Democracy and Literature

One of my standard tropes in my teaching days was to caution students against succumbing to “the tyranny of the present.” We often focus narrowly on current events or trends and tend to miss the much larger picture. Our talk about COVID vaccines may blind us to the problems associated with the centuries-long ascendancy of scientific method as an overweening cultural authority; or our reflections on weaknesses in our educational systems and the decline of family structures may distract us from considering the ways in which industrial capitalism has not only changed our social systems but our morals as well; or how the very idea of literacy alters authority and community and (according to Neil Postman) created the thing we call “childhood”; or how our concerns about the “state of our democracy” may blind us to the general development of democracy itself and how it contains forces of growth but also destruction, and how that which it destroys may be permanently lost to us.

Readers of this website will recognize once again the echoes of the “religious terror” that reverberated in Alexis de Tocqueville’s soul when he considered the (then) 700 year emergence and predominance of the idea of equality and the ruins it left in its wake. So obvious to us Americans is the rightness of the idea of equality and so precious its benefits, he believed, that we would accept its restrictions as freedom and its untamed and corrosive energy as a gift. At first, he believed this unique attribute of America, its “equality of conditions,” was both bane and blessing, but by the time he wrote his second volume he was less sanguine about equality’’s effects, being ever more attuned to how it would prepare us for a soft despotism. As Rousseau once said, all would “run headlong into their chains” so long as we were all in the soup together. The fact that the reader may be getting uncomfortable at the very thought there might be something wrong with the idea of equality goes to Tocqueville’s point about its unseen and unreflected upon hold on us.

Tocqueville applied both his keen eye and his heuristic to every area of American life, and his observations are sharpest and most cutting not when he discusses politics but when he discusses democratic culture. Tyranny in the ancient world, he claimed, operated when the ruler applied force to the body, but in a democracy “society,” reflecting majority desires and interests, tyranny would become irresistible: “In democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” The main way democracy accomplishes this is not in what it eliminates but in what it “prevents from being born”; and the main thing it keeps from being born is brilliance. It tends to debase rather than elevate. He thus warned us not to choose democracy if we want “to give loftiness to the human spirit” or if we want to “maintain profound convictions and to prepare for great devotions” or if we are interested in “polishing mores, … elevating manners, [and] making the arts shine.” If we are interested in poetry and art and great literature, he told us, we will not find them in a democratic culture.

His multi-chapter reflections on literature are among the most interesting in Democracy in America. Given our interest in material well-being and practical application, Americans would have little patience for the difficulties involved in refining one’s tastes; so rather than consuming art as a rich and well-crafted feast, Americans would settle for food easily prepared, quickly devoured, and rapidly digested. Americans would seldom if ever, he thought, “elevate the mind to the highest spheres of the intellect” but instead always bring “it back toward the middle ones.” In other words, the idea of equality would level out, or we might say level down, our interests and abilities and tastes. Americans may produce a surfeit of what passes as art and literature, but in so doing would “diminish the merit of each of them,” and this in no small part because Americans are more concerned about the cash value of a piece than its aesthetic value. Only America could produce the studio of Thomas Kinkade and its sentimental and naturalized and nostalgic kitsch.

Tocqueville believed that only an elevated art possessed the quality that, by transcending the tastes of all, could genuinely unite all (think of the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th, as an example). But democratic art would always be crude and make us more crude in the process:

They therefore do not make these pleasures the principle charm of their existence; but they consider them as a passing and necessary relaxation in the midst of the serious work of life: such men can never acquire a profound enough knowledge of the literary art to feel its delicacies; the little nuances elude them. Having only a short time to give to letters, they want to put it wholly to profit. They like books that are procured without trouble, that are quickly read, that do not required learned research to be understood. They demand facile beauties that deliver themselves and that one can enjoy at an instant; above all the unexpected and the new are necessary to them.

Democratic peoples would inevitably tend, he argued, to see sublimity only in themselves, and such introspection would necessarily further fragment and thus destabilize society. Lacking a common literature or a common art, we also lack a common culture, thus attenuating our ability to work together.

