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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 11. September 6, 1951

Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Masefield believes that the people can and will appreciate the best of Britain's literature—if they get a chance. Eliot believes that they cannot. He expands his thesis in his "Notes Towards a Definition of Culture," stating that "the fundamental social processes . . . previously favoured the development of elites," but that now the opposite takes place, and culture degenerates "because wider sections of the population take an active part in cultural activities."

The degree of truth in Eliot's contention is that culture in our western world is, undeniably, degenerating. Cheap and nasty American productions are splashed all over the place—the French intelligentsias have dubbed it "Le Plan Marshall Cultural." There are comic-cuts and films full of brute worship and clerical nostalgia for a ghostly past; pulp magazines and Broadway plays full of sexual perversion, war propaganda, and racialism. Did you see "The Killers," "The Blue Dahlia?" Do you read "Life"—or Lillian Helman's later plays?

At the same time, It is true that here in the west "wider sections of the population take an active part in cultural activities"? Surely of recent years the vested ownership of "cultural" media—press, radio, screen—have become more and more subordinated to a constantly narrower group of interests. Even the B.B.C. is directed by a committee of businessmen, one of them tied directly to a U.S. press chain. Even in little New Zealand the 1949 Commission reported that the theatre business is effectively controlled by two chains—and beyond that, the whole process, from the scenario-writer's cerebellum to the box-office, is in the grasp of a ring of overseas film concerns, closely inter-related. Our daily press, privately-owned, is itself a vested interest with the additional gag of commercial advertising which [unclear: so] chokes the radio.

No. It is only at the receiving end that "wider sections of the population" indulge in "culture." As consumers, they may be accused of creating a demand for the shocking trash they are given. But in our society there is no room for an effective demand for anything by the consumer. He takes what he is given. A mind dulled by moronic rubbish develops a taste for moronic rubbish.

Hence Eliot's view, no doubt, that Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley would be "caviar to the general." He seems to forget that Elizabethan artisans mobbed the pit of the Globe, that every Protestant weaver cherished—and read—his copy of "Paradise Lost," and that the Owenites and Chartists declaimed from "The Masque of Anarchy" and "Prometheus Unbound."

He also seems to forget that those barbaric Communists, although they notoriously lack any western culture, nevertheless manage to maintain a popular demand for high standard ballet, for Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Cervantes, and Tolstoy—to such an extent that they are still best-selling commodities in every theatre and bookstall from Berlin to Shanghai. And here people really do take an active part in culture—every factory and farm village has its theatre, its library, its orchestra,—its writers, artists, musicians.