NYTimes

March 2, 2002

Damning (Yet Desiring) Mickey and the Big Mac

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

hy do they hate us?" One answer to that now familiar question may be its opposite: "Why do they love us?"

American popular culture, American film, American pop music, American fast food and American television manage to inspire both love and hate, as if the two passions were inseparable parts of a single whole, evoking the video image last fall of Osama bin Laden wearing what appeared to be a Timex Ironman Triathlon watch. So while the Taliban tried to quash the cultural influences of the West — hanging televisions from trees like electronic corpses — Afghan women were risking their lives by secretly going to Western-style beauty parlors.

One explanation for this repulsion and attraction has become fairly common: American popular culture is capitalist culture. In capitalism commodities are produced that will spur desire for still more commodities. Capitalism seduces through sheer force of marketing and sheer promise of pleasure. What fundamentalist society would not be horrified by the ways in which traditions and rituals are subsumed by the filthy lucre
of the marketplace?

This view of popular culture has a long heritage. In "The Communist Manifesto" Marx and Engels described capitalism as intrinsically unsettling, disrupting social conditions, creating "everlasting uncertainty and agitation." Attacks by intellectuals on popular culture in the 1940's and 50's expanded this view. In 1953 Dwight Macdonald wrote in his famous essay "A Theory of Mass Culture" that mass culture was "imposed from above," that it created "passive consumers."

"Like 19th-century capitalism," Macdonald wrote, "Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions." It is a kind of cultural indenture imposed by what he called the "Lords of kitsch." The philosopher Theodor Adorno also argued that mass culture was an instrument of oppressive power. He believed that it had a totalitarian dimension; television, he said in a 1954 essay, was "a medium of undreamed-of psychological control."

Those ideas have now become unquestioned axioms, elaborated on by other critics and analysts. Oddly, those views are also not that far from what Islamic fundamentalists themselves believe, or, for that matter, what the antiglobalization activists believe: pop culture succeeds because it is imperialist.

The problem is that these images of passive victims of the capitalist maw, enthralled by a cavalcade of meaningless commodities, bears very little relationship to most people's experiences and does little to explain the allure of popular culture. The connection between popular culture and capitalism is hardly as definite as it may seem. As the sociologist Daniel Bell has pointed out, traditional capitalism, with its requirements for restraint and planning, is not easily reconciled with the unbounded desires and ambitions of popular culture. Capitalism has changed in response to culture just as culture has changed in response to capitalism.

In addition, acceptance of capitalism does not require acceptance of popular culture. Fundamentalist governments and nondemocratic countries like China may seek the prosperity created by modified capitalism without changing their views of American cultural influence; capitalist France and Canada have, at different times, made cultural resistance national policy.

So capitalism offers limited explanations. More powerful influences shape culture. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, argued in "Democracy in America" that there was a fundamental difference between the artistic culture of an aristocracy and that of a democracy. In an aristocracy, members of the nobility form a small class with fixed interests, inspiring a uniform style among artisans and creators. Attention is paid to detailed craftsmanship, and artistry is a form of service.

But in a democracy, Tocqueville said, there are no restrictions of class or guild on either artisans or their public. Styles are less firmly defined; social arrangements are more fluid; human aspirations vary widely. So artisans offer what Tocqueville called "imperfect satisfaction" for diverse audiences rather than perfection for the few. Tocqueville also accurately anticipated the nature of pop culture: democracy, he wrote, shifts the preoccupation of art from the soul to the body, from the ideal to the real.

Similar characteristics were described by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" as he heralded the growth of liberal culture. With equality and mobility, he wrote, citizens "now read the same things, listen to the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them."

With this expansion of attention to the same things and places, commercial culture has also become more vital. Marshall McLuhan once recalled in a 1947 essay an American Army officer's pondering the difficulty of democratizing fascist Italy after World War II. "Democratic freedom," the officer argued, with tongue partly in cheek, required not worrying about politics but "worrying about the means of defeating underarm odor, scaly scalp, hairy legs, dull complexion, unruly hair, borderline anemia, athlete's foot, and sluggish bowels." Once relieved of concerns about caste and material need, the individual is free to address other issues.

McLuhan argued that these material concerns were not to be condemned. Rather, the "luxuriant and prurient chaos of human passions," he wrote, are unavoidable. These passions were acknowledged by the American founding fathers, McLuhan said, and the recognition of those desires helped shape both the realism and the utopianism of American culture.

So American popular culture offers a powerful promise. Luxuriant and prurient passions are partially satisfied; desires for autonomy are offered fulfillment; material pleasures and possibilities become palpable. Choices are freely made. Who can resist such a siren song? But there is a cost to this shedding of restrictions; there is something inherently disruptive about popular culture. It undermines the elite values of aristocratic art, displaces the customs of folk culture and opposes any limitation on art's audiences or subjects. It asserts egalitarian tastes, encourages dissent and does not shun desire.

"Mass Culture," Dwight Macdonald wrote, "is very, very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody." This is also a reason for intellectuals' fear of its onslaught. As the art critic Clement Greenberg pointed out in the 1940's when these issues first reared their heads, "all the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question." With the coming of "universal literacy," he argued, came a debased form of art: kitsch. And kitsch, he uncannily observed, was going "on a triumphal tour of the world," creating what he called "the first universal culture ever beheld."

This is even more true now than it was a half-century ago. Popular culture has become the standard-bearer for modernity, heralding its transformations. But for fundamentalists and many terrorists, that is the very problem. Even among mainstream intellectuals, some effects of popular culture are scorned. Popular culture may be hailed by left-wing critics for its liberating energy, but it is also condemned by others as an opiate; among conservatives, it is feared for its nihilistic influence on tastes and morals.

What then, if anything, can or should be done, since the triumph of popular culture seems so inseparable from the virtues of democratic culture? Is there any way both to promise liberty and the pursuit of happiness while preserving some discrimination among desires and differences among cultures? Or are disgust and desire doomed to be intertwined? Answers are not likely to appease Islamic totalitarianism, but they are increasingly important for the evolution of American democracy and culture.

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