into which the rebellious individual could escape; one reason why rebellious individuals so frequently ended by becoming revolutionaries as well was that they discovered in those who were not admitted to society certain traits of humanity which had become extinct in society. We need only read the record of the French Revolution, and recall to what an extent the very concept of le peuple received its connotations from a rebellion against the corruption and hypocrisy of the salons, to realize what the true role of society was throughout the nineteenth century. A necessary condition of the despair of individuals under the conditions of mass society is because these avenues of escape are now closed as soon as society has incorporated all the strata of the population.
Hence, my frustration with the mass social structure and content of entertainment on which technocrats spend their leisure time and money. While certain richer cultural forms are “entertaining”, the mass social character of entertainment reeks of philistinism.
Here we are not concerned with society, however, but with what happens to culture under the different conditions of society and mass society. In society, culture, even more than other realities, had become what only then began to be called a “value.” Values, in other words, became a social commodity that could be circulated and cashed in as social currency to acquire social status. Cultural objects were transformed into values when the cultural philistine seized upon them as a currency by which he bought a higher position in society – higher, that is, in her own opinion he deserved either by nature or by birth. Cultural values, therefore, were what values have always been, exchange values; in passing from hand to hand, they were worn down like an old coin. They lost the power originally peculiar to all cultural things, they could arrest our attention and move us. This process ended with the “bargain-sale of values” during the 1920s and 30s when cultural and moral values were “sold out” altogether. While this comment is directed at the Weimer Republic’s preparation for the fascist whirlwind to come with the Nazis – the German wholehearted support for the genocide in Palestine may indeed indicate permanent supply chain issues in the production of anything like authentic culture.
Perhaps the chief difference between society and mass society is that society wanted to assess cultural things as social commodities, and thus used and abused them for its selfish purposes, but did not “consume” them. Even in their most worn-out shapes, these things remained things, they were not “consumed” and swallowed up but retained their worldly objectivity. Mass society, on the contrary, wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just as are any other consumer goods. The products needed for entertainment serve the life process of society, even though they may not be as necessary for this life as vegetables. They serve to whittle away time, and the vacant time that is whittled away is not leisure time; leisure time, strictly speaking, is time in which we are truly liberated from all cares and activities necessitated by the life process, and therefore free for the world and its “culture”. Instead, the vacant time of mass society and its technocrats is leftover time, which is still biological, i.e., leftover after labor and sleep have received their due. The vacant time that entertainment is supposed to fill is a hiatus in the biologically conditioned cycle of labor, in “the metabolism of man with nature,” as Marx used to say.
Under contemporary conditions, this hiatus is constantly growing; there is more and more time freed that must be filled with entertainment, but this enormous increase in vacant time does not change the nature of the time. Entertainment, like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process. And biological life is always, whether one is laboring or at rest, engaged in consumption or in the passive reception of amusement, a metabolism feeding on things by devouring them. The commodities the entertainment industry offers are not cultural objects whose excellence is measured by their ability to withstand the life process and to become permanent parts of the world and they should not be judged according to these standards, nor are entertainment commodities values that exist to be used and exchanged; they are rather consumer goods destined to be used up, as are any other consumer goods. (For an extensive account of the biological life process, see Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.)
However, the preceding words should not be understood as offering a criticism of the entertainment industry, or how one fills vacant time. As long as the entertainment industry produces its own consumer goods, all is well, and we can no more chide it for the nondurability of its articles than we can reproach a bakery because it produces goods which, if they are not to spoil, must be consumed as soon as they are made.
It has always been the mark of educated philistinism to despise entertainment and amusement because no “value” could be derived from them. In so far as we are all subject to life’s great cycle, we all need entertainment and amusement in some form or other, and it is sheer hypocrisy or social snobbery to deny that we can be amused and entertained by exactly the same things that amuse and entertain the masses. As far as the survival of culture is concerned, it certainly is less threatened by those who fill vacant time with amusement and entertainment than by those who fill it with some haphazard educational gadget like AI to improve their social standing.
If mass culture and the entertainment industry were the same, I should not worry much, even though it creates a serious problem for artists and intellectuals. It is as though the futility inherent in entertainment had been permitted to permeate the whole social atmosphere, and the often-described malaise of the artists and intellectuals is of course partly due to their inability to make themselves heard and seen in the tumultuous uproar of mass society, or to penetrate its noisy futility. But this protest of the artist against society is as old as society, though not older. As far as artistic productivity is concerned, it should not be more difficult to withstand the massive temptations of mass culture, or to keep from being thrown out of gear by the noise and humbug of mass society, than it was to avoid the more sophisticated temptations and the more insidious noises of the cultural snobs in refined society. Unhappily, the case is not that simple. The entertainment industry is confronted with gargantuan appetites, and since its wares disappear in consumption, it must constantly offer new commodities. In this predicament, those who produce for the mass media ransack the entire range of past and present cultures trying to find suitable material. This material, however, cannot be offered as it is; it must be prepared and altered to become entertaining; it cannot be consumed as it is. Mass culture comes into being when mass society seizes upon cultural objects, and its danger is that the life process of society (which like all biological processes insatiably draws everything available into the cycle of its metabolism) will literally consume the cultural objects, eat them up, and destroy them.
