John Carey - The Intellectuals and the Masses

In his book, John Carey explores the role of the masses in society and how mass culture has shaped us. Carey uses the book to criticise what many philosophers and ‘intellectuals’ thought of the masses and how they feared them. Ultimately, it was the introduction of universal literacy which caused this fear – the masses could now read and write and had a voice; the intellectuals’ positions in the top strata of society were no longer secure.

Carey uses the thoughts of others to put his ideas across. Below are quotes from the book which I have selected to best demonstrate the ideas of Nietzsche, TS Elliot, Lord Northcliffe, James Joyce and several others:

Newspapers were highly criticised by the intellectuals as the literature of the masses..
- TS Elliot: “newspapers affirm the masses as a complacent prejudiced and unthinking mass”
- Nietzsche: “The rabble vomit their bile and call it a newspaper”
- Northcliffe disagreed with this, asserting that a newspaper should deal with what the masses want (although this was in order to make money from them)
- Nietzsche completely hated the new educated masses – life under them was “suicide”. However he admired Hitler, believing in an undemocratic society where intellect puts you at the top. Spoke of the “master-race”, which many theorists say directly influenced Hitler in later years
- Yeates believed in innate knowledge and said “sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” – the beginnings of ethnic cleansing?

John Carey on Modernism: disliked the intellectuals’ ploy of making literature too difficult for the masses to understand

- Ortega: population increase leads to over-crowding, which is intrusive and leads to the dictatorship of the masses – there is an inevitability of dictatorship
- EM Forster: the effort of the masses to acquire knowledge is ill-advised and unsuccessful, because culture comes with wealth
- Virginia Woolf used her novels to explore the masses, portraying her character Miss Kilman as uncultured and, importantly, religious
- James Joyce, like all intellectuals hated newspapers, and essentially believed that the masses weren’t wealthy enough to be cultured
- Tinned food is hated by the intellectuals and becomes a symbol for the masses. It is suggested that the First World War wouldn’t have happened without tinned food. It is also seen as an offence against the sacredness of individuality
- Ortega says the quality that marks out a mass is a lack of ambition

CASE STUDIES

George Gissing and the Ineducable Masses:
- writing to his friend
- speaks of the vulgarity of the masses
- rise of the aristocracy makes a bigger class gap
- tried to appeal to people on the brink of joining the masses
- believed in the civilising power of poetry, although he didn’t think it would be successful on the masses

HG Wells, Getting rid of people:
- watched the urbanisation of Bromley and hated it
- anti-Catholic
- New-Republic: wanted to kill of undesirable people in a humane manor e.g. diseased people
- Wanted something like ‘Utopia’ – a new world

HG Wells against HG Wells:
- believed the human race is doomed
- however total destruction is both bad and good

Narrowing the Abyss: Arnold Bennett
- the hero of the book
- disliked by the intellectuals
- believed that the intellectuals should write to a wider audience and that what is popular with the masses should not be immediately discounted
- everyone is an artist – completely disagrees with the intellectuals
- the spread of education will heal the rift in English culture
- interestingly said “most people find life dull – it’s the journalists job to make it not”

Wyndham, Lewis and Hitler:
- The intellectuals’ intellectual
- TS Elliot admired him
- Sexist ideas: the intellectuals were warned that women and children would drag them into the masses
Believed that 20th Century cultural decay was the fault of women
- “democracy hates intellectuals because the mind has an aristocratic colour which affects the masses”
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