II. Modern Mass Society

The first difficulty crops up at once. The pioneers who early recognized and diagnosed the symptoms of modern mass society one of the first and most distinguished of whom, Ortega y Gasset, recently left us in old age-must today be inclined to observe some what wistfully that their endeavor has heen overtaken by the com mon fate of new ideas. It is a fate which in itself exemplifies one of the laws of mass society: what was once fresh and meaningful be comes somewhat like a coin which ]passes from hand to hand and loses its sharp outline in the process. The more "enmassment" has been talked ahout in the last fifteen years, the more shallow and blurred the concept has become. At the same time, a certain amount of exaggeration leads us to see "mass phenomena" everywhere. Occasionally, one meets with a tendency to use such words somewhat smugly and self-righteously as if "mass man" were always the other fellow-as an expression of some sort of vague uneasiness or of genuinely reactionary disso ciation from everything which may be called "the people." The very success of a new watchword is often its undoing, because it is hard to hear it up and down the country without eventually com ing to regard it as hackneyed and then to react successively with weariness, criticism, and, finally, antagonism. This is probably the most charitable explanation for the fact that some smart alecks nowadays pretend that all the fuss about mass and enmassment is a false alarm and that the disintegration of society described by these words is only a new, and anything hut pathological, stage of cultural development. These people would have us believe that everything is as it should be and that paradise is just around the corner: the paradise of a society whose idea of bliss is leisure, gadgets, and continuous fast displacement on concrete highways.

There are those who lightheartedly dismiss this great anxiety as intellectual twaddle and unashamedly talk about a new cultural 37 A HUMANE ECONOMY style just because of the ever rising consumption of things by which the standard of .life is thoughtlessly measured. Some of these peo ple, I say, behave like the students in Auerbach's cellar: As 'twere five hundred hogs, we feel so cannibalic jolly. But Mephistopheles' answer is not far away: Not if we had them by the neck, I vow, Would e'er these people scent the Devil! What these happy-go-lucky children of our time do not seem to grasp is that to regard the problem of modern mass society as an invention of intellectual dreamers is to misunderstand the central issue of our epoch. It is the crucial issue for the moral, spiritual, political, economic, and social future of the world into which we are born. Whoever denies this ought to reflect that in. ignoring or belittling the enmassment problem he is at one with· the Commu nists and so furnishes one more proof of the close affinity between a certain brand of Western thought and Communism. "Mass," to take an example at random, is defined in the Communist Lexikon A-Zin einem Band (Leipzig, 1955) only as "the masses of the workers as a whole," and Ortega y Gasset is described as an "ex treme reactionary and individualist philosopher."

The very mildest answer which such glossing over and extenua tioncalls for is that mass society is a phenomenon for which we lack historical standards and one for which we are unprepared by the experience of earlier ages. This is certainly true of the all pervasive character of mass society and of its foundations, if not, perhaps, of a.ll its separate elements. This phenomenon accounts for a large part of the revolutionary change which has taken place during the last forty years in the manner of human life and thought and which radically distinguishes our epoch from all past ones. This revolution has occurred within the lifetime of the more elderly amongst us, including myself. Together with the triumphs of 38 MODERN MASS SOCIETY technology, urbanization, and industry and with the still rising flood of world population, the genesis and spread of mass society is one of the most important facets of this revolution.

Mass and World Population Each of us brings his personal experience to the understanding of the problem under discussion. What the words mass society first call to mind is the visiblecrowdedness of our existence, which seems to get irresistibly worse every day: sheer oppressive quan tity, as such, surrounding us everywhere:; masses of people who are all more or less the same-or who are at least assimilated· in ap pearance and behavior; overwhelming quantities of man-made things everywhere, the traces of people, their organizations, their claims. Merely to get along with all of these quantities requires con stant adjustment, accommodation, self-control, conscious and prac ticed responses, and almost military uniformity. In the great cities of the United States, it is considered necessary that school chil dren, instead of being taught more important things, should have lessons in "social adjustment," that is, in the art of queueing pa tiently, folding one's newspaper in the subway without being a nuisance to other passengers, and other such tricks of civilization.

Even in Europe it would be interesting to investigate how much less history or other culturally important things children learn at school because they have to be taught the traffie code. Nor is it easy nowadays to escape from the crowdedness of life and the flood of people in order to be alone for a while. In my expe rience, a typical Sunday outing in New York means taking one's car and driving out of town along an exactly prescribed traffic lane and in the midst of other endless· columns of motorcars, stopping at the edge of a wooded area and parking the car in the space pro vided, paying one's entrance fee and looking, with thousands of others, for a free square yard to sit down on, stretching one's legs by walking up and down a few paces, and then returning, in the 39 A HUMANE ECONOMY same manner as was used in coming out, to one's flat on the fif teenth floor of an apartment building. After that, one is supposed to be refreshed and ready to face the week's subway trips and office work somewhere up on the fiftieth floor, and perhaps might even be energetic enough to spend an evening at the movies in Rocke feller Center, in company with ten thousand others, having first, as part of an endless human serpent, shuffied through a cafeteria in order to stoke up with the necessary calories and vitamins.

To try to escape from the giant honeycombs of city dwellings into the suburbs is to jump from the frying pan into the fire-with reference, again, to some parts of the United States. Suburbia has its own very charming brands of mass living. The price of having a little house and garden of one's own may be a gregariousness that surpasses anything known in the center of town. There can he no question of one's home being one's castle. Everybody is forever "dropping in" on everybody else; the agglomeration of people stifles all expression of individuality, any attempt at keeping to oneself; every aspect of life is centrally ruled. When I was living on Long Island, even the temperature of the central heating-al ways excessive for my taste-was controlled at the common boiler house for all the tens of thousands huddled together in this settle ment. "To hoard possessions is frowned upon," writes American sociologist William H. Whyte, Jr., in his "Individualism in Sub urbia" (Confluence [September, 1954], p. 321). "Books, silver ware, and tea services are constantly rotated, and the children feel free to use each other's bicycles and toys without bothering to ask." Everyone is under pressure to join in, to take part in com munal life, even if it means giving up or neglecting his private occupations, unless he wants to be known as a spoilsport. Classes on "family group living" end up by being more important than natural and free family life itself. Yet the development of a natural community is impossible, if only because of the constant coming and going of people.

We all know to what extent this American pattern of life has 40 MODERN MASS SOCIETY already spread to Europe. We can hardly hope to escape the same hell of congestion. In Europe, too, the traffic columns are becoming denser, and even the queues at ski lifts are getting longer; the stony ranges of our cities grow upwards and sideways; the very moun tain peaks, which Providence seenlS to have preserved as a last refuge of solitude, are drawn into mass civilization by chairlifts. In Europe, too, the power shovels of the world of steel and concrete are advancing steadily. As we increasingly become mere passively activated mass par ticles or social molecules, all poetry and dignity, and with them the very spice of life and its human content, go out of life. Even the dramatic episodes of existence--birth, sickness, and death take place in collectivized institutions. Our hospitals are medical factories, with division of labor between all sorts of health mechan ics and technicians dealing with the body. People live in mass quarters, superimposed upon each other vertically and extending horizontally as far as the eye can see; they work in mass factories or offices in hierarchical subordination;; they spend their Sundays and vacations in masses, flood the universities, lecture halls, and laboratories in masses, read books and newspapers printed in mil lions and of a level that usually corresponds to these mass sales, are assailed at every turn by the same billboards, submit, with millions of others, to the same movie, radio, and television programs, get caught up in some mass organization or other, flock in hundreds of thousands as thrilled spectators to the same sports stadiums. Only the churches are empty, almost a refuge of solitude. Whether we travel or stay at home in our sprawling cities-and more and more of us are at home in them-it is becorning ever harder to escape the rising flood of people which qrags us down and makes us crea tures of the herd or the mass machinery' which canalizes this flood.

