Bread and Circuses

Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay

Patrick Brantlinger

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501707636
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia mondiale

Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and the theorists of the Frankfurt Institute, down to Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Bell, Brantlinger considers the many versions of negative classicism and shows how the belief in the historical inevitability of social decay—a belief today perpetuated by the mass media themselves—has become the dominant view of mass culture in our time. While not defending mass culture in its present form, Brantlinger argues that the view of culture implicit in negative classicism obscures the question of how the media can best be used to help achieve freedom and enlightenment on a truly democratic basis.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
The Two Classicisms

We change cures, finding none effective, none valid, because we have faith neither in the peace we seek nor in the pleasures we pursue. Versatile sages, we are the stoics and epicureans of modern Romes.

—E. M. CIORAN, A Short History of Decay

THIS is an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret 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 and movie Being There; its most severe critics treat it as an instrument of totalitarian manipulation and social disintegration. All critical theories of mass culture suggest that there is a superior type of culture, usually defined in terms of some historical model: the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Periclean Athens. I 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 recreation 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 and fall of the Roman Empire. Hence, “bread and circuses.” Comparisons of modern society with Roman imperial decadence I shall call “negative classicism.”

Frequently what a social scientist or a literary critic or a popular 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 of this 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. Unless 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. I 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 mythology, 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, liberalism, 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 notions 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 technological society” will strangle upon its own contradictions, chief among which is likely to be an amorphous monstrosity called “mass culture.”

My 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 education, the cultural effects of the processes of democratization and industrialization. Since a complete history of this mythology would have to survey most writing about culture and society over the same time span, I have chosen instead to focus on major patterns and major cultural theorists. The first chapter offers an overview of some of the assumptions and theories that shape contemporary responses to mass culture, as well as a capsule history of the “bread and circuses” analogy. 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 contributions 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 industrialization—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 declining 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 of the 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 barbarism. 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—Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. 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 capitalism. 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 negative classicism seems inevitably to point to television as the chief culprit in the alleged decline and fall of contemporary culture. Yet television and the other mass media are historically without precedent, 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 potential, including some forms of negative classicism.

In general negative classicism has involved associating mass culture and the mass media with other socioeconomic factors that are clearly destructive or “decadent.” In a recent essay that discusses uncontrolled industrial expansion, overpopulation, international conflict, and an alleged demise of political leadership, I. 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 literacy has, as ought to be more than apparent by now, lowered the general level of culture and understanding.”1 A McLuhanesque addition 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 the 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 hierarchical order and sustained by the great works of the past and the truths and beauties achieved in the tradition destroyed itself in two World Wars. We are now living in a cruel “late stage in Western affairs” marked by feelings of disarray, by a regress into violence 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 . . . small 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 committed suicide, but that mass culture has assassinated the genuine article, the elitist civilization of the past. And, where mass culture is perceived as a destructive 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 exception. If the term “decadence” alone does not point clearly to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, then the term “barbarism” brings the pattern into focus. Echoing Toynbee, Ortega, Spengler, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and many other negative classicists, Sinai believes that high culture is today besieged by “the masses,” bent on the “vulgarisation and proletarianisation” of “the arts and sciences.” The masses represent “the new barbarism,” which has “arisen within modern civilisation rather than being an invasion from without.”

In a discussion of Sinai’s essay published in a later issue of Encounter, several writers, while agreeing with much of his analysis, offer wry, thoughtful comments about his doomsaying. They point out that, if the emergence of the masses and the development of mass culture has its destructive side (and what process of social change has not?), it has also its constructive side. Elitism or aristocracy may have given rise to high culture, but on the backs of the vast majority. Furthermore, as Ronald Butt writes, “if it is the fate of all civilisations” to decline and fall, “why should it disturb us intellectually (whatever the inconvenience to us personally), particularly if it is part of a natural process of death and rebirth?”2 Butt’s question, of course, reveals an illogicality characteristic of all prophetic social criticism, including the mythology of negative classicism. If the falls of empires can be prophesied, they must be predetermined. Because the “iron law of decadence” must be inescapable to be “iron,” the better part of intellectual valor would seem to entail making the best of a bad situation rather than writing Jeremiads about it. Besides, as Butt goes on to say, although Rome did indeed fall, out of its decay “came the much higher, more spiritual and humane aspirations of Christian Europe.” He adds: “It is not a fashionable thing to say, but . . . I would personally have preferred to live in the humane cultural excitement of Alfred the Great’s Christian court than in the bread-and-circuses atmosphere of Imperial Rome. Except, of course, for the lack of hot water and heating.”

The phrase panem et circenses, or “bread and circuses,” comes from Juvenal’s tenth satire. Referring to the attempted coup by Sejanus against Tiberius, Juvenal writes:

And what does the mob of Remus say? It follows fortune, as it always does, and rails against the condemned [Sejanus]. That same rabble, if Nortia [Etruscan goddess of fortune] had smiled upon the Etruscan [Sejanus], if the aged Emperor had been struck down unawares, would in that very hour have conferred upon Sejanus the title of Augustus. Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things—Bread and Circuses!3

Juvenal suggests that the Roman Republic has given way to the Empire because the fickle populace has abandoned its political responsibilities for doles of food and the lures of the racetrack and the arena. In modern writing, his phrase is often cited in criticisms of mass culture to denote a process of social decline. The modern masses (so goes the argument) have abandoned political involvement in favor of welfare programs and the distractions of the mass media. The result...