David J. Rosner’s “On Mass Culture and Civilizational Mediocrity” in v65 traces a line of German 19th- and 20th-century thinkers holding very negative views toward Anglo-American culture, its mercantile capitalism, its liberal democracy, and its mass culture of mediocrity. The sequence runs through Nietzsche’s critique of democracy (Utilitarianism’s “greatest good for the greatest number” perpetuates mediocrity and “penalizes the excellent”); Heidegger’s conflation of American culture and Soviet communism as metaphysically the same (“the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the boundless organization of the average man”); Adorno’s critique of the “culture industry” and its soporific homogenization of consumers; and Spengler’s condemnation of capitalism as hastening the Decline of the West.

Heidegger’s concept of “the they-self” (das Man) — drawn partly from Kierkegaard — argues that “everydayness” prescribes a kind of being in which the “they” prescribes what we take pleasure in, what we read, see, and judge about literature and art. This leveling can become more pronounced in some civilizations than others. Adorno’s Marxist spin holds that mass culture functions as a mechanism of distraction by which capitalism anesthetizes its citizens from the reality of their own oppression, never leaving the consumer alone long enough to reflect upon their boring exhausting jobs. Spengler’s “money machine” replaces “the primordial value of the land” with “money separated from goods,” and “the cash-nexus” saps the energy of the race.

In v87, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov returns to this tradition with “Hope and Pessimism in ‘Classical’ 20th Century Civilizational Theory,” examining Bloch’s Principle of Hope against Spengler’s cultural pessimism, Toynbee’s catastrophism, Sorokin’s calamity and reconstruction, and Targowski’s “educating for wisdom.”

Source summaries:

  • v65 (Fall 2011) — David J. Rosner, “On Mass Culture and Civilizational Mediocrity,” works through the four-figure sequence. (v65)
  • v87 (Fall 2022) — Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov, “Hope and Pessimism in ‘Classical’ 20th Century Civilizational Theory,” updates the German pessimist tradition and contrasts it with Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope. (v87)