More and more we are becoming a part of this human compound, and I imagine that few of us can still harbor any doubts about what this means for man's spiritual and moral existence or for the health of society as a whole. Nor can there be any doubt about the 41 A HUMANE ECONOMY immediate cause of this deluge of sheer human quantity and all its consequences. The immediate cause lies in a crudely simple fact: the irresistible, overflowing growth of population. Before the Sec ond World War, it was generally assumed that population growth would steadily slow down and eventually stop, at least in the most developed countries, but this prediction has been belied by the facts. The human flood has gone on rising with unbelievable speed throughout the world. No one can now speak of the possibility, let alone the probability, that the curve may flatten out in the foresee able future. World population is growing at a rate of something like 1.5 per cent each year, which means that it doubles every fifty years. The flood is most spectacular just where the limits of capacity have very nearly been reached: in the populous countries of Asia in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Burma. Especially impressive is the case of Egypt. This oasis, hemmed in on all sides by the desert or the sea and even now settled and cultivated to its utmost capacity, provides an alarming, concrete demonstration of what overpopula tion in the stark literal sense of the word can mean. What is new and disturbing in the situation is that, contrary to so many fore casts, the earth's population is rising and promises to go on rising at a faster rate than before, even in some of the old industrial coun tries of Europe and in the United States.

As alarming as the population growth is the blindness with which its dangers are denied or simply overlooked. While Jules Romains rightly regards the world-population problem as probleme numero un (in his book of that title) , very few people understand, let alone accept, this view. There is an important and interesting task here for psychologists, who might try to analyze and explain this deliri um mundi pullulantis, with its criminal optimism, as Schopen .. hauer might have called it, its cult of quantity, its taboos, and its strange mixture of statistics and lullabies, not forgetting the extra ordinary part played by demographic nationalism-for it is always the growth of one's own people, and never that of others, which gives cause for rej oicing. However,· there is a difference of degree 42 MODERN MASS SOCIETY between the Western world and sorrle of the Asian countries about to be drowned by the population flood. 'Under the pressure of com pelling facts, public opinion in Japan, for instance, has by now come around to the view that the birth rate must be adapted to the death rate. The same attitude is gaining ground in India. But in the industrial countries of the West, .large families are still re garded as a merit, to be rewarded by the treasury out of penalties on less procreative citizens, and it counts as a duty to the com munity to fulfill one's biological functions. Special emphasis should be given to the fact that this attitude, almost an "official" one in some countries, can no longer invoke the unequivocal dogma of the Catholic church, even though the latter has remained conservative on this subject for reasons which deserve respect. 2 Thus the modern world affords the unique spectacle of people being as busy multiplying as in preparing their own extermination, and by the very same technology without which the demographic growth could never have occurred in. the·first place. Now one would expect that if people watch this expansion with so much optimism they must have some sound reasons for it, especially since this optimism frequently takes the form of almost arrogant self-assur ance, occasionally combined with open contempt for the pessimists.

However, the reasons are anything but convincing; they are not even plausible. We are told that by improving agricultural methods and putting new land under cultivation we can .keep pace with population growth for a long time to come. But such assurances ring false, even at present, especially if we are honest enough to include in the calculation such extremely important conditions of equilibrium between population and economic potential as raw material and power resources,· as well as the symptoms of soil exhaustion and hydrological imbalance. Even now a country like India,in trying to raise the miserable standard of Hving of its expanding popula tion, has to keep running in order to stay in the same place-unless capital imports were to increase far in excess of any practical pos43 A HUMANE ECONOMY sibilities. In this field, as in all others, it is incontrovertibly true that even the most prodigious investment (such as the much-dis cussed Aswan Dam in Egypt) provides only a more or less ex tended breathing space-until the hard-won elbow room is popu lated by new millions.

The race between technology and population growth is becoming ever more arduous, and the necessary capital expenditure implies an ever more stringent restriction of current consumption. Nor can the race be kept up forever. This must surely be obvious to anyone who stops to think. Even the most stubborn optimism will even tually have to yield to the irrefutable fact that this historically unique and explosive population growth simply must cease, unless the world, with its population expanding at the present rate, is to have three hundred billion inhabitants in a few hundred years (more precisely, in the year 2300). If it has to stop eventually, why not now? Why must the earth first be transformed into an anthill? Why must nature be completely ravaged, with all the concomitant risks for man, the "parasite of the soil," to use Edward Hyams' phrase? Must we really try to put off the inevitable at the cost of making hell out of our civilization? I should say that this would be nothing less than criminal irresponsibility towards the coming generations and a cowardly postponement of a decision which will have to be made in the end.3 This is the world population position. The industrial nations of the West, riding on the crest of a wave of economic expansion and mass prosperity, would be deluding themselves if they thought that they could remain safe from these long-run prospects for any length of time. Nevertheless, they are in a favored position. It does seem as if ever more intensive industrialization, along with the possi bilities not· yet fully appreciable that will be created by atomic energy and automation, has provided a formula for reconciling a growing population with a rising standard of living. In fact, cer tain bold theories would have us believe th~t it is precisely popula44 MODERN MASS SOCIETY tion growth, with ensuing mass demand and mass production, which imparts dynamism to the industrial countries.

I shall not for the moment go into the question of whether this formula, even at present, achieves all that is claimed for it. The problem of combinihg population growth with rising standards of living requires far more precise and profound research than is usually accorded it. In some respects we may well be better off than the preceding generation, but in other respects we are a good deal poorer.· But even if there were less doubt about all this than there is, it would be rash to overlook the exorlbitant and still rising price which the Western industrial nations have to pay for this formula: the increasing vulnerability, instability, uncertainty, and suscepti bility of an economy running in top gear. The economic system of these countries, together with the social system which surrounds and supports it" can be likened to a pyra mid standing on its point. It is the work of man, more ingenious than anything imaginable but also more artificial, intricate, and, in the aggregate, more vulnerable to any failure of one of its parts, which failure a simpler and more robust system could survive without harm. The welfare and existence of millions of people de pend upon the orderly functioning of this huge mechanism, but with their mass passions, mass clairns, and mass opinions, these same people are undermining the conditions of order, certainty, and sober reason, without which the greatest technical and organi zational progress is of no avail.

Thus the foundations of a civilization to which we entrust the growing welfare of a rising population are weakened rather than strengthened by mass society, which is at the same time the result of this civilization and the origin of the population growth. We must ask ourselves whether, in the long run, the Western countries' mass supply system, with all its imponderable conditions, is at all com patible with the apparently irresistible development by which wage and salary earners are becoming the overwhelming majority of the 45 A HUMANE ECONOMY population everywhere. If we have to buy their good graces by continually yielding to economically irrational demands and by the continuous expansion of a welfare state which stifles responsi bility, incentives, and initiative alike and if we have to pay for this with chronic inflation, for how long can we he at all confident that technical progress will continue to yield the overall utility expected of it?

These are not idle questions, and no one who looks about with open eyes will regard them as such. But the mere circumstance that they can he seriously raised and that they admit, at least, of the possibility of a negative answer should be enough to shake the optimists' faith in an assured future for the world's teeming mil lions. The argument should be clinched, surely, by the considera tion that the tenderest spot of our system is its dependence on orderly international economic relations, a dependence inade quately measured by the mere statistical share of the industrial na tions' foreign trade in their national product. International eco nomic relations can be reasonably secure only if they form part of a political and ethical international order. We once had such an international order, hut today,· when the industrial nations of the West are improvidently taking a new demographic upsurge for granted, it has become a tragic certainty that this old international order-doomed, perhaps, by some ineluctable fatality-has broken down without being replaced by another. 5 We had the first inkling of what this signifies when we found that today the whim of an Oriental despot is enough to paralyze the proud millions of our motorcars and to turn our winter heating into a problem.

These sober reflections may cause some expansionists to cling all the more firmly to the above-mentioned theory, which regards demographic growth in the industrial countries of the West as an indispensable motive power of the economy and as self-supporting, thanks to the bounty of an economic system so dynamized. This sounds like the tale of a modem Baron Miinchhausen who is trying 46 MODERN MASS SOlCIETY to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Everything goes like clockwork: the more cradles there are in use, the greater is the demand for goods, the higher is investment, the fuller is full em ployment, the more vigorous is the boom, and the more dynamic the economy. This theory· is astonishingly popular, but it is highly dubious, to say the least, and in this simple form certainly wrong. The mere fact that until recently population .growth was, on the contrary, regarded as a source of unemployment should make us suspicious.

