Page 48 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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32 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

Macdonald in being ‘so grimly critical of the present America, is too kind to the past in
America and to the past and present in Europe’ (191). In this way, Macdonald’s pes-
simism about the present is only sustained by his overly optimistic view of the past. In
short, he ‘exaggerates . . . the bad eminence of the United States’ (193).
In ‘The middle against both ends’, Leslie Fiedler (1957), unlike most other contri-
butors to the debate, claims that mass culture

is a peculiarly American phenomenon. ...I do not mean ...that it is found only
in the United States, but that wherever it is found, it comes first from us, and is still
to be discovered in fully developed form only among us. Our experience along
these lines is, in this sense, a preview for the rest of the world of what must follow
the inevitable dissolution of the older aristocratic cultures (539).

For Fiedler, mass culture is popular culture that ‘refuses to know its place’. As he
explains,

contemporary vulgar culture is brutal and disturbing: the quasi spontaneous expres-
sion of the uprooted and culturally dispossessed inhabitants of anonymous cities,
contriving mythologies which reduce to manageable form the threat of science, the
horror of unlimited war, the general spread of corruption in a world where the
social bases of old loyalties and heroisms have long been destroyed (540).

Fiedler poses the question: What is wrong with American mass culture? He knows that
for some critics, at home and abroad, the fact that it is American is enough reason to
condemn it. But, for Fiedler, the inevitability of the American experience makes the
argument meaningless; that is, unless those who support the argument are also against
industrialization, mass education and democracy. He sees America ‘in the midst of a
strange two-front class war’. In the centre is ‘the genteel middling mind’, at the top is
‘the ironical-aristocratic sensibility’, and at the bottom is ‘the brutal-populist mental-
ity’ (545). The attack on popular culture is a symptom of timidity and an expression
of conformity in matters of culture: ‘the fear of the vulgar is the obverse of the fear
of excellence, and both are aspects of the fear of difference: symptoms of a drive for
conformity on the level of the timid, sentimental, mindless-bodiless genteel’ (547).
The genteel middling mind wants cultural equality on its own terms. This is not the
Leavisite demand for cultural deference, but an insistence on an end to cultural differ-
ence. Therefore, Fiedler sees American mass culture as hierarchical and pluralist, rather
than homogenized and levelling. Moreover, he celebrates it as such.
Shils (1978) suggests a similar model – American culture is divided into three
cultural ‘classes’, each embodying different versions of the cultural: ‘“superior” or
“refined” culture’ at the top, ‘“mediocre” culture’ in the middle, and ‘“brutal” culture’
at the bottom (206). Mass society has changed the cultural map, reducing the
significance of ‘superior or refined culture’, and increasing the importance of both
‘mediocre’ and ‘brutal’ (209). However, Shils does not see this as a totally negative
development: ‘It is an indication of a crude aesthetic awakening in classes which