Mass society, my arse
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 02:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI've been doing some background reading on Heidegger, fortunately in a form that comes with lots of pictures so I can understand it somewhat. The authors (Jeff Collins and Howard Selina) explain Heidegger's triple whammy of Thrownness, Projection and Fallenness well enough that I can put it together with what I remember from Sartre to the extent that the penny drops, or can at least be wrestled to the floor. In the build-up to this, they mention Karl Jaspers' Man in the Modern Age which tells of the struggle between the individual spirit and the "enslaving forces" of technological mass society. "Ah, yes," I am thinking, "mass society, Weber, Adorno, Durkheim, Marcuse and all those other clever Teutonic sociologists. Now I know where we are - twentieth-century society created mass culture and stifled the individual ... mass media, modernism, consumerism ... and ... and this is a load of bollocks."
Now I do not wish to dismiss all the criticisms made of mass society. Adorno, in particular, makes some good points, if you can tease them out from the pessimistic neo-Marxism. However, all of these modern (and post-modern) critiques rest on a misconception that is so close to our noses that we often fail to notice it: the twentieth century was not the age when mass culture crushed the individual spirit. It had a pretty good try in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, but for the most part, far from being the age of faceless conformity, it was a time of vibrant individualism. Let me put it this way: if modern Western culture saw the death of the individual at the hands of mass society, in which cultures was the individual more alive? The nineteenth century saw a lot of rhetoric about the individual (whether the liberal individual of Mill or the anti-rational individual of Nietzsche) and in some ways it was an individualistic age - but only in relation to the ages preceding it, not the one following it. To stand out from the crowd in the nineteenth century was a glorious thing, but also a very expensive one, and if you didn't start off with a small fortune, you could very well spend the twilight of your non-conformist Heldenleben coughing up blood in an unheated garret. Going back further, we have the Middle Ages, when you could be tortured and burnt alive for holding unorthodox views on the Trinity or, if you were a woman, for wearing trousers or having a wart on your nose. Who needs television to ensure social conformity when you have racks and thumbscrews?
The twentieth century is thought of as the age of mass society for two reasons. First, there were a lot more people around to be massy (in 1900, there were only four cities in the world with a population of more than two million; fifty years later these cities all had populations in excess of five million). Second, people got better at communicating - the infamous "mass media". Did this growth in the number of people and the number of people they could communicate with result in stifling conformity and uniformity of opinion? Was the individual crushed by mass society? Quite the opposite. More people and more communication meant more variety and more choice, and this choice was not merely between different brands of consumer products. The interwar years, when mass propaganda was really kicking into gear and totalitarianism was the flavour of the age, were also the heyday of weird and wonderful fads: vegetarianism, yoga, nudism, eurhythmics, hiking, biking, jazz, sun worship, phenomenology. The 1960s, when everyone seemed worried that we were heading towards a Brave New World of socially-engineered groupthink, turned out to be an object-case in individualism run riot. Even the 1950s, that most conformist and massified decade, gave us the Beatniks and the Angry Young Men, who could at least afford to be beat and angry because of the post-war economic boom.
Of course critics could point out that these were mere eddies in the current of mass society: they were not instances of genuine individual spiritual life (whatever that is), but mini-conformities. However, I think this speaks more to the fact that when humans want to be individuals, they prefer to do it together. This is not a characteristic of any age or society; for better or worse, it is part of our nature. The important point is that in the twentieth century, for the first time, large numbers of ordinary people could make conscious decisions about the way they wanted to live their lives. I suspect it is the "ordinary people" part that so upset the critics of mass society. On the one hand, there were the Marxist critics, who saw the masses as hopelessly mired in false consciousness and unable to be individual in anything other than a false, bourgeois way. On the other hand, there were the conservatives who were still peeved about the Enlightenment. What irked them was not that individuals could no longer rise above the herd, but that classes no longer could.
Now I do not wish to dismiss all the criticisms made of mass society. Adorno, in particular, makes some good points, if you can tease them out from the pessimistic neo-Marxism. However, all of these modern (and post-modern) critiques rest on a misconception that is so close to our noses that we often fail to notice it: the twentieth century was not the age when mass culture crushed the individual spirit. It had a pretty good try in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, but for the most part, far from being the age of faceless conformity, it was a time of vibrant individualism. Let me put it this way: if modern Western culture saw the death of the individual at the hands of mass society, in which cultures was the individual more alive? The nineteenth century saw a lot of rhetoric about the individual (whether the liberal individual of Mill or the anti-rational individual of Nietzsche) and in some ways it was an individualistic age - but only in relation to the ages preceding it, not the one following it. To stand out from the crowd in the nineteenth century was a glorious thing, but also a very expensive one, and if you didn't start off with a small fortune, you could very well spend the twilight of your non-conformist Heldenleben coughing up blood in an unheated garret. Going back further, we have the Middle Ages, when you could be tortured and burnt alive for holding unorthodox views on the Trinity or, if you were a woman, for wearing trousers or having a wart on your nose. Who needs television to ensure social conformity when you have racks and thumbscrews?
The twentieth century is thought of as the age of mass society for two reasons. First, there were a lot more people around to be massy (in 1900, there were only four cities in the world with a population of more than two million; fifty years later these cities all had populations in excess of five million). Second, people got better at communicating - the infamous "mass media". Did this growth in the number of people and the number of people they could communicate with result in stifling conformity and uniformity of opinion? Was the individual crushed by mass society? Quite the opposite. More people and more communication meant more variety and more choice, and this choice was not merely between different brands of consumer products. The interwar years, when mass propaganda was really kicking into gear and totalitarianism was the flavour of the age, were also the heyday of weird and wonderful fads: vegetarianism, yoga, nudism, eurhythmics, hiking, biking, jazz, sun worship, phenomenology. The 1960s, when everyone seemed worried that we were heading towards a Brave New World of socially-engineered groupthink, turned out to be an object-case in individualism run riot. Even the 1950s, that most conformist and massified decade, gave us the Beatniks and the Angry Young Men, who could at least afford to be beat and angry because of the post-war economic boom.
Of course critics could point out that these were mere eddies in the current of mass society: they were not instances of genuine individual spiritual life (whatever that is), but mini-conformities. However, I think this speaks more to the fact that when humans want to be individuals, they prefer to do it together. This is not a characteristic of any age or society; for better or worse, it is part of our nature. The important point is that in the twentieth century, for the first time, large numbers of ordinary people could make conscious decisions about the way they wanted to live their lives. I suspect it is the "ordinary people" part that so upset the critics of mass society. On the one hand, there were the Marxist critics, who saw the masses as hopelessly mired in false consciousness and unable to be individual in anything other than a false, bourgeois way. On the other hand, there were the conservatives who were still peeved about the Enlightenment. What irked them was not that individuals could no longer rise above the herd, but that classes no longer could.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 05:22 am (UTC)Some day, I need to share with everyone the special version of hell I have cooked up for any pipsqueak Western woman who yaps on about how she is "oppressed" by mass media and impossible standards of female beauty in the same way that women under the Taliban are "oppressed" by the burqua.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 09:01 am (UTC)