The social sciences, of course, are not the only intellectual cultures that help us understand humanity and the human condition. Fiction, particularly classic fiction and particularly serious fiction, the fiction of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of Lev Tolstoy, of Mikhail Bulgakov, of Nikolay Gogol, of Mark Twain, and of Alice Munro, to chose a few examples, have long helped many including me grasp the “nature”of humanity and the “nature” of the human condition. Perhaps the work of fiction that has helped me most understand both is a short story by the noted science fiction writer C.M. Kornbluth titled “The Marching Morons”.
“The Marching Morons” is fascinating on a number of different levels. On the basic or literal level it is a tale about how the few intellectuals have to spend large chunks of their lives inventing devices and making them work in order to protect the masses, the marching morons, from themselves. On another level “The Marching Morons" is a clever inversion of Karl Marx’s conception of the working class, who Marx sees as the carrier of real humanity and real human society and culture and who will, thanks to the dialectic of time and with the help of intellectuals, restore humanity to its real nature by undermining breaking the cultural and ideological chains associated with the fetishisation of the commodities.
I don’t think I have ever read a piece of fiction or non-fiction that, as does Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”, captures something essential about humanity across both time and space. When viewed in combination with Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox” it helps us understand something important about not only intellectual culture but mass culture. Berlin, of course, divided intellectual culture into two groups: the hedgehogs, those who try to find the essence of humanity, society, and culture in a single factor, and foxes, those who see multiple factors as providing the bases for humanity, society, and culture.
The division between hedgehogs and foxes may be quite compelling when we focus on intellectual culture particularly in the West. Intellectual culture, however, is only a minute and perhaps shrinking part of human culture. Intellectuals, whether hedgehogs or foxes, are countercultures within a tiny broader counterculture. Broader society and culture is made up more by sheep than either hedgehogs or foxes as Kornbluth points up While the hedgehogs and foxes can and sometimes do think outside the cultural and ideological boxes they have been socialised for conformity into, the sheep rarely if ever think outside the box. They live largely contented lives fetishising the ideological commodities they have been socialised into as long as they can eat the bread and attend the circuses that help breed contentment or at least vaccinate the masses from thinking outside the box too often or too much.
The problem with Berlin’s division of intellectual culture into hedgehogs and foxes is that it is not broad enough. Those intellectuals, those apologists, those polemicists, those demagogues, who are courtiers, who are sycophants to those who have power because of their economic positions, their political positions, and their positions in the media, and who help the powers that be manipulate the socialised for conformity masses, the suckers as P.T. Barnum called them, are best described as wolves.
Like intellectual culture in general, this culture of wolves, this culture of demagogues, is characterised by countercultures. There are, for example, demagogues on the left, demagogues who identify as liberals, demagogues who identify as conservative, and demagogues who are actually right wing populists. Those in the last counterculture, this culture of hired spin doctors who play sweat and sweat sour political and ideological flutes to the masses, differ in degree or quality from those in the other countercultures in that for them any means—lies, disinformation, scapegoating, slurs, inquisitions, uber hypocrisy, even murder (killing for the Lord)--can be used to achieve their theocratic ends because they believe that they and they alone are directly wired into god, history, nature, whatever. And yes I do realise that polemical (and to some extent analytical) intellectual Marxism shares this ethnocentric ideological and utopian trait.
With the triumph of mass modern society, mass capitalism, mass faux democracy—even Iceland is not a democracy in the real sense given bureaucratic realities though silent Friends communities may be—the masses have come to play a central role in producing and reproducing mass society, mass capitalism, and mass faux democracy given the extension of the franchise and the increasing role the mass media, including the mass brave new digital media, plays in pied piping the sometimes if not generally gullible masses. Paradoxically, even when the masses are not gullible they often get their cognitive wires crossed as when the right wing populist masses in the US, blame the federal government for all the ills of society, except when it comes to imperial warmaking, of course, rather than the economic elite who actually, thanks to their wealth, their bureaucratic positions, and the power and authority that comes from these, who really run most of the governments of the Western world. Both the Marxist Frankfurt School and Conservative Mass Society critics, of course, recognised these problems of mass society even if they did not always divine the cures for the mass society sickness.
Will any of this ever change? I doubt it. The Frankfurt School and Foucault were actually right. Postmodern digital media have made it possible to spread bullshite, lies, delusions, and hallucinatory conspiracy theories faster and farther than was possible via the oral media of the traditional world and the modern media of the modern world. Education cannot stop it because schooling is not liberatory despite the liberal dogma that it is save only for a small minority. Delusion is probably even more prominent today than it was in the past. There are more masses than intellectuals and more conformist intellectuals than dissidents, those whose voices are always crying in a wilderness. The historically dissident Society of Friends, a group at the forefront of peace activism, indigenous rights, women’s rights, gay rights, for instance, even when its conformist wings are counted amount to only 400,000 worldwide. Even economic crises these days, thanks to socialism for the rich and powerful, thanks, in other words, to the use of taxpayers monies to bail out risk loving economic and financial vampiric corporations, have little impact on the systems that have been developed by those in power to maintain the dynamic status quo in mass capitalist societies like the US.
Perhaps only an ecological catastrophe can bring about real change at this point. And ecological change is coming. In fact, it is already here in the form of pollution, climate change, health problems associated with both, and the declines in animal species, to name only a very few things associated with the human made apocalypse. While environmental catastrophe is unstoppable at this point what this entails for the human animal is uncertain. Perhaps the powers that be will leave this planet for another and the whole sick cycle will start anew. Regardless of what happens stay tuned for while the human drama, tragedy, comedy, black comedy, parody, and satire may not be all that suspenseful what is scarier, more horrific, more terrifying, more barbaric, more sickening, more distressing, and more full of blood and guts than the seemingly never ending plague that humanity brings in its wake. As always, candy and popcorn are always available in the lobby or in the kitchen.
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