The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The main target of Packard’s attack was the relatively new technique of motivational research (MR), which relied on intensive interviewing, psychoanalytic theory, and qualitative analysis, and in which sex often figured prominently. As Galbraith had emphasised, many people did not question advertising – they thought it important in helping fuel the demand on which mass society’s prosperity was based. In 1956 the prominent MR advocate Ernest Dichter had announced, ‘Horatio Alger is dead. We do not any longer really believe that hard work and savings are the only desirable things in life; yet they remain subconscious criteria of our feeling of morality.’ For Dichter, consumption had to be linked to pleasure, consumers had to be shown that it was ‘moral’ to enjoy life. This should be reflected in advertising.74

  Packard’s main aim in The Hidden Persuaders was to show – via a catalogue of case histories – that American consumers were little more than ‘mindless zombies’ manipulated by the new psychological techniques. In one revealing case, for example, he quoted a marketing study by Dichter himself.75 Headed ‘Mistress versus Wife,’ this was carried out for the Chrysler Corporation and explored why men bought sedans even though they preferred sporty models. The report argued that men were drawn into automobile showrooms by the flashy, sporty types in the window, but actually bought less flashy cars, ‘just as he once married a plain girl.’ ‘Dichter urged the auto maker to develop a hardtop, a car that combined the practical aspects men sought in a wife with the sense of adventure they imagined they would find in a mistress.’76 Packard believed that MR techniques were antidemocratic, appealing to the irrational, mind-moulding on a grand scale. Such techniques applied to politics could take us nearer to the world of 1984 and Animal Farm and, Packard thought, following Riesman, that the ‘other-directed’ types of mass society were most at risk. Advertising not only helped along the consumer society, it stopped people achieving autonomy.

  Packard’s second book, The Status Seekers, was less original, attacking the way advertising used status and people’s fears over loss of status to sell goods.77 His more substantial point was that, just then in America, there was much debate over whether the country was really less class-ridden than Europe, or had its own system, based more on material acquisitions rather than heredity. (This also was an issue that Galbraith had raised.) Packard advanced the view that business was essentially hypocritical in its stance. On the one hand, it claimed that the wider availability of the consumer products it was selling made America less divided; on the other, one of its major methods of selling used exactly these differences in status – and anxiety over those differences – as a device for promoting the sales of goods. His third book, The Waste Makers, used as its starting point a 1957 paper by a Princeton undergraduate, William Zabel, on planned obsolescence, in other words the deliberate manipulation of taste so that goods would seem out of date – and therefore be replaced – long before they were physically exhausted.78 This last book was probably Packard’s most overstated case; even so, analysis of his correspondence showed that many people were already disenchanted by the underlying nature of mass consumer society but felt so atomised they didn’t know what to do about it. As he himself was to put it later, the people who wrote to him were members of ‘The Lonely Crowd.’79

  Naturally, the business community didn’t relish these attacks; as an editorial in Life put it, ‘Some of our recent books have been scaring the pizazz out of us with the notion of the Lonely Crowd … bossed by a Power Elite … flim-flammed by hidden persuaders and emasculated into a neuter drone called the Organisational Man.’80

  One general notion underpinned and linked these various ideas. It was that, as a result of changes in the workplace and the creation of mass society, and as a direct consequence of World War II and the events leading up to it, a new socio-politico-psychology, a new human condition, was abroad. The traditional sources from which people took their identity had changed, bringing new possibilities but also new problems. Riesman, Mills, Galbraith, and the others had each chipped away, sculpting part of the picture, but it was left to another man to sum it all up, to describe this change of epoch in the language it deserved.

  Daniel Bell was born in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1919 and grew up in the garment district in a family that had migrated from Bialystok, between Poland and Russia (the family name was Bolotsky). Bell was raised in such poverty, he says, that there was ‘never any doubt’ that he would become a sociologist, in order to explain what he saw to himself. At the City College of New York he joined a reading group that included Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Howe, all well-known sociologists and social critics. Some were Trotskyists, though most later changed their beliefs and formed the backbone of the neoconservative movement. Bell also worked as a journalist, editing the New Leader, then at Fortune with Whyte, but he also had a stint at the end of the war as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, with David Riesman, and moonlighted as a sociology lecturer at Columbia from 1952–1956. He later joined Columbia full time before moving on to Harvard, in 1965 founding The Public Interest with Irving Kristol as a place to rehearse the great public debates.81 It was while he was moonlighting at Columbia that he produced the work for which he first became known to the world outside sociology. This was The End of Ideology.