The example of the populous underdeveloped countries and, in Europe, of Italy proves that this can indeed be true in certain cir cumstances, namely, when population growth is associated with lack of capital, so that it is difficult to absorb the additional labor force without a decrease in wages. Conversely, we have to admit that population growth may help to overcome economic depression in conditions of excess capital caused by insufficient investment of savings. However, it remains doubtful whether such "structural" support of the capital market by means of demographic expansion continuing through cyclical fluctuations is a really effective coun terweight against the psychological and monetary factors causing these fluctuations. A still more pertinent question is whether, in the presence of an intelligent countercyclical policy, the remaining stimulating forces of the modern econolny would not be entirely sufficient.

In any case, these considerations are not topical today any where in the Western. world, since it suffers not from a surplus but from .a deficiency of capital and from inflationary excess invest ment caused in large part precisely by the rising populations' ad ditional capital demand for housing, means of production, roads, and many other things. In these circumstances there is a presump tion that without the stimulant of demographic expansion, we would get, instead of depression, a salutary and anti-inflationary limitation of investment to projects .designed to raise the produc47 A HUMANE ECONOMY tivity and welfare of a stable population. No convincing reason compels us to expect any decisive change in this situation in the foreseeable future. 6 For the rest, the champions of the theory here refuted generally do not seem to realize that it is a degradation of man and of the great mystery of creation to turn conception and birth into an indispensable means of raising the demand for motorcars, refrig erators, and television sets-a mere mathematical factor, as it were, in the production -consumption equation. If these people were right, it would be a most striking demonstration of how far we have already traveled along this demographic path leading to a life ever more artificial, contrived, and unstable.

Nor is this all. There is one more argument, a decisive one, which brings us back to the beginning of these reflections. Suppose that everything said so far is less convincing than I believe it to be. Suppose that technology, science, inventions, and organization can really keep in step with population growth or even get ahead of it. Suppose that we can somehow cope with the problem of the ex haustion of the soil and of known raw-ma~erial resources. And suppose that there occurred nothing but the gradual transforma tion of the world into some sort of colossal urban complex, broken up by sparse green patches, rather like the Ruhr today. With all of these implausibly favorable assumptions, what would we get, be yond the material fact that people are reasonably well off, have enough to eat, and possibly consume a growing quantity of phono graph records and automobile tires ? For how much does that count in the immeasurable non-material and therefore infinitely more important sense? In other words, what happens to man and his soul? What happens to the things which cannot be produced or expressed in monetary terms and bought but which are the ultimate conditions of man's happiness and of the fullness and dignity of his life?

This is the question. The fact that it is hardly ever raised consti tutes one of the hitterest commentaries that can he made on our 48 MODERN MASS SOCIETY times. Is it not, we may modestly ask, part of the standard of living that people should feel well and happy and should not lack what Burke calls the "unbought graces of life"-nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure, as distinct from that break in the rush which is called "spare time" and has to be filled by some hectic activity? All these are things, in fact, of which man is progressively deprived at startling speed by a mass society constantly swollen by new human floods. The optimists, with their illusions about population growth, are wrong at all levels of reasoning, and they are more in error at each successive level than at the preceding one. In the first place, they miscalculate with respect to the purely economic optimum size of population. They are defeated at the second level, where reflection on the· social optimum of population size raises the question of whether demographic expansion beyond a certain point does not endanger the stability of the econ~my's social framework. And they are in an altogether hopeless position at the third, last, and most important level, where the vital optimum is at stake. There are sound reasons for assuming the social optimum to lie well below the economic, since the social and moral instability of the system can assume alarming proportions, although technical and organi zational progress does not yet seenl to give grounds for disquiet, but it is obvious that the vital optimum lies very much lower still.

There is little doubt that the industrial countries· of the West, let alone the nations of Asia and Africa that are vegetating on the border line of absolute overpopulation, have already gone beyond both the economic and the social optinlum, and it is quite certain that they have left the vital optimum far behind and are rapidly approaching the vital maximum. Since these things can be neither measured nor weighed, the vital population optimum is obviously not susceptible of scientific defini tion and determination by the usual methods of sociology and economics. But this does not disprove the pa~amount importance of 49 A HUMANE ECONOMY the problem, though it challenges the methods of the social sciences, which have yet to learn that precision and truth are two very dif ferent matters. The social sciences lose all their meaning when their equations and statistics make them lose sight of the typical office worker in New York, who has to pay the price of human agglomeration by having to spend three hours a day commuting hetween his home and his office, who jumps from one means of transport onto another and is lucky if he finds a seat-provided, of course, that he does not set himself up as an outmoded, quixotic knight of chivalry in our era of equality between the sexes. These conditions clearly figure as a liahility in the balance sheet of his life. It will he small consolation to him that the item, counted as part of the transport component of national income, reappears as an asset in standard-of-living statistics. All this does is to illustrate the ahsurdity of such a standard-of ..living philosophy.

If we are to estimate correctly the vital significance of the pres ent-day flood of humanity, we must not forget the New York com muter, so typical of our era. But neither must we forget all the other consequences of that flood which are manifest in the con gestion of our existence. We must not forget the progressive disap pearance of the difference between town and country, glorified as an ideal by Marx and now taken for granted even hy non-Marxist sociologists, with a disdainful smile at our backwardness; or the noise and stench of mechanized mass living; or polluted rivers in which we can no longer bathe; or the increasing difficulty of as suring an adequate supply of drinking water; or the horrible viola tion of nature, which we are gradually turning into a desert and the balance of which we disturb and finally destroy, to our own incalculable damage. And finally, returning to the main stream of our argument, we must not forget mass society as a whole, whose primary origin or condition is the human flood itself.

It puts our time and its sociologists to shame that a man like John Stuart Mill, one of the fathers of nineteenth-century utilitarian ism, clearly saw, more than a hundred years ago, the issue which 50 MODERN MASS SOCIETY we characterize as the problem of the vital population optimum. In his Principles of Political Economy (Book IV, Chapter 6, §2), which, like the Communist Manifesto, appeared in 1848, we find the following: "There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increas~ of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I con fess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of popula tion necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be anlply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extir pated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cra dle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human be ings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited in crease of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it."

51 A HUMANE ECONOMY Wise words-and unheeded ones. More than a century later, one of the leading journalists of the United States, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, in an article in The Saturday Review (December 8, 1956) entitled "Sawdust, Seaweed, and Synthetics," accused the demographers of "appalling inhumanity" in solemnly calculating the "amount of nourishment necessary to fill ever more billions of bellies" without stopping to ask themselves whether life will still be worth living when we have to rely on sawdust, seaweed, and synthetics. "Per sonal freedom, nature, beauty, privacy, solitude, variety, savor trivial?" Even a positivist sociologist would have to admit that these are decisive values. "How long could a rashly multiplying mankind continue to find enough beauty?" Mowrer points out that if popu lation continues to increase, the authorities would necessarily have to curtail our liberties more and more, "not because they are neces sarily opposed to freedom but because they must do so if living is to be made endurable for any of [the people]." A hundred years ago, Mill had no doubts on this subject. But perhaps his dark fore bodings had first to come true, so that in our own days a man like this American journalist could ask the soul-searching question: "How far can mankind lose contact with both the organic sub stratum and the macrocosmic framework of his life and prosper spiritually?" Just how narrow the margin is, in fact, we shall see presently when we discuss boredom as the curse of our modern mass society.

Mass-Acute and Chronic We must probe deeply in order to understand the true nature of mass society. The everyday experience of crowd and quantity, how ever elementary it may be, does not exhaust the problem. Behind it something else is happening, something much more profound, significant, and fateful: a shift of the center of gravity towards collectivity and away from the individual, at rest within himself and holding his own as an integral personality. The equilibrium 52 MODERN MASS SOCIETY between individual and society, their relation of constant tension and genuine antinomy, is disturbed in favor of society. This equi librium-there can be no doubt whatever about it-is the norm of individual and social health. We do not hesitate, therefore, to call the serious imbalance a disease, a crisis, with which we cannot live for long. In the most general terms, our conception of mass society is this: The individual is, in our time, losing his own features, soul, in trinsic worth, and personality because and in so far as he is im mersed in the "mass," and the latter is "mass" because and in so far as it consists of such "depersonalized" individuals. To the extent of this shift of the center of gravity, the essential element which the individual needs in order to be a complete human being and spir itual and moral personality seems to us to be missing. At the same time, one of the basic conditions of sound social life is destroyed.

