Crowd Culture
An Examination of the American Way of LifeBy Bernard Iddings BellISI Books
Copyright © 2007 Bernard Iddings Bell
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-882926-60-2Chapter One
I. The Cultural Picture
"The spread of democracy will not necessarily help us, indeed it makes our task more difficult. To call the masses into power is to dilute existing culture. They must be humored and satisfied; attention must be paid to their interests and tastes and if these are trifling, ignoble and base, the level of civilization will fall. There is good democracy; there is also the democracy which is a social order in which a degenerate mass has no other care than to enjoy the ignoble pleasures of vulgar men."-Sir Richard Livingstone
The chief threat to America comes from within America.
It comes from our prevailing self-admiration, from indisposition to listen to adverse criticism of our way of life, disinclination to see ourselves as we are, an unwillingness to confess our sins which has come dangerously near to being an inability to see that there are serious faults to admit and remedy. Most Americans regard an insistence on national self-criticism as traitorous or near it. In consequence, our people as a whole have acquired and retain a false optimism about the ability of our way of life to survive and flower. Most of us have a juvenile trust in the permanence of an America whose people forget the transitoriness of the immediate and the superficiality of the obvious, pay scarcely more than a polite lip service to what the race has discovered to be changeless and humanly necessary.
By no means all of us are complacent in this fashion. There is a growing number of critics, though still only a minority of Americans belong to it, which sees not only that all is far from well in these United States but that what is wrong is more than incidental or accidental. This minority is as well aware as anyone can be of American virtues and abilities. It knows that we are competent to make, cheaply and for the most part well, almost anything we wish to make; and that we are as a nation incredibly, though not inexhaustibly, wealthy. It knows, too, that Americans are hospitable, kindly, generous, though they are usually unwilling to involve themselves, in order to assist others, in sacrifice which means pain. The minority is sure that our way of life is better than that which prevails in totalitarian countries, if for no other reason than that criticism of that which is tolerated in our land if anyone cares to go in for it, reluctantly tolerated but still tolerated.
But somehow or other more than a few of us begin to see that while wealth accumulates in these United States, man seems to decay. Corruption corrodes our political and industrial doings. In our private lives a pervading relativism, an absence of conviction about what is the good life, a willingness to seek the easy way rather than the way of integrity, blunts the proddings of conscience, takes the zest out of living, creates a general boredom. We are not a happy people; our alleged gaiety is not spontaneous. Our boredom results not only in a reluctant morality but in shockingly bad manners, which most of us do not even know are bad manners. We become increasingly truculent. Our way of life, while opulent and brash and superficially friendly, is less and less conducive to peace of mind and security of soul.
The minority which feels this way grows in numbers, in clarity of perception, in willingness to speak up even when to do so brings down on its head a clamorous scorn from those who flatter and exploit an ailing democracy and, not too rarely, mete out persecution in its name.
The critical group of patriotic malcontents is sure that what the United States must produce, if it is to manage our magnificent material achievement, is Americans who are more sane, more spiritually adequate, than the present crop. We need such Americans not only to prevent us becoming and remaining slaves here at home to an industrial and political machinery manipulated by the unscrupulous, nor merely to keep us from greedily snarling over the fruits of technology until we find ourselves at one another's throats. The critical minority knows that we must produce and educate more understanding and more spiritually adequate Americans if we are to insure even our survival as a people and protect from external attack those opportunities for freedom in an ordered society which our Founding Fathers envisioned and for which they made great sacrifices.
The minority recognizes that in the One World which is coming into being our nation cannot long secure itself from alien enemies if all it has to depend on is a continued threat to use armed force or an attempt to purchase global good will toward us. It knows, for instance, that Charles Malik, the Lebanese Minister to Washington, told the unvarnished truth in an address which he made not long ago in New York City. "In world affairs," he said, "there are two serious handicaps which it is difficult for the United States to live down. In massiveness, the old world has a decided advantage over the new, both as to population and to sheer quantity in matter. In time, therefore, the old world will certainly overtake you on the material plane. The second disadvantage is that whereas there are cultural and racial continuities between the Soviet Union and the whole of Asia, there are no such continuities between the United States and Asia. This is one of the most destiny-bearing facts of the world situation today. The only way for America to overcome these two disadvantages is by concentration on quality." "Can the United States develop," Dr. Malik asked, "a type of man who sums up in his character such a quality of understanding, of humility, of truth, of humor, of moral stature, of strength and resourcefulness of mind, of pregnant ideas, of universal sympathy and friendship and love, as to enable him, by the sheer weight of his being, to overcome the disadvantages of mass and discontinuity? It has not yet dawned upon America how much is required of her to develop this kind of humanity."
It is, of course, impossible to indict a whole nation; but by and large Americans are not today the sort of people whom Dr. Malik rightly says we need to be. Our dangerous inadequacy is due not so much to deliberate iniquity on the part of individuals as to the compulsions of a culture which shoots wide of the mark in its estimate of human values.
A culture is that complex of attitudes and resultant actions in which are embodied and revealed the prevailing aspirations and desires of that congeries of human beings in the midst of which one lives. It is exceedingly difficult for anyone to escape the pressure of public opinion. It is hard to free oneself from it even in matters of minor and incidental importance. In a democracy like ours it is, indeed, commonly considered unforgivable to wish so to escape. But there must be those who know freedom from the clamorous crowd if there is to be any considerable improvement in the complexion of the common life. To better American character there must be those who understand the prevailing American culture; those who have discovered what ends our citizens chiefly pursue and train their children to pursue, and what means of pursuing these ends are deemed respectable. If the ends seem inadequate or the means reprehensible when viewed and evaluated in the light of the agelong history of human behavior, the patriot must reject and attack them, no matter at what risk to himself. He must refuse to swim with the current...
