Pessimism For Mass Consumption
An Essay on Morals.
by Philip Wylie.
New York, Rinehart & Co., 1947. 204 pp. $2.50.

It is to the credit of the American way of life that it intends everything and everybody for mass consumption. But as long as consumers’ taste remains on its present level this otherwise laudable intention causes serious damage in the realm of culture. Culture for the “masses”—yes. Joy for the “masses”—by all means. But not all culture for the “masses”—not yet. The mass digestion has to be prepared. To trim, rationalize, and pre-digest for mass consumption such difficult cultural objects as the fine arts, poetry, and philosophy will at the present moment only mislead where we seek most to enlighten. (Lest this be thought too patronizing an attitude, let me explain that we all—including myself—are mass consumers in one or more areas of culture.)

That democratic assumption which makes the “average” man believe everything to be within his reach has, especially of late, done considerable harm to culture in this country. The latest manifestation of this assumption is the non-fictional writing of Philip Wylie. Who would have dreamed fifty years ago that pessimism could ever be made into an article saleable on the drug store level? Mr. Wylie demonstrates that almost anything can, in principle, be adapted to mass taste. Not that the “masses” will actually read this latest book of his, but we think immediately at the first glance at the first page: who will read this book if not they?

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Mr. Wylie’s earlier work of non-fiction, Generation of Vipers, as banal as it finally is, may have had the spark of something valid in its first impulse. At least it was negative. Unfortunately, his new book is positive, and it is a farrago of such arrantly assertive and militant nonsense as the editor of even an American publishing house rarely lets go to the printer. This, perhaps, is what the contemporary village atheist really looks like in print—sad decline of the provincial iconoclast, of the little shoemaker who used to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche! Only in this awful age could half-bakedness sink so low, only in this age could such half-bakedness reach print in anything but subsidized editions.

Mr. Wylie claims that man can solve his present difficulties only by freeing his instincts from the domination of the ego. The ego means churches, institutions, Communism, most public issues, etc., etc., all of which man ought to repudiate in order to realize himself and the fact that he is, to start with, only an animal. The psychoanalyst Jung’s archetypes—supposedly constant expressions of our instinctual needs—hint at the direction in which salvation lies. Down with almost everything. But for all Mr. Wylie’s subversive bluster in the name of the instincts, we discover that Americanism remains intact and that in the end he doesn’t even really mean what he says about religion. Everything can be taken back. And in any case Mr. Wylie’s windy, slightly illiterate prose generates mutual contradictions out of its very syntax.

This is, among other things, revolution for the timid layman. Without having to go to the bother of making one, he will get the sensation of a revolution from an attitude of violent, insubordinate, and irrelevant assertiveness. The emptier the assertiveness the purer the sensation. But what he will get more than anything else in the end is the sensation, without the difficulty of the actual experience, of having read something profound. Profundity for the masses, too. In the final analysis, if we go by Kant’s aesthetics, Mr. Wylie’s book has to be considered as a work of art, however low the level of that art—since, according to Kant (and this reviewer agrees with him), art gives one the sensation of a thing without necessarily including its meaning.

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But I have already taken this book too seriously. The important thing about it is not its absurdity or anything else that pertains to its explicit content. What, aside from its character as a new form of culture for the “masses,” makes it worth noticing at all is that it constitutes one more symptom of a dissatisfaction with’ the quality of contemporary American life that is spreading even to the smuggest and most worldly-successful sectors of our society. Essay on Morals is a banal symptom; nevertheless the state of mind it bears witness to is in a historical and sociological context a serious one. When people like Mr. Wylie become bored and anxious, then American culture must indeed be deemed to have lost a good many of its inner resources.

I do not believe that our society’s failing ability to allay the anguished boredom of the individuals who compose it can be blamed altogether on the international situation and the threat of the atomic bomb. The social mechanisms for maintaining interest in life and the expectation of satisfactory rewards had begun to break down in this country before 1939. The war may have speeded the process up but it did not initiate it. Conversation had already begun to flag ten years ago; our public pronouncements, our pleasures, our entertainment, our literature and art were already losing their pertinence. Today they seem so radically irrelevant that even people like Mr. Wylie, a writer of popular fiction undistinguished even in its own sphere, have begun to notice it and no longer know how to keep their place. The situation must be even more serious than we realize.

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