This is the fundamental idea common to all theories of the evils of "mass": As part of "mass," we are different from what we nor mally are and should be in healthy circumstances; we are sub human, herdlike, and the state of society dangerously corresponds to our own. This much is common ground, but further analysis may proceed in a number of different directions, which should be sharply, distinguished lest we aid and abet the blurring of the con cept or' mass. We must begin by distinguishing two kinds of mass in the sense of social pathology: mass as an acute state and mass as a chronic state. Mass as an acute state can occur in any historical context when ever individuals temporarily become part of a crowd, an inorganic agglomeration which does not interfere with the individual's form of life and which dissolves as quickly as it is assembled. I have in mind such things as a mass meeting, a sudden mass movement, or even some spiritual epidemic. In such cases, individuals, as we know, are subject to certain psychological laws whose effect may be characterized as emotional hyperthymia, intellectual regression, and paralysis of the moral sense of responsibility. In other words, 53 A HUMANE ECONOMY as parts of an acute mass, we are more excitable, more stupid, and more ruthless than usual. It is acute mass with which, in the main, the literature on mass psychology has been concerned from the time of Gustave Le Bon to our own day. Its findings and our cor roborating experience are no doubt important and interesting, but this is not really the issue that concerns us when we speak of en massment as a disease of modern society. It is true that enmassment fosters the emergence of acute mass by multiplying the occasions on which we are subject to the laws of mass psychology. It is equally true that acute mass may give rise to very perilous condi tions so that we are well advised to guard against it and to arrange our public and social life in such a manner as to protect it, as far as possible, against the avalanches of mass psychology. But the phenomenon is neither novel-Peter of Amiens was very successful in bringing it about in the eleventh century-nor of such a men acing kind as to lead us to consider enmassment as one of the cen tral problems of the present social and cultural crisis. The former problem is not even part of the latter, but of a different kind, which does not prevent the two from being constantly confused.

The problem with which we are actually faced is the problem of mass as a chronic state, as a permanent condition of the life of more and more people in the world today. Here again we have to distinguish a number of different aspects and facts. The process may be understood in the first place as essentially belonging to the intellectual and ethical sphere. What we have in mind is the way thought is becoming shallow, uniform, derivative, herdlike, and tritely mediocre; the growing predominance of the semi-educated; the destruction of the necessary intellectual hier archy of achievement and function; the crumbling away of the edifice of civilization; and the presumption with which this homo insipiens gregarius sets himself up as the norm and chokes every thing that is finer or deeper. In this context, a highly significant detail to be noted is the fact that classical education seems to be doomed in our mass society, if only because mass man persecutes 54 MODERN MASS SOCIETY it with genuine hatred, the hatred of one whose lack of mental dis cipline bars him from access to this education-not to mention the influence of our era's rampant utilitarianism, technicisnl, and rna terialism. 7 It is a case of aggrieved educational lacobinism, intel lectual egalitarianism aiming at the leveling out of "mental income inequalities," not upwards, as would be desirable but is impossible, given the unalterable aristocracy of nature, but downwards, as is only too easily possible but quite definitely undesirable.

It is this process of intellectual and ethical depersonalization which Ortega y Gasset had principally in mind when he wrote his pioneer work The Revolt of the Masses. The crisis of our times is here seen chiefly as a cultural crisis. It cannot, of course, be isolated from the concurrent structural changes of society, but its real and deepest roots reach down to those ultimately decisive levels of the mind and the soul where the sustaining ideas and values of the Western world's Christian civilization are at stake. One would have to be very remote from these ideas and value judgments to fail to recognize enmassment, in this sense of intellectual and moral disin tegration, as the real core of the evil or to deride such a diagnosis. Only if we overcome enmassment can we hope to save our seri ously ailing civilization. Now this process of everything becoming part of mass in the intellectual and moral spher~ is supported by a similar process in the social sphere. By this we mean the disintegration of the social structure, generating a profound upheaval in the outward condi tions of each individual's life, thought, and work. Independence is smothered; men are uprooted and taken out of the close-woven social texture in which they were secure (this is now happening on a large scale in the former colonial and dependent territories) ; true communities are broken up in favor of more universal but imper sonal collectivities in which the individual is no longer a person in his own right; the inward, spontaneous social fabric is loosened in favor of mechanical, soulless organization, with its outward com pulsion; all individuality is reduced to one plane of uniform nor55 A HUMANE ECONOMY mality; the area of individual action, decision, and responsibility shrinks in favor of collective planning and decision; the whole of life becomes uniform and standard mass life, ever more subject to party politics, "nationalization," and "socialization."

Urbanization, industrialization, and proletarianization (in a well-defined sense) are only special aspects of this sinister overall process, which I once tried to define metaphorically as a decom position of the humus of society and its transformation into a social dust bowl. Now if mass thus becomes permanent, more and more people are in a constant state of readiness to submit to those psy chologicallaws which the theory of acute mass describes. Advertis ing, propaganda, popular crazes meet no obstacles, since intellectual and moral enmassment have created a vacuum into which foul wa ter can seep. Matters are made worse by the fact that mass per suasion now has at its disposal the new and incomparable media of radio, film, and, above all, television. The danger of spiritual infection has, in brief, become enormous, especially since, in the sterile bustle of our times, more and more people (above all, those in responsible positions) lack the leisure and composure to think for themselves or to commune with the author of some thoughtful book. "Someone who is compelled every day to think of his colleagues, his parliamentary majority, his re election, the press, public opinion, party intrigues, and a thousand other things ends up by being able to devote very little time to medi tation, and even that must be reserved for problems important in relation to other people, problems of success," says Jules Romains.

All the more enthusiastically do such men indulge in the confer ence mania, which gives them the illusion that wisdom is to be gathered at conventions or congresses and is a precipitate of the resolutions and terms of reference of committees and subcommit tees. "It is hard to imagine a minister of Louis XV or, to take more familiar examples, a Talleyrand or a Metternich embracing some newfangled doctrine with so much enthusiasm that they lose their lucidity of mind," writes Romains. The more rapidly people in our 56 MODERN MASS SOCIETY times succumb to spiritual mass epidemics and the less resistance their own judgment possesses, the more discontinuous and variable becomes the spiritual·image of society. If such people avidly lap up mass slogans, if they surrender to "social religions" as a surrogate for vanishing faith and traditional values, if they take to mass entertainment and mass spectacles al most as to narcotic drugs, they do it not merely to fill the emptiness of their souls. One of the principal reasons why they plunge into the mass is that they are made deeply unhappy by the social en massment which prizes people out of the fabric of true community.

Thrown into society as isolated human beings, literally individua and human atoms, people hunger for "integration," and they allay this hunger by means of the intoxicating thrills and crowds of mass society. They can no longer live without the radio, press, films, group outings, mass sports, and all the concomitant noise, without the sense of "being in the swim," without the "smell of the herd." We can count ourselves fortunate when these mass men rest content with this kind of thing and do not allow their hunger for faith and integration, their nostalgia for the consolation of firm inner and social support, to drive them into the maelstrom of the fearful social religions of our time-for these always imply fanatical and intol erant mass hatred (though frequently in the name of abstract, gen eral philanthropy), such as national hatred, class hatred, and race hatred. Mass Culture Let us now look at the details of the overall process we have out lined. We begin with its intellectual and moral aspects. We are cer tainly not mistaken in regarding the civilization corresponding to mass society as mass culture or, as Guglielmo Ferrero called it nearly fifty years ago, "quantitative civilization." It is exemplified in today's mass products and in the mass tastes to which they ap peal and of· which they take commercial advantage. By whatever 57 A HUMANE ECONOMY standards we measure cultural development, its curve has been go ing steadily downwards in all countries of the West during the last fifty years, notwithstanding certain brakes and compensations to which the optimists cling with a kind of despair. Men like John Stuart Mill, Herman Melville, or Jacob Burckhardt, who watched with misgiving the proliferation of the signs of cultural decay in their own times, would find their worst fears far exceeded if, half way through our twentieth century, they could take the measure of the readers (or should I say the viewers?) of our illustrated papers and our race of educational pygmies. No doubt those who lay down the law in our society would ridicule them as hopelessly romantic because they have not yet grasped the fact that the hour of "modern consumption society" is at hand. 8 Mass culture has gone quite far already, as can be seen by any one who looks, without rose-colored glasses, at the indicators of intellectual mass consumption, from the seven-figure circulations of our completely infantile illustrated papers and the eighty to ninety million editions of the incredibly dreadful American comic books to the general educational and cultural level of our times. The re verse side of all this is the tight corner into which books really worth reading are driven, together with serious periodicals not catering to mass tastes. Nor is this all. It is hard to disagree with pessimists-such as, for example, the American Dwight MacDonald ("Mass Culture," Diogenes [1953], III) -who maintain that our civilization is becoming subject to a sort of Gresham's Law. Just as, according to Gresham's Law, bad money drives out good money, so, too, does modern mass culture make it increasingly difficult for anything better to hold its own. This situation, incidentally, also has economic reasons in the spread of commercialism and in the effects of mass-production methods on book and magazine publish ing. Even where the finer product subsists, it is n~ longer the apex of a generally accepted pyramid, and there is a growing temptation for the intellectual elite to devote its talents to satisfying and flat tering mass demand, thereby reaping both mass fame, however 58 MODERN MASS SOCIETY ephemeral, and substantial material gains. It is no use deluding ourselves. We are forced to admit that there is scant reason for the comforting conclusion that this process of decay has been arrested, let alone reversed. But there are enough encouraging symptoms on both sides of the Atlantic to render paralyzing despondency equally groundless.

