Why Intellectuals Hate Mass Culture

Why are intellectuals always bemoaning the spread of what they have labelled as Mass Culture? Why have they made a categorical imperative out of their tea-time habit of lamenting how everyone is wearing Levi-Strauss, drinking at Starbucks, gulping down Nescafe, guzzling Pepsi, listening to MTV, watching Hollywood, and eating McDonald's? The politically correct response, of course, is this, in all its bluntness : It sells to be anti-American these days; and, yes, Che Guevara is back in fashion. There just might, however, be another reason for this modish antipathy to the spread of Mass Culture that is wide-spread among intellectuals.

Even a hundred years ago, though, things were rather different, and intellectuals were then very fond of Culture which served as an umbrella-term for the set of human dispositions, propensities, tastes, and practices that are malleable and that can be moulded through 'education' so that the end-product would be an individual who was 'refined', 'sophisticated', and, in short, 'cultured'. Immense efforts were made by the intellectuals, in alliance with the administrative, judicial, and legislative apparatuses of the modern states, to ensure that more and more human beings became 'cultured'; and the intellectuals, as the self-established experts in emerging disciplines such as 'psychoanalysis' and 'sociology', sold their services to the states to enforce universally applicable norms of social organisation and individual conduct, as these were defined by them. Thus the states spawned entire arrays of 'reform centres', 'correction/reeducation wards', 'psychiatric camps', and 'welfare zones', all of them geared towards the extirpation of local ('retarded', 'retrograde') and indigenous ('superstitious', 'reactionary') cultural differences in order to establish, propagate, and reproduce the Official Culture as prescribed by the intellectuals.

Today, however, things look very different : Culture has become swept into the vortices of the market, a system over which the intellectuals have no power. Consequently, literature, music, art, and sculpture, all of which were earlier viewed by the intellectuals as symbols of a Culture sanctified by their hallowed presence have now become commodified as objects for amusement, free-play, parody, and entertainment. Publishers of books and magazines, owners of art galleries, and managers of record companies, do not need the help of the intellectuals to find out what the market wants to buy and what can be sold in it.

And it is therefore no wonder that the intellectuals are highly offended and enraged by this unexpected snubbing that they have received from the market forces, and like a disgruntled and spiteful school-boy they have hit back by accusing Culture of having run away from their benevolent patronage and having become degenerate, decadent, and debauched. Having been dethroned from their earlier supreme position of being able to dictate what the Official Culture should be, the intellectuals make a feeble attempt to strike at their detractors by accusing them of homogenizing, totalizing, and uniformizing culture in the form of Mass Culture (glibly forgetting, overlooking, or hiding their own earlier totalitarian record of swamping down on cultural diversity).

So the next time you meet an intellectual on the road who accuses you of lack of taste and discernment, of crudity, of coarseness, and of uncouthness simply because you are drinking a Starbucks coffee, listening to an iPod, and wearing a Lee jeans, do not be ruffled at least. Patiently listen through the outburst (without, of course, lowering the sound-volume on the iPod), then pat the intellectual on the shoulder, and walk on to enjoy your Starbucks. The intellectual is simply doing what anyone in that position would do : lament on one's devastating loss of cultural power through knee-jerk invectives at whoever has taken away this power.