CIIAPTER 1 Introduction: The Two Classicisms '"Ve change cures, finding norte effecti¡;e, neme calid, beca use lce hace faith neither in the ¡¡ea ce u;e seek rlOr in the pleasurcs ¡ce ¡JlIrsue. Versatile sages, ¡ce are the stoics ami epicurealls of lnodern Romes. -E. ~1. CIOHA'i, A. Sl!ort Historl¡ of Decm¡ HIS is an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret T it as either a symptom or a cause of social decay. Television, for example, is sometimes treated as an instrument with great educational potential which ought to help-if it is not already helping-in the creation of a genuinely democratic and universal culture. But it just as often evokes dismay, as in Jerzy Kosinski's novel amI movie Beillg There; its most severe critics treat it as an instrument of totalitarian manipulation amI social disintegration. All critical theories of mass culture suggest that there is a superior type of culture, usually defined in terms of some historical moclel: the Enlightenment, the Renais­ sanee, the NI icldle Ages, Periclean Athens. 1 shall call looking to the past for an ideal culture "positive classicism." But critical theories of mass culture also often suggest that the present is a recreatiO!1 or repetition of the past in a disastrous way: the modern world is said to have entered a stage of its history like that of the decline ancI bll of the Roman Empire. Hence, "bread amI circuses." Comparisons of mo<1- ern society with Roman imperial decadence 1 shall caH "negative classicism. " Frequently what a social scientist or a literary critic or a popular 18 BREAD AND G/RGUSES journalist offers as analysis of mass culture or the mass media proves to be something else: a version of a persistent, pervasive mythology that frames its subject in the sublime context of the rise and fall of empires, the alpha and omega of human affairs. Very little has been written about mass culture, the masses, or the mass media that has not been colored by apocalyptic assumptions. It would be too easy to say that where genuine analysis ends mythologizing begins, but that is often the case. The terms ofthis mythology-"mass culture" itself, but also "the masses," "empire," "decadence," "barbarism," and the like­ defy definition. Their meanings shift with each new analysis, or rather with each new mythologizing. U nless it is rooted in an analysis of specific artifacts or media, the phrase "mass culture" usually needs to be understood as an apocalyptic idea, behind which lies a concern for the preservation of civilization as a whole. 1 call negative classicism a "mythology" both because it is apocalyptic and because it pervades all levels of public consciousness today, from scholarly and intellectual writing to the mass media themselves. Of course it is a secular mythol­ ogy, close to Roland Barthes' s concept of "myth as depoliticized speech"; a near synonym for it might be "ideology." But negative classicism transcends the specific ideologies-conservatism, liberal­ ism, radicalism, fascism, socialism, Marxism-and is used in different ways by them all. Its most thoughtful expositors elaborate and qualify it with great sophistication and rationality, but it still functions more like an article of faith than like a reasoned argument: in many cases, a mere passing allusion to "bread and circuses" or to such related no­ tions as "decadence" and "barbarism" is meant to trigger a chain of associations pointing toward a secularized Judgment Day in which democracy, or capitalism, or Western civilization, or "the technologi­ cal society" will strangle upon its own contradictions, chief among which is likely to be an amorphous monstrosity called "mass culture." M y chief purpose has been to provide a critique of the mythology of negative classicism as it has developed over the last two centuries in relation to "mass culture": the mass media, journalism, mass educa­ tion, the cultural effects of the processes of democratization and indus­ trialization. Since a complete history of this mythology would have to survey most writing about culture and society over the same time span, 1 have chosen instead to focus on major patterns and major cultural theorists. The first chapter offers an overview of some of the The Two Classicisms 19 assumptions and theories that shape contemporary responses to mass culture, as well as a capsule history of the "bread and circuses" analo­ gy. The second looks back to the Greek and Roman origins of modern culture theories, including the two classicisms themselves. The third returns to the modern world via an examination of some of the main con tribu tion s of the Christian tradition to contemporary theorizing about mass culture. It focuses on the idea of religion as the antithesis of classical culture, and as somehow proletarian or for the masses, and therefore as a version of mass culture-"the opium of the