No serious discussion of this subject can avoid a comparison between these results and the high hopes which a progress-happy era had pinned on the fight against illiteracy . We can but marvel that those who cherished these naIve hopes-some of them may still be about-never seem to have realized that what really counts is what all these people are to read once they have learned how to read. Nor do they seem to have asked themselves whether the standardized educational system by which illiteracy is eradicated was always favorable to a wise choice of reading matter. "The average Englishman reads nothing except a thin and vulgar daily newspaper, though he has been compelled to go to school for half a century; while in Portugal, the state with the highest rate of illiteracy in western Europe, the readi.ng of serious books and jour nas' per head of population, is much higher than in enlightened Britain. The broad nineteenth-century public for English literature, in short, has very nearly ceased to exist." (Russell Kirk, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice [Chicago, 1956], 303-304) That this should not be turned into a specious argument against compulsory education and the fight against illiteracy is so obvious that one is almost ashamed to mention the mere possibility of such abuse. But it is naIve to overlook the conditions on which depends the benefit of general education; these conditions are of more im portance than teaching the technique of reading. It is mass society which has so largely destroyed these conditions.

Let me illustrate this point with an example from my personal experience. Not long ago I had occasion to discuss with a student the final draft of a paper; his nationality is immaterial. It was an above-average study of civil aviation, and the author was a mature, 59 A HUMANE ECONOMY experienced man whose education probably surpassed that of many of his kind. He had come to the conclusion that the economic ra tionality of this latest means of transport appeared somewhat doubt ful if allowance were made for all the open and indirect subsidies. I brought our long conversation to an end with a few philosophical reflections and added that the story of Daedalus and Icarus still seemed to contain a mysterious truth. What kind of people were they, I was asked, and what in the world did they have to do with aviation? Did he not remember Ovid's Metamorphoses? No, that had never been mentioned in his Latin class. Had he never encoun tered this legend elsewhere? Again, no.9 Now let me tell another story, also a personal recollection. Many years ago I visited a second-hand bookshop in Istanbul. It was run by a Greek, and I found him immersed, together with a young girl, in the study of a book. I asked him not to let me disturb him, but while I was browsing among the dusty shelves, I could not help overhearing some of the remarks passing at the table. Soon there was no doubt: they were reading and discussing the Odyssey. It seemed to me that there could hardly be a more touching sight than that of this Greek, here, in a dark corner of ancient Byzantium, handing down to his daughter the eternal beauty of Homer, still a living heritage after three thousand years, while outside the trams rattled past and the motorcars hooted.

These two experiences, juxtaposed, illustrate the meaning of dis continuity and continuity in cultural tradition. They show what continuity signifies and, on the other hand, how sharp a break is taking place in our generation after a long process of attrition. It is a break which amounts to a cultural catastrophe, for we witness the passing of millennial traditions that have furnished the sub structures of our civilization. Anyone who wants to instruct himself in detail about the sources, significance, and development of these traditions will find an admirable guide in Ernst Robert Curtius' great work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Curtius has shown us on what an almost inexhaustible source we are still 60 MODERN MASS SOCIETY drawing, and in teaching us to appreciate it fully, he makes it all the more evident just what we are losing now, three thousand years after Homer, my amiable Greek in Istanbul notwithstanding. 10 What were the instruments of this millennial tradition? Who were the people who took the biggest part in handing it down, and what economic and social conditions favored or disfavored the process, up to the threshold of our mass epoch? Who-this is the key question-read books in different periods of history and what books? It is not easy for us to imagine a time when the book, as food for the mind and as a vehicle of tradition, hardly existed for the overwhelming majority of the population. In his Waning oj the Middle Ages, J. Huizinga has painted a vivid picture of what the fifteenth century was like in this respect. Curtius has described by what textbooks the young in the grammar schools were taught throughout the Middle Ages and on what yet more remote sources these textbooks, in turn, drew. But each one of us can remember from his own experience how invaluable for a child's development ~re the books which he has at his disposal outside the classroom these are the books which matter most-for the free and joyous satisfaction of the soul's curiosity, at different times and in differ ent classes of society. Goethe has given us, in Dichtung und Wahr heit, a wonderful description of his own youthful reading; with obvious delight, which we can understand perfectly if we think back to the bliss of our own first childhood reading, he tells of the ear liest food of his mind: the great folio Bible, Orbis Pictus by Amos Comenius, Fenelon's Telemaque, Robinson Crusoe and Till Eulen spiegel, Die schone Melusine,Kaiser Oktavian, Fortunatus, and the whole tribe down to the Wandering Jew. In earlier centuries, chil dren were not so lucky because there were no children's books, and apart from the Bible, they had to fall back on Ovid, Statius, or Virgil. It is easy to appreciate how very significant this must have been for the transmission of the European literary tradition. II This tradition, there can be no doubt whatever about it, is seri ously threatened today, if indeed it is not drawing to its close. With61 A HUl\1ANE ECONOMY out embellishing anything and leaving modernistic nonsense to one side, we have to admit that this tradition is collapsing and that its collapse is. burying priceless treasures. One of the first and indis putable consequences is perhaps the decay of our languages. 12 But why, we may ask, is the loss or even the dilution of this Christian and humanistic cultural tradition more than a change of scene in the history of thought? Why is it a cultural catastrophe, which is of the essence of our present cultural crisis? Because this tradition is a European tradition and because it makes us Europeans in the widest sense of the word. What this means can easily be appreciated by anyone who merely tries to imagine what the world, a world in which every continent is built upon Europe and its traditions, would be like without this pillar. 13 We cannot even seriously conceive of the idea that after three thousand years we should have to begin again at the beginning in fashioning our minds and that we could

possibly replace our spiritual heritage by educational matter of the kind which may roughly be indicated by the range and style of popular magazines, that is, by run-of-the-mill knowledge and run of-the-mill discussions about vitamins, jet aircraft, social questions, the dernier cri of literature, and the latest creations of philosophy. What happens when the attempt is nevertheless made is precisely what the modern world is so eager to demonstrate. The question that faces us is frighteningly clear. It is the ques tion of whether the fight for existence in which the European cul tural tradition is now engaged is not so desperate precisely because it is simultaneously a fight against the most powerful and menacing forces of our social development. This tradition has, in the eyes of our mass epoch, two things against itself: the fact that it is "tradi tion" and that, necessarily, it is not within everybody's reach, or better, that it presupposes an intellectual hierarchy of people who are able and willing to make a determined effort to acquire it, de velop it, and partake in it. It is as much a challenge to the unstable reforming spirit of the rerum novarum cupidi as it is to social re sentment, which cannot tolerate a minority being in any way priv62 MODERN MASS SOCIETY ileged in relation to the mass, least of all when the privilege rests on the inexorable exclusivity of personal talent, gifts, and aspira tions and is, as such, far more embittering than sheer material wealth, which is not, in principle, out of reach in the contest and lottery of economic life. To all this we must add modern technical and pseudo-scientific pragmatism and utilitarianism and their total inability to grasp that the achievements of the natural sciences, im portant and formative though they are, cannot change man's nature as primarily a spiritual and moral being. All in all, we can hardly be surprised that the consumptive disease of our cultural tradition has reached the galloping stage in our generation. At the same time, historical awareness, the sense of continuity and of our links with history as a living part of knowledge, is declining more and more widely. This, too, is an essential feature of a faithful overall picture of our modern mass culture.