  In 1955 Bell attended the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Milan, where several notable liberal and conservative intellectuals addressed a theme set by Raymond Aron, ‘The End of the Ideological Age?’ Among those present, according to Malcolm Waters, in his assessment of Bell, were Edward Shils, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Hugh Gaitskell, Max Beloff, J. K. Galbraith, José Ortega y Gassett, Sidney Hook, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Bell’s contribution was a lecture on America as a mass society. The ‘End of Ideology’ debate – which would recur in several forms during the rest of the century – was seen originally by Aron as a good thing because he thought that ideologies prevent the building of a progressive state. In particular, Aron identified nationalism, liberalism, and Marxist socialism as the three dominant ideologies that, he said, were crumbling: nationalism because states were weakening as they became interdependent, liberalism because it could offer no ‘sense of community or focus for commitment,’ and Marxism because it was false.82 Bell’s contribution was to argue that this whole process had gone further, faster, in the United States. For him, ideology was not only a set of governing ideas but ideas that were ‘infused with passion,’ and sought ‘to transform the whole way of life.’ Ideologies therefore take on some of the characteristics of a secular religion but can never replace real religion because they do not address the great existential questions, particularly death. For Bell, ideologies had worked throughout the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth because they helped offer moral guidance and represented real differences between the various interest groups and classes in society. But those differences had been eroded over the years, thanks to the emergence of the welfare state, the violent oppression carried out by socialist regimes against their populations, and the emergence of new stoic and existential philosophies that replaced the romantic ideas of the perfectibility of human nature.83 Mass society, for Bell and for the United States at least, was a society of abundance and optimism where traditional differences were minimised and a consensus of views had emerged. The blood, sweat, and tears had gone out of politics.84

  Bell wasn’t seeking a prescription, merely attempting to describe what he saw as an epochal change in society, where its members were no longer governed by dominant ideas. Like Fromm or Mills he was identifying a new form of life coming into being. We are now apt to take that society for granted, especially if we are too young to have known anything else.

  Few if any of these writers were associated intimately with any political party, but the majority were, for a time at least, of the left rather than of the right. The equality of effort demanded from all sections of society in wartime had a power
ful significance that was much more than symbolic. This was reflected not only in the creation and provisions of the welfare state but in all the analyses of mass society, which accepted implicitly that all individuals had an equal right to the rewards that life had to offer. This equality was also part of the new human condition.

  But was that justified? Michael Young, a British educationalist, an arch innovator, and a friend and colleague of Daniel Bell, produced a satire in 1958 that poked fun at some of these cherished assumptions.85 The Rise of the Meritocracy was ostensibly set in 2034 and was cast as an ‘official’ report written in response to certain ‘disturbances’ that, to begin with, are not specified.86 The essence of the satire is that the hereditary principle in life has been abolished, to be replaced by one of merit (IQ+Effort=Merit), with the ‘aristocracy’ replaced by a ‘meritocracy.’ Interestingly, Young found it very difficult to publish the book – it was turned down by eleven publishers.87 One suggested that it would only be worth publishing if it were rewritten as a satire like Animal Farm (as if that had been easy to publish). Young did rewrite the book as a satire, but even so the publisher still declined to take it on. Young was also criticised for coining a term, meritocracy, that had both a Greek and a Latin root. In the end the book was published by a friend at Thames & Hudson, but only as an act of friendship – whereupon The Rise promptly sold several hundred thousand copies.88

  The book is divided into two sections. ‘The Rise of the Elite’ is essentially an optimistic gloss on the way high-IQ people have been let loose in the corridors of power; the second section, ‘The Decline of the Lower Classes,’ is a gleeful picture of the way such social engineering is almost bound to backfire. Young doesn’t take sides; he merely fires both barrels of the argument as to what would happen if we really did espouse wholeheartedly the mantra ‘equality of opportunity.’ His chief point is that such an approach would be bound to lead to eugenic nonsenses and monstrosities, that the new lower classes – by definition stupid – would have no leadership worth the name, and that the new IQ-rich upper classes would soon devise ways to keep themselves in power. Here he ‘reveals’ that society in 2034 has discovered ways of predicting the IQ of an infant at three months; the result is predictable – a black market in babies in which the stupid children of high IQ parents are swapped, along with large ‘dowries,’ for high-IQ children of stupid parents.89 It is this practice that, when exposed in the newspapers, gives rise to the ‘disturbances,’ an incoherent rising by a leaderless, stupid mob, which has no chance of success.

  Young’s argument overlaps with Bell’s, and others, insofar as he is saying that the new human condition risks being a passionless, cold, boring block of bureaucracy in which tyranny takes not the form of fascism or communism or socialism but benevolent bureaucratisation.90 Scientism is a factor here, too, he says. You can measure IQ, maybe, but you can never measure good parenting or put a numerical value on being an artist, say, or a corporate CEO. And maybe any attempt to try only creates more problems than it solves.

  Young had pushed Bell’s and Riesman’s and Mills’s reasoning to its limits, its logical conclusion. Man’s identity was no longer politically determined; and he was no longer an existential being. His identity was psychological, biological, predetermined at birth. If we weren’t careful, the end of ideology meant the end of our humanity.

