The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (2014)
“or “modern man.” Those were people whose lives were shaped not by traditional cultures but by the demands of urbanized, industrialized, and commercialized modern life, of which shallow mass culture was one expression. The West had dominated much of the world for centuries, but something essential about the heritage of Western civilization was possibly about to be lost. Since America was leading the way into modernity, that cultural erosion might be weakening the American moral character and the... collective ability of Americans to remain as a free people. As Bernard Rosenberg put it in an alarmist, but not unusual, form, “At its worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism.” At stake, then, in countering the modern trends that degraded the quality of human experience, might be nothing less than loss of freedom.1 “Freedom” was much celebrated in midcentury America and was a word one could use without explanation or argument.MoreLess
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