In conclusion, we want to dispel a common misconception on a point regarding which even John Stuart Mill's famous essay On Liberty is dangerously misleading. It is very easy to stress only the conformism and uniformity of our mass culture and to imagine that they imply the complete absence of the courage to be eccen tric' unconventional, individual. But the situation is not like that at all. Certainly there is conformism and uniformity, but they are displayed precisely in breaking with the cultural tradition and in trying, at all costs, to proffer something new, original, or provoca tive pour epater Ie bourgeois. There is not as much conformism in tradition as there is in willful eccentri.city; it goes with disorienta tion and discontinuity, with disdain of anything conventional, time tested, or normal, with sophistication and admiration of the avant garde, with the cult of whatever happens to be new today and dis carded tomorrow, the idolizing of novelty. It is conformism in being non-conformist. As an American critic of mass culture puts it, the modern Babbitt thinks he owes it to himself to hang a Pi casso on his wall.14 But "bitter" Kitsch is no better than "sweet"

and is just as revealing. 63 A HUMANE ECONOMY Indeed, nothing gives mass man away as much as his contempt for what he calls "suburban," "bourgeois," or "Philistine." His conformism manifests itself in the break with tradition and con tinuity, in rootlessness, anti-conservatism, revolutionary romanti cism. This is the main danger today. The opposite danger of stale and stuffy stagnation hardly arises in present circumstances. This view of the situation is confirmed if we look beyond our own imme diate horizon to what goes on in the so-called underdeveloped countries. The only hopeful approach is to regard the situation as a violation of human nature and society which is hard to conceive as permanent and which is bound, sooner or later, to end in an acute crisis, which might just possibly have the salutary effect of bringing us back to our senses. These reflections are not merely the disgruntled and pretentious musings of a reactionary standing in holy terror of anything called mass. Socialists like George Orwell and Hendrik de Man did not think otherwise. In fact, we are indebted to the latter for a particu larly grim and penetrating analysis of the relationship between mass and cultural decline. 15 These men's testimony confirms me in my feeling that this sub ject is so important that I should not leave it without adding a few more examples to give it color and life. First let me demonstrate how far we have already got with our tabula rasa attitudes. I quote a former Director-General of the WorId Health Organization, Dr.

Brock Chisholm. A few years ago, he wrote in a Canadian paper (Toronto Telegram, Weekend Magazine [1955, No. 10]) that we should create a uniform world population by mixing all. races. "The sooner we're all interbred, the better," says this man, who, grotesquely, was put in charge of world health. 'He wants to do away with all tradition, as well as with "our economic and social structure," and thereby acquires at least the distinction of pushing a sort of super-mass progressivism to hitherto unheard-of lengths. His example naturally carries special weight because of his office. My next witness shows that in an advanced mass society there is 64 MODERN MASS SOCIETY no longer any feeling for inevitable differentiation in upbringing and manners. An American girl student, typical in this respect, de clared her utter incomprehension when a working-class French woman remarked of some young lady that she was bien elevee.

Nor did the student understand what I meant by my ironic retort that this must be because all girls in her country were bien elevees. Obviously, the concept as such-which is none other than Pascal's honnete homme-no longer exists in a mass society. Let me add at once, to cut short any possible European self-righteousness, that we have every reason to ask ourselves seriously whether there are not a good many countries on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, too, which are scarcely distinguishable from America in respect to the intellectual domination of the "cornmon man," who is representa tive not of the "people," spontaneous, natural, and possessed of a sound native power of judgment, hut of "mass."16 Mass culture is everywhere crowding out the two forms of real culture, those of the elite and of the people. Mass and Society The mass phenomena of cultural development which we have just discussed can obviously not be neatly separated from those of social development. We should keep this wen in mind as we now turn to a closer examination of the relationship between mass society and mass democracy and the final, poisonous product of its decomposi tion, totalitarianism. This was expressed with the utmost clarity long ago by that classical writer who, with the exception of Pesta lozzi, was the first and most profound of the prophets of gloom to analyze in advance modern mass dernocracy, namely, Alexis de Tocqueville. I have in mind especially the famous passage in his great work De fa democratie en Amerique, where, groping his way on untrodden ground, he tried to show how egalitarian democracy was bound to develop into a new form of despotism. His only mis take, and a pardonable one, was to imagine this new mass-demo65 A HUMANE ECONOMY cratic despotism as something comparatively mild, whereas we know better. 17 It would require a long treatise to describe the elements and con ditions which mark out and determine the path leading to mass democracy and its extraordinary dangers to liberty. The essential point becomes clear if we consider the difference between liberal democracy of the Anglo-Saxon and Swiss kind on the one hand and the Jacobin brand of democracy on the other. The latter has in creasingly become the dominating form of democracy in our times precisely because it is appropriate to mass society. Why is this so, and what is the link between Jacobin democracy and mass society?

If we say that liberal democracy places the accent on liberty and Jacobin democracy on equality, this means in practice that the former rests on government with the consent and under the control of those governed and the latter on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, ascertained by majority decision and intended to realize the identity of people and government. Now while this Jacobin sovereignty of the people is a fiction, it is a highly dangerous one because it opens the way to the worst despotism and makes it possible for a majority decision to establish a totalitarian government. Liberal democracy is a source of free dom because it is liberal, that is, respectful of the individual's right to liberty, and because it is, at the same time, democracy, that is, makes government subject to the consent of those governed. Jacobin democracy, however, is the ultimate ruin of freedom. Now this Jacobin ideology of the sovereign people is less harmful when the state is regarded as something alien, something to be watched with suspicion. This is the case in federal constitutions, where the re mote central government is not locally regarded as one's "own" and therefore stimulates liberal defenses, while at the same time the central government acts as a counterweight to any despotic sepa ratism of the members of the federation at all levels. It is for this reason that the Jacobins always rightly judged federalism to be the worst enemy of the republique une et indivisible. But since a federal 66 MODERN MASS SOCIETY political structure cannot be created simply by the fiat of a consti ..

tutional document but presupposes a social articulation rooted in tradition, nothing is more inimical to federalism than modern mass society because it destroys this articulation. Thus mass society fos.. ters Jacobin mass democracy by paralyzing and destroying the countervailing forces of federalism. Even where these still survive they are clearly on the defensive, and their prospects of victory are constantly deteriorating. The outlook is, perhaps, most favorable in Switzerland because that country"s multi-national character makes federalism vital to the existence of the state. In Germany, on the other hand, federalism seems to have no live roots any more, its long tradition notwithstanding. This· is one of the most impressive symptoms of the alarming degree to which that country has already become a prey to enmassment after hav.. ing passed through the mill of totalitarianism and defeat. Even the circles most vociferous in their condeInnation of mass society re..

main blind to this unequivocal symptom, as is demonstrated by their disdain of federalism. Witness the ease with which recently, under their leadership, or at any rate with their consent, Wiirttem .. berg and Baden were wiped out as historical entities and, like two factories, merged in the name of administrative convenience-though even that has proved elusive. It is therefore hardly surprising that some years ago a socialist minister in one of the German Lander should have declared, in all seriousness, that federalism, autonomy, and local government were quite unnecessary in a democratic state because, in contrast to the old authoritarian state, there was no longer any division between people and government. These things, he said, had been an expres .. sion of justified mistrust toward a central government divorced from the people and as such were out of place today. This state .. ment at least serves to destroy any cherished illusion about this radical Jacobin ideology and its consequences. One is reminded of the Communists, who, when reproached with the total absence of independent trade-unions in Soviet: Russia, reply ingenuously that 67 A HUMANE ECONOMY in a state where government and working class have merged into one, there is no need for any independent trade-unions to safeguard the workers' interests. This is, in fact, what goes on in the minds of the Jacobins, and they are all under the spell of a myth whose pseudo-religious content is unmistakable-even without the recent incident when an election poster of the Swiss Communist party blasphemously put the "sovereign" people in the place of God and parodied the Bible by declaring: "The fear of the people is the beginning of wisdom." It is ominous that much the same used to be said by the leaders of National Socialist Germany.