I am not referring to the phenomenon of mass distribution. When cultural objects, books, or pictures in reproduction, are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the goods in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed (rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to 5-minute “deep-dives” on Plato’s Republic in the course of reproduction or preparation for the movies) to be put into usable form for a mass sale which they otherwise could not attain. Neither the entertainment industry itself nor mass sales as such are signs of, not what we call mass culture, but what we ought more accurately to call the death and deterioration of culture in mass society. This decay sets in when alien liberties are taken with these authentic cultural objects so that they may be distributed among masses of people.
It might finally be dawning on all of us that the pernicious influence of mass society reaches into our most cherished content producers – like TED, Big Think, but also Jonathan Haidt, Scott Galloway, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Oprah Winfrey. – but also the lion’s share of the publishing industry. These are often a special kind of intellectuals, often well-read and well-informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects to make them palatable to those who want to be entertained or – and this is worse – to be “educated,” that is, to acquire as cheaply as possible some kind of cultural knowledge to improve their social status. The present malaise of the intellectual springs from the fact that he finds himself surrounded, not by the masses, from whom, on the contrary, he is carefully shielded, but by these digesters, re-writers, and changers of culture whom we find in every publishing house in North America, and the editorial offices of nearly every magazine. And these “professionals” are ably assisted by those who no longer write books but fabricate them, who manufacture a “new” textbook out of four or five already on the market, and who then have only one worry: how to avoid plagiarism.
Here the criterion of novelty, quite legitimate in the entertainment industry, becomes a simple fake and, indeed, a threat: it is only too likely that the “new” textbook will crowd out the older ones, which usually are better, not because they are older, but because they were still written in response to authentic needs. This state of affairs, which indeed is equaled nowhere else in the world, can properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses nor their entertainers, but are those who try to entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture, or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and educational as well. The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become very entertaining indeed; many great authors of the past have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. The malaise of the intellectual in the atmosphere of mass culture is much more legitimate than his malaise in mass society; it is caused socially by the presence of these other intellectuals, the manufacturers of mass culture, from whom he finds it difficult to distinguish himself and who, moreover, always outnumber him, and therefore acquire that kind of power which is generated whenever people band together and act more or less in concert.
Culturally, the malaise is caused, I think, not so much by the massive temptations and the high rewards which await those who are willing to alter their products to make them acceptable for a mass market, as by the constant irritating care each of us has to exert in order to protect his product against the demands and the ingenuity of those who think they know how to “improve” it. Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; enter tainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. If life is no longer content with the pleasure which is always coexistent with the toil and labor inherent in the metabolism of man with nature, if vital energy is no longer fully used up in this cycle, then life may reach out for the things of the world, may violate and consume them. It will prepare these things of the world until they are fit for consumption; it will treat them as if they were articles of nature, articles which must also be prepared before they can enter into man’s metabolism. Consumption of the things of nature does no harm to them; they are constantly renewed because man, in so far as he lives and labors, toils, and recuperates, is also a creature of nature, a part of the great cycle in which all nature wheels. But the things of the world made by persons (in so far as he is a worldly and not merely a natural being), are not renewed of their own accord. When life seizes upon them and consumes them at its pleasure, for entertainment, they simply disappear. And this disappearance, which first begins in mass culture that is, the “culture” of a society poised between the alternatives of laboring and consuming, is something different from the wear and tear culture suffered when its things were made into exchange values, and circulated in society until their original stamp and meaning were scarcely recognizable. We could say that the devaluation of culture in “good society” through the cultural philistines was the characteristic peril of commercial society, whose primary public area was the exchange market for goods and ideas.
The disappearance of culture in a mass society, on the other hand, comes about when we have a consumers’ society which, in so far as it produces only for consumption, does not need a public worldly space whose existence is independent of and outside the sphere of its life process. In other words, a consumer’s society does not know how to take care of the world and the things that belong to it: the society’s own chief attitude toward objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches. If we understand by culture what it originally meant (to take care of and preserve and cultivate) then we can say without any exaggeration that a society obsessed with consumption cannot at the same time be cultured or produce a culture. For all their differences, however, one thing is common to both these anticultural processes: they arise when all the worldly objects produced by the present or the past have become “social,” are related to society, and are seen in their merely functional aspect. In one case, society uses, exchanges, evaluates, and devaluates them; in the other, it devours and consumes them. This functionalization of the world is by no means a matter of course; the notion that every object must be functional, fulfilling some needs of society or the individual, the church a religious need, the painting the need for self-expression in the painter, and the need of self-perfection in the onlooker, and so on is historically so new that one is tempted to speak of systemic prejudice. The cathedrals were built ad majorem gloriam Dei! While they as buildings certainly served the needs of the community, their elaborate beauty can never be explained by these needs, which could have been served quite as well by any nondescript building. An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; this durability is the very opposite of its functionality, which is the quality that makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up. The “thingness” of an object appears in its shape and appearance, the proper criterion of which is beauty. If we wanted to judge an object by its use value alone, and not also by whether it is beautiful or ugly or something in between, we would first have to pluck out our eyes. Thus, the functionalization of the world which occurs in both society and mass society deprives the world of culture as well as beauty. Culture can be safe only with those who love the world for its own sake, who know that without the beauty of man-made, worldly things which we call works of art, without the radiant glory in which potential imperishability is made manifest to the world and in the world, all human life would be futile and of no significance at all.
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 
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