people." The fourth chapter then turns to the "decadent movement," primarily among nineteenth-century French and British writers, to show how it developed as a defensive response to the democratization and indus­ trialization-that is, the "massification"-of culture. "Decadent" poets and artists were the first major group of intellectuals to develop a mythology based upon the analogy of modern society to the declin­ ing Roman Empire. The fifth chapter turns to the origins of Freud's theories of civilization in his group psychology and its forebears, such as Gustave Le Bon's "crowd psychology." Freud adopts much ofthe negative thinking about "the masses" present in Le Bon, Nietzsche, and other late nineteenth-century writers; the emergence of "the masses" or of "mass culture" is a sign of the beginning of the end of civilization, a return to barbarismo Chapter 6 explores the culture theories of three contrasting figures from the first half of this century: José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus. The first two offer elaborate versions of negative classicism; Camus has enough faith in ordinary human nature to believe in the prospect of a mass culture that is not decadent, but that is instead synonymous with a free, humane civilization. The seventh chapter examines the mass culture theories of the chief representatives of the Frankfurt Institute-The­ odor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Ben­ jamin. The concept of the "dialectic of enlightenment" points to a regression of civilization that, according to these theorists, is largely caused by mass culture and the mass media, at least as these have developed under capitalismo The last chapter focuses on television, as reflected in the apocalyptic ideas of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and others, including the Frankfurt theorists. The mythology of nega­ tive classicism seems inevitably to point to television as the chief culprit in the alleged decline and fall of contemporary culture. Yet 20 BREAD AND CIRCUSES television and the other mass media are historically without prece­ dent, and the "bread and circuses" analogy may finally be no more than a term in an eschatological fantasia that obscures the liberating potential of the new communications technology. In the conclusion. I suggest some of the factors that obstruct the realization of this poten­ tial, including some forms of negative classicism. In general negative classicism has in volved associating mass culture and the mass media with other socioeconomic factors that are clearly destructive or "decadent." In a recent essay that discusses uncon­ trolled industrial expansion, overpopulation, international conflict, and an alleged demise of political leadership, 1. Robert Sinai pays most attention to "mass culture" or "mass civilization" as the principal cause of the "disaster and decay" that he forecasts as the immediate future of the world. Even something so apparently constructive as "mass literacy" is, from Sinai's perspective, destructive: "mass liter­ acy has, as ought to be more than apparent by now, lowered the generallevel of culture and understanding. "1 A McLuhanesque addi­ tion to this idea is that, according to Sinai, "the old verbal culture is in decline and there is everywhere a general retreat from the word." As in McLuhan, the visual mass media, cinema and television, are tbe main saboteurs of mass literacy, although mass literacy itself has been a cause of the decay of something else-high culture or civilization, developed only through the leadership of creative elites. The high culture based on privilege and hierarehieal order and sus­ tained by the great works uf the past anel the truths and beauties aehieved in the tradition destroyed itself in two World \V<lrs. We are now living in a cruel "late stage in \Vestern affairs" marked bv feelings of disarray, by a regress into violenee and moral obtuseness, by a central failure of values in the arts and in the graces of personal and social behaviour. Confused and bombarded, modern man is suffused with fears of a new "Dark Age" in which civilisation itself as we have known it may disappear or be confined to ... smal! islands of archaic conservation. [16) Sinai is undoubtedly speaking loosely here, because what he says in the rest of his essay is not that high culture cornmitted suicide, but that mass culture has assassinated the genuine al·ticle, the elitist civi- 1. 1. Robert Sinai, "\Vhat Ails Us and Why: On the Roots ofDisaster and Decav," Encounter, April 1979. p. 15· The Two Classicisms 21 lization of the past. And, where mass culture is perceived as a destruc­ tive force or tendency, as in an example of negative classicism like Sinai' s, the fall of empires is rarely far behind. "All social systems are ruled by an iron law of decadence," says Sinai, and ours is no excep­ tion.