The close and indeed indissoluble link between mass society and Jacobin democracy can perhaps be seen even more clearly if we look at it in another light. What distinguishes mass democracy of a Jacobin complexion from liberal democracy is that the former, with its emphasis on the sovereignty of the people, does not ac knowledge the decisions of the "sovereign" to be subject to any higher and absolute authority, such as liberal democracy recog nizes. For the latter, there are certain limits to the power of the state which may not be transgressed by any popular or parliamen tary majority; they are the limits traced by the traditional princi ples of government, the unchallengeable commands of ethics and natural law, and the unwritten precepts of the history of nations. Anglo-Saxon and Swiss democracy are rooted in historical soil that is centuries older than universal suffrage; they grew up in an age when the ancient elements of freedom, whether of classical, Christian, or Germanic origin, were still a live reality and when the area of rights and obligations was firmly circumscribed by a society whose fabric and structure were the very opposite of modern mass society. Most of us still possess enough good sense to recognize liberal democracy's essentially metademocratic limits in extreme cases and to take it for granted that we cannot leave it to a majority decision whether our country is to become Communist. But there are few who are aware of the implied perilous fragility of the un diluted democratic principle, which exposes us all along the line to 68 MODERN MASS SOCIETY arbitrary power and to the dissolution of the inviolable principles of government and· society and which can protect neither freedom nor property nor law from despotism. It is, as Jacob Burckhardt said, the "end of all security."

Democracy is, in the long run, compatible with freedom only on condition that all, or at least most, voters are agreed that certain supreme norms and principles of public life and economic order must remain outside the sphere of democratic decisions. This unitas in necessariis encompasses· more than the principle of the rule of law, which, though admittedly important, is ultimately only formal. It is this fundamental agreement which imbues the concept of in violable law as such with an absolute content, and once it can no longer be taken for granted, we are in the presence of mass de mocracy of a pretotalitarian kind. We hardly need the lessons of the Jacobin government of the French Revolution to remind us forcibly of the inevitable socialist tendencies of such mass democ racy. Conversely, socialism is fatefully ranged among the forces responsible for the transformation of liberal democracy into mass democracy. To divest such fundamental institutions as property and economic freedom of their inviolability and to make their fate dependent on the ballot box is tantamount to destroying the very foundations of liberal democracy, since the latter must rest on above-party agreement with respect to the unchallenged validity of the state's ethical, social, and political principles. Democracy is then no longer an instrument of internal peace, security, stability, and freedom but becomes a tool of revolution, and of permanent revolution at that.

This kind of radicalism, typical of a spirit which is not content to accept what is but must forever reopen every question, is pre cisely the mark of mass society and mass man. It is the spirit of men who, together with their social roots, have lost the sense of tradition, principles, and history and who have become the prey of the moment's whims and passions, as well as of the demagogy of leaders translating these whims and passions into ephemeral slogans 69 A HUMANE ECONOMY and inflammatory speeches. Matters are yet made worse hy the skepticism and positivism, sometimes hordering on nihilism, for which the intellectuals are to blame. Thus modern mass democracy becomes the breeding ground for the revolutionary social religions of our times and the rallying point for the crusades on which the inflamed masses set out to conquer some millennium, some New Jerusalem. What Michel Chevalier (Lettres de l'Amerique du Nord [1836] ), at the same time as Tocqueville, rightly or wrongly said of the American people applies without reservation to mass democ racy: it has "the morale of an army on the march." And it has all the attributes of such an army, too: the clockwork precision of the march, collective high spirits, noise, the "here today and gone to morrow" outlook, the moment's enj oyment without thought of the future, the transience of· life, the rousing banners, a nomad and rootless existence, practical action unburdened by disdained theo ry, pragmatism, grabbing and wasting, and good-fellowship.Is We shall have more to say later abou,t the significance for today's economic and social life of this mass democracy cut loose from the moorings of natural law and tradition. Meanwhile, we want to illu minate from yet other angles our main subject of "mass and society."

Let us return once more to Tocqueville. It is to his credit that, unlike his successor, Mill, he clearly recognized that it would he entirely wrong to regard as two opposite poles mass society and the individual, or mass behavior and individualism. On the contrary, mass man is individualistic because of the loosening of the social fabric and the disintegration of community. One of the least· well understood aspects of the process of enmassment is that it detaches the individual from his natural social fabric and leaves him to his own resources. Conversely, when individualism became the cult of the isolated individual as such and of the mere millionfold voter, in contrast to true community and social articulation, to corps intermediaires and federalism and political and social pluralism, it also became one of the most corrosive of spiritual acids, dissolv70 MODERN MASS SOCIETY ing the organic structure of society and thereby contributing to the formation of mass society and mass democracy.

Mass society is simply a sand-heap of individuals who are more dependent than ever, less sharply defined and more depersonalized than ever, and at the same time more isolated, uprooted, aban doned, and socially disintegrated than ever. This is what we must grasp if we want to understand the true nature of mass society and its political, spiritual, social, and. economic consequences. The Lonely Crowd-nothing could describe the phenomenon better than these words, which aptly form the title of a book by the American sociologist David Riesman. It is true that solitude, in the sense of communing silently with oneself and nature, is becoming both rarer and less earnestly desired. But loneliness, separateness, and isolation are becoming the destiny of the masses, and this is a situa tion which is so highly pathological that one is tempted to agree in this respect with certain serious authors who regard our modern world as affiicted by collective lunacy. This was the diagnosis pro nounced by the Dutchman J.Huizinga even before the Second World War, and since then, psychiatrists have repeated the warn ing. It is true that the isolation of the individual has several con current causes, but the most important among them is undoubtedly the·mass-conditioned disintegration of community.l0 It is significant, and perhaps also comforting, that it sho~I1d be another American, Ernest van den Haag (with Ralph Ross in The Fabric of Society [New York, 1957], Chapter 15), who has given us the most disillusioned account of the depersonalization and so cial disintegration going on in an advanced mass society. People are divested of their natural individuality, both as producers, turn ing out mass products by more and more mechanized methods, and as consumers, because mass products cannot cater to individual tastes and because, at the same tirDe, the class of people wealthy enough to buy custom-made goods is dwindling fast, thanks to in vidious taxation imposed by the crushing majority of consumers with "shared tastes." Impersonal work has its counterpart in 71 A HUMANE ECONOMY impersonal consumption; the standardization of objects demands and eventually enforces the standardization of persons. "Most peo ple perch unsteadily in mass-produced, impermanent dwellings throughout their lives. They are born in hospitals, fed in cafe terias, married in hotels. After terminal care, they die in hospitals, are shelved briefly in funeral homes, and are finally incinerated.

On each of these occasions-and how many others? -efficiency and economy are obtained and individuality and continuity stripped off. If one lives and dies discontinuously and promiscuously in anonymous surroundings, it becomes hard to identify with any thing, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything even one's own individuality. The rhythm of individual life loses autonomy, spontaneity, and distinction when it is tied into a stream of traffic and carried along according to the speed of the road, as we are in going to work, or play, or in doing anything." A modern Faust, enjoining the fleeing moment to "linger a while, thou art so fair," would not lose his soul but cause a traffic jam. How right, too, is this acute American observer in his remark about the frantic and hopeless efforts of the "human-relations in dustry" to reconstitute individuality artificially-"scientifically" is the word, of course-by pseudo-personalization. These efforts are on a level with the growing practice of the food industry, which first extracts all the goodness from flour and then enriches it with artificial vitamins. Even the name card by which the official at the ticket booth is personally introduced to us merely proves how im personal our contact is; in the natural conditions of the village or small town such a name card would be entirely redundant. It is life affectedly giving itself scientific airs, like the popular craze for vitamins or the enticing inscription "Ride for your health" which I once saw at the Atlanta airport on a rocking horse placed there to keep children amused. This, of course, was meant as advertising, and we are anticipating a later chapter.

