Page 30 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 23
It is here that we should begin, then, with the most general sup­
positions about culture that informed accounts of the rise of mass
society and, in turn, the typical post-war approach to media effects.
Culture, in this analysis, is above all a repository of value: human­
ity's most significant beliefs and achievements are articulated and
'stored' in culture. Or, at least, this is how it should be. But culture
is not of a piece. It is differentiated, not simply in the sense that it
encompasses different cultural forms, but also in the sense that
such forms are perceived to be of different degrees of worth.
Accordingly, culture can only properly be understood in hierarchi­
cal terms. We can and should make an evaluative distinction
between, at its simplest, 'high' and 'low' culture. It is 'high' culture
that carries the key values, that incorporates the richest and most
significant expressions of human aspirations. 'Low' culture, by con­
trast, is a vulgarized product of industrial societies: commercially
motivated, mass produced, and tending to pander to the lowest
common denominator of taste evinced by the undiscriminating
mass.
So pervasive were these assumptions that even those inclined to
be positive about aspects of modern cultural life routinely adopted
the hierarchical conception. Take the sociologist Edward Shils, for
example, in his keynote paper given to an influential 1959 sympo­
sium. In some contrast to proponents of the orthodox mass society
thesis, Shils (1961) did not see mass culture in entirely negative
terms. He argued that mass society had occasioned a wider spread
of what he called 'civility' and citizenship, that it had generated a
growing emphasis on individual dignity, and that it had dispersed
worthwhile cultural materials far more widely through society than
had previously been the case. And yet even he remained unprob­
lematically willing to distinguish between levels of culture and,
perhaps more revealing, to label them in unashamedly evaluative
terms. 'For present purposes,' he writes, ' we shall employ a very

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