We should not be surprised, then, to find that this leveling tendency occasionally alarmed democracy’s defenders, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the middle part of the last century when systematic efforts were made to bring high art to the great American middle. CBS broadcast Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts,” whereby not only America’s youth but all Americans were introduced to and instructed to appreciate the great canon of Western music by one of America’s greatest teachers (watching Bernstein teach music is to see a true master teacher at work). Publishing companies published collector’s series of “Great Books” that could be proudly displayed and perhaps even read in all households. All of us of a certain age remember the door to door encyclopedia salesman who promised to put at everyone’s fingertips the great heritage of the west. Julia Child taught the average housewife not to settle for meatloaf and gravy but to prepare French food in every American household. What all these projects had in common were people of unquestioned skill and taste and cultivation and learning translating all that to middle America for the purpose of elevating it. Why couldn’t Mrs. Jones make duck à l’Orange while Bobby read Aeschylus?

This very interesting essay by Nathan Payne reviews the aspirations and failures of this midcentury middle-brow cultural education project. The project had two noble purposes: to correct democracy’s excessive leveling, and to form and maintain a shared culture. Having long seen itself as Europe’s cultural inferior, America’s triumph over Europe in two world wars gave it a newfound confidence in itself.

It is true that Americans already aspired to the heights of European culture before the world wars. In the early twentieth century, however, our relation to the Old World had the aspect of an inferiority complex. We were less the stewards of our Western heritage than its estranged wards. Perhaps the destruction and brutality of World War II revealed advanced civilization to be a fragile thing, which needed to be preserved and protected in the anxious atomic age. Thousands of young Americans who might have otherwise never traveled to Europe were exposed to the culture of the Old World as it was being torn apart. After the war’s end, they returned with a legal right to an education, and a new expanse of leisure time. Also arriving in America were European intellectuals and artists fleeing Nazi persecution or the upheavals of war. America provided men such as Einstein, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Toscanini, Kantorowicz, Bruno Walter, and Thomas Mann with comfortable academic chairs and music directorships; and they in turn helped bring European culture to the American masses. This explosive growth in culture was made directly available to ordinary Americans through television, radio, and the long-playing record, but it required middlemen, or popularizers, to make it fully accessible to them.

Part of the brilliance of Payne’s essay is his careful calibration of these efforts against the tendency of democratic citizens to compare themselves to one another. The sets of “Great Books” may have had less to do with being read than with being seen. Critics quickly realized that a commercially produced mass-culture could never fully be reconciled to high art.

I hate to have to hand it to Macdonald [a foremost critic]. Fadiman’s noble vision of the Great Books being preserved from modern barbarism resonates today more than it did then. We live in our own Dark Ages, in which no idea is considered valid unless it can be easily communicated in bullet points; library books are thrown into the dumpster to make way for more screens; and STEM in all caps is believed to be a magic word. (For example, “STEM bridge-building” is somehow considered a more impressive label for an educational exercise in model engineering than just “bridge-building.”) But when Macdonald lists the deficiencies of the Great Books set, many of his complaints ring true.

The essay is replete with ripe observations and examples, both worthy and redolent of Tocqueville.

Fadiman’s persnickety attention to the truth of the most trivial words springs from the same source as his advocacy for great literature: the fear that humanistic values were in danger of being crowded out by the values of a mechanistic age, and that reflection, curiosity, and wit were no match for conditioning, consumption, and cant.

He was right, of course. After seventy years or so of mass culture and new leisure, we are as shallow, as easily manipulated, as addicted to novelty as ever before. Humane learning is viewed as obsolete due to machines that can respond to any question you put to them with answers that are inane, superficial, and false. The library book sales where I first found Fadiman’s anthologies were organized in order to make room for computers, more computers, and yet more computers.

Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” would soon be replaced by sensationalist dramas and ham-fisted comedies. When I would have my students reflect on which cultural artifacts they shared, pretty much the only three answers I received were Disney (oh cursed enterprise!) and Friends (as a friend of mine once said, the witless show by which future generations will condemn us) on the moving picture side, and Harry Potter on the printed word side. Given the data we have on how little Americans are reading, and how selectively reinforcing their reading has become, much like their viewing habits, it’s no wonder our politics are so fractured. The great acculturation efforts of the last century may have failed, but maybe — as Payne suggests — that ought to inspire us simply to do it better.

Discussion Questions:

1. How many books do you read a year, and how many people do you know read the same books? How do they manifest themselves into shared enterprises?

2. Have things such as book clubs and Oprah’s Book Club and “best seller” lists tried more informally to elevate our tastes, or do they reinforce middle-brow tastes through a technology of “popularizing”?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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