These socially disintegrated individuals are like physical bodies with peripheral centers of gravity. Hence another significant symp72 , MODERN MASS SOCIETY tom: the spread of a harrowing sense of eccentricity. Less and less men are at rest within themselves, or, to quote a famous passage from Jacob Burckhardt's letter to Friedrich von Preen of Decem ber 30, 1875, "they shiver with cold unless they are huddled to gether in their thousands." This is true not only of single persons but of whole groups, of the small a.nd outlying groups, that is, in relation to large and central ones, in particular of the village and small town in relation to the large town and metropolis. In these smaller communities, people are increasingly losing the last vestige of what ethnologists call ethnocentrism, to be found in its pure state among tribes that are thus far untouched by our civilization. On the contrary, more and more people are becoming "ethno fugal," haunted by the feeling of "being out of things" and tor mented by the fear of becoming "rustic and provincial," as they significantly call it, unless they forrn part of the great human heap of the metropolis.

The result is an attitude which one Jrnight describe as our era's characteristic alibism, that is, an instinctive craving to be elsewhere and a neurotic feeling of being always in the wrong place. This is powerfully fostered and at the same time technically facilitated by the automobile, radio, films, and television, and the resulting no madism of our day takes multiple forms: the apparently irresistible appeal of large cities; a yearning for gregariousness, even in one's hours of leisure; constantly being on the move; an increasingly pathological kind of mass tourism that finds its be-all and end all in "doing" sights, taking snapshots, and "having been there"; and "congressitis" and the mania of meetings and festivities. Nor is this all. The great problem of mass society is not exhausted by isolation, emptiness, and loss of solidarity, together with the ensuing void in the normal human life's conditions of happiness.

Something else is almost more oppressive and· decisive, something which is far from being given the attention it deserves: this is the boredom of mass society. Boredolrl is a product and an accessory of mass society and at the same time the cause of things which in73 A HUMANE ECONOMY tensify some of its features and drive it still further. No thoughtful person can deny that here is one of the master keys to an under standing of our modern world. Boredom is the true curse of our epoch-boredom, together with mass living, the isolation of the individual and his separateness, the weakening of society's inner mainspring, and the triumph of vapid utility over the poetry, dig nity , spontaneity, and grace of life. Boredom and Mass Society The vast and important subject we have now reached is so con tested that we must go a bit further afield, for what we now have to say touches upon the very foundations of the irrepressible optimists' position. Again and again it becomes evident in discus sions of mass society and the cultural crisis that what we regard as the central issue of our epoch and the cause of its being one of the most critical periods of world history is not seen by others in the same light. For us, mass society and the giant strides with which technology advances through our world are the symptoms and sources of a severe disease of society and of a fatal alteration of the individual's spiritual and moral conditions of life; in our view it is here that we must seek the essential causes of the threat to liberty and personality in the shape of collectivism and totalitarianism.

But we have learned to expect that someone will always come for ward to deny this diagnosis in the name of progress and liberty. Indeed, some declare the symptoms of a truly vast disease to be those of recovery, holding out equally vast promises. It would be quite wrong simply to consider such views as "Ameri can," as contrasted with "European" views. It is true that the American pattern of life and thought, largely because it is proper to a society less able to draw on the reserves of a healthier past, in many respects displays most clearly some of the things which cause misgivings to the critic of mass society and mechanization. Any American who is determined to remain an apologist to the last is thereby misled into optimism and social rationalism. But we need 74 MODERN MASS SOCIETY only recall names like George Santayana, Russell Kirk, or Walter Lippmann and the army of their spiritual kin, the neo-conservatives or decentralists. They demonstrate how, under the impact of America's extreme experiences, the questionable and indeed alarm ..

ing aspects of this pattern of life and thought call forth the criticism of the best Americans and mobilize: moral and religious reserves such as one would be only too glad to see among some Europeans who persist in their self-satisfaction or blind intent to imitate America. On the other hand, there is no lack of Europeans trying to outdo the transatlantic apologists of Americanism and of what they call "American freedom" and who, with an optimism hard to understand, turn a deaf ear to our criticism of mass society, mecha .. nization, and technolatry. Fortunately, then, there is no conflictbetween what might be de.. scribed as European and American mentality. Our European super Americans, with their eulogies of the magnificent "consumer so ciety" or whatever else they may can it, only cover themselves with ridicule, not least in the eyes of the Americans, who know better and who regard European enthusiasm for "Americanism" merely as disloyalty to a common patrimony. The conflict is, instead, be..

tween two social philosophies, tied neither to nations nor con tinents nor social classes but reaching deep down into the sub strata of religion. Once more we alre reminded of Cardinal Man ning's words: "All human differences are ultimately religious ones." In any event, the conflict clearly does not lack a pronounced political flavor, which comes out clearly when the critique of mass society is dismissed as reactionary·-one argument among many common to progressives and Communists. At first sight it seems difficult to discover any bridge of mutual understanding or even a ground for fruitful discussion. To brand people of our kind as romantic (a designation which may soon he come an honorable one) is no more helpful than for us, in our turn, to dismiss our opponents as anthropologically or sociologically blind optimists or social rationalists. How can we break out of this sterile position of mutual non75 A HUMANE ECONOMY understanding? Is it possible to find a sound basis for objectively acceptable arguments against which the optimists can raise no protest?

It is of the utmost importance to realize that such a possibility does exist. Let us try to make a start. There is a certain and indeed predominant type of optimist who behaves like the blind talking of color-and often rather aggressively. Being himself the creature of a large industrial city, he lacks the experience of people born and bred in the country, with an intimate knowledge of village com munity life and closeness to nature-the very opposite of what Hans Freyer calls "man-made society." There is an asymmetry be tween people of the former kind and those of us who have had the good fortune of such experience; they are poorer than we are in the knowledge of the things which are at issue in this discussion and provide us with a true yardstick. We who come from the coun try-or who have at least remained in close contact with country life and have become town dwellers only in our later years-have the advantage of knowing both environments. The others are fa miliar only with the urban and industrial one. A second asymmetry is this: hardly any country-bred inhabitant of a big city has ac cepted the urban and industrial reforming optimism and the root lessness of mass society as an ideal, whereas among those born in the city and the landscape of industry the number is legion who are under no illusion about the price they have to pay in the shape of loss of integration with community and nature.

It may well be worth pondering this state of affairs a little in order to discover which side is the more stricken with blindness and the poorer in experience. It follows that in any discussion we are entitled to ask where our optimist adversary comes from and whether he possesses the same breadth of experience as we do; if he cannot adduce proof to that effect, he ought to admit that he is not competent to speak. Unfortunately, however, we here encounter a further circum stance which can but reinforce the pessimism of the critics of indus76 MODERN MASS SOCIETY trial mass society. The more urbanized industrial man becomes the predominant type, the greater is the likelihood that urbaniza tion, mass living, and the advancing mechanization of life and landscape will be treated as items of progress and liberty by those intellectuals who, born in the same environment, have nothing but irony and arrogance for those who really know better.

We therefore have to envisage the depressing prospect that a protesting voice may find it increasingly hard to make itself heard at all-not because our society is doing so gratifyingly well but because its disease may go so far that we lose any sense of what is or is not health, which would not leave people feeling any happier or healthier. In all of these respects a country like Switzerland is still com paratively well off because the percentage of people who have grown up in the country or who are at least connected with it by something more than tourism is still unusually high. "It is no acci dent," the Bavarian critic Joseph Hofmiller writes ("Form ist Alles," Aphorismen zu Literatur und Kunst [Munich, 1955]), "that the Swiss have such beautiful children's stories: they do not inhabit large towns. A metropolitan child doesn't even know what it means to be a child. To be a child m.eans to play in the fields, amidst grass and trees and birds and butterflies, under the endless canopy of a blue sky, in a great silence in which the crowing of the neighbor's cock is an event, as is the Angelus bell or the creak ing of a wheel. To be a child means to live with the seasons, the first snow and the first colt's foot, the cherry blossom and the cherry harvest, the scent of flowering crops and dry grass, the tick ling of the stubble on one's bare feet, the early lighting of the lamp. The other thing is a surrogate, shabby, cramped, musty, an adult's life en miniature." In a cruel cartoon of a Berlin back yard by Heinrich Zille, a porter chases children away from a miserable potted plant and calls after them: "Go and play with the dustbins!"