Page 40 - Culture Society and the Media

30 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
means and forms of communication as to result in a tendency toward conditions
of moral and intellectual uniformity. Rather than being viewed as vehicles of
enlightenment, popular education and the press are regarded as reducing
intelligence to the level of the lowest common denominator, the promoters of a
moral and intellectual mediocrity. It is worth noting, however, that Mill viewed
the threat to moral and intellectual authority as being posed less by ‘the masses’,
in the sense of a modern variant of the mob, than by the dull complacency of the
selfsatisfied middle classes.

Mass/élite theories

Although apprehensive with regard to the cultural consequences of the extension
of the franchise and the development of literacy, Mill did not oppose these
developments so much as merely point to their consequences and to the
safeguards that would need to be taken against them. In this, he was typical of
the English strand of the mass society critique which, on the whole, has been
somewhat qualified in its élitism, hedging it around with a good degree of
obeisance to democratic and egalitarian susceptibilities. It is thus noticeable that,
for the greater part, the division between élites and masses, as it has been
construed by English social and cultural theorists, has been represented as a
socially and culturally produced division rather than as one resting on the
differential distribution of innate natural characteristics.
The main thrust of the continental tradition of mass society theory has run in
the opposite direction. Among the more important figures here are José Ortega
and Friedrich Nietzsche. Stridently anti-democratic, these shared the view that
men were naturally divided between the weak and the strong, between those
destined to be the objects of the wills of others and those who were self-willed,
and construed the social division between the élite and the masses as a product of
the unequal distribution of such innate characteristics.
The difficulty, as far as Nietzsche and Ortega were concerned, was that this
‘natural’ balance between élites and masses had been threatened by the advent of
democracy, the development of the press and of popular education and, more
generally, by the dissolution of those traditional forms of social relationships
which allegedly had hitherto clearly defined for the masses their subordinate
‘place’ within a hierarchically structured social order. In short, they feared that
the rule of the élite was over and the reign of the rabble about to begin unless the
former could be induced to rouse itself, to turn back the tide of democracy and
liberalism which threatened to engulf it.

The masses and moral disorder
An enduring theme in the work of the founding fathers of the sociological
tradition was the concern with the threat of moral disorder which was said to be
posed by the disintegration of the traditional social ties binding the individual to