  26

  CRACKS IN THE CANON

  In November 1948 the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to T. S. Eliot. For him it was a year of awards – the previous January he had been given the Order of Merit by King George VI. Interviewed by a reporter in Princeton after the announcement from Stockholm, Eliot was asked for what the Nobel had been awarded. He said he assumed it was ‘for the entire corpus.’ ‘When did you publish that?’ replied the reporter.1

  Between The Waste Land and the prize, Eliot had built an unequalled reputation for his hard, clear poetic voice, with its bleak vision of the emptiness and banality running through modern life. He had also written a number of carefully crafted and well-received plays peopled with mainly pessimistic characters, who had lost their way in a world that was exhausted. By 1948 Eliot was extremely conscious of the fact that his own work was, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd put it, ‘one of the more brightly chiselled achievements of a culture that was dying,’ and that partly explains why, in the same month that he travelled to Stockholm to meet the Swedish king and receive his prize, he also published his last substantial prose book.2 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is not his best book, but it interests us here because of its timing and the fact that it was the first of a small number of works on both sides of the Atlantic that, in the aftermath of war, formed the last attempt to define and preserve the traditional ‘high’ culture, which Eliot and others felt to be mortally threatened.3

  As we saw in chapter 11, The Waste Land, besides its grim vision of the post-World War I landscape, had been constructed in a form that was frankly high culture – fiercely elitist and deliberately difficult, with elaborate references to the classics of the past. In the post-World War II environment, Eliot clearly felt that a somewhat different form of attack, or defence, was needed – in effect, a balder statement of his views, plain speaking that did not risk being misunderstood or overlooked. Notes begins by sketching out various meanings of the term ‘culture’ – as in its anthropological sense (‘primitive culture’), its biological sense (bacterial culture, agriculture), and in its more usual sense of referring to someone who is learned, civil, familiar with the arts, who has an easy ability to manipulate abstract ideas.4 He discusses the overlap between these ideas before concentrating on his preferred subject, by which he means that, to him, culture is a way of life. Here he advances the paragraph that was to become famous: ‘The term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.’5

  But if this list seems ecumenical, Eliot soon makes it clear that he distinguishes many levels in such a culture. He is not blind to the fact that producers of culture – artists, say – need not necessarily have high intellectual gifts themselves.6 But for him, culture can only thrive with an elite, a cultural elite, and cannot exist without religion, his point being that religion brings with it a shared set of beliefs to hold a way of life together – Eliot is convinced therefore that democracy and egalitarianism invariably threaten culture. Although he often refers to ‘mass society,’ his main target is the breakdown of the family and family life. For it is through the family, he says, that culture is transmitted.7 He ends by discussing the unity of European culture and the relation of culture to politics.8 The overall unity of European culture, he argues, is important because – like religion – it offers a shared context, a way for the individual cultures within Europe to keep themselves alive, taking in what is new and recognising what is familiar. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead from Science and the Modern World (1925): ‘Men require from their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.’9 But perhaps the most important point of culture, Eliot says, lies in its impact on politics. The power elite needs a cultural elite, he argues, because the cultural elite is the best antidote, provides the best critics for the power brokers in any society, and that criticism pushes the culture forward, prevents it stagnating and decaying.10 He therefore thinks that there are bound to be classes in society, that class is a good thing, though he wants there to be plenty of movement between classes, and he recognises that the chief barrier to the ideal situation is the family, which quite naturally tries to buy privilege for its offspring. He views it as obvious that cultures have evolved, that some cultures are higher than others, but does not see this as caus
e for concern or, be it said, as an excuse for racism (though he himself was later to be accused of anti-Semitism).11 For Eliot, within any one culture, the higher, more evolved levels positively influence the lower levels by their greater knowledge of, and use of, scepticism. For Eliot, that is what knowledge is for, and its chief contribution to happiness and the common good.

  In Britain Eliot was joined by F. R. Leavis. Much influenced by Eliot, Leavis, it will be recalled from chapter 18, was born and educated in Cambridge. Being a conscientious objector, he spent World War I as a stretcher bearer. Afterward he returned to Cambridge as an academic. On his arrival he found no separate English faculty, but he, his wife Queenie, and a small number of critics (rather than novelists or poets or dramatists) set about transforming English studies into what Leavis was later to call ‘the centre of human consciousness.’ All his life Leavis evinced a high moral seriousness because he believed, quite simply, that that was the best way to realise ‘the possibilities of life.’ He thought that writers – poets especially but novelists too – were ‘more alive’ than anyone else, and that it was the responsibility of the university teacher and critic to show why some writers were greater than others. ‘English was the route to other disciplines.’12

  Early in his career, in the 1930s, Leavis extended the English syllabus to include assessments of advertisements, journalism, and commercial fiction, ‘in order to help people resist conditioning by what we now call the “media.” ‘However, in 1948 he published The Great Tradition and in 1952 The Common Pursuit.13 Note the words ‘Tradition’ and ‘Common,’ meaning shared. Leavis believed passionately that there is a common human nature but that we each have to discover it for ourselves – as had the authors he concentrated on in his two books: Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. No less important, he felt that in judging serious literature there was the golden – the transcendent – opportunity to exercise judgement ‘which is both “personal” and yet more than personal.14 This transcendental experience was what literature, and criticism, were for, and why literature is the central point of human consciousness, the poet ‘the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.’ Leavis’s literary criticism was the most visible example of Eliot’s high-level scepticism at work.15