Page 42 - Culture Society and the Media

32 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
The masses and totalitarianism
Perhaps the most pessimistic current of the mass society outlook is that which
seeks to argue a connection between the social conditions of ‘mass man’ and the
rise of totalitarian social and political movements. The most influential tendency
within this current of thought has been that represented by Hannah Arendt and
Carl Friedrich.
Regarding Nazism and Stalinism as mere variants of an essentially similar
form of totalitarianism, they have sought to explain them as the result of the
entry into politics of irrational forces which the age of mass democracy is said to
have inaugurated by giving political weight to the opinions of the masses during
a period when their social atomization rendered them pliable to élite
manipulation. Arguing that the nineteenth century witnessed the almost complete
fragmentation of the social structure, the creation of a society without classes or
even primary social groupings, men—and women, it needs to be added—were said
to enter the twentieth century in a condition of utter isolation and alienation,
totally lacking the degree of psychic self-reliance which their situation required.
Rootless, lonely, directionless, ‘mass man’ thus constituted ready-made fodder
for totalitarian parties to the extent that the chiliastic ideologies these espoused
offered him a means by which he might overcome his puniness and isolation, the
psychic pain of responsibility, by merging his will with that of a mass
movement.

Mass culture versus folk culture
Finally, it has been argued that the development of mass society has been
accompanied by the formation of a new type of culture—‘mass culture’—which,
in its pervasiveness, threatens to undermine, to destroy by contamination, the
qualities of moral and aesthetic excellence inscribed in the ‘high culture’ of the
educated élite and which is construed as grossly inferior to the ‘organic’,
supposedly more robust forms of ‘folk culture’ which had previously comprised
the cultural life of the common people. In place of a sturdy, self-reliant and self-
created culture celebrating the wholesome values of an organic folk, it is
contended, we now have a weak and insipid ‘mass culture’ which is
commercially produced and offered to the masses for their passive consumption:

Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression
of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of
High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above.
It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are
passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying
and not buying…. Folk Art was the people’s own institution, their private
little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters’ High
Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses