Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [115]
But this aspect of the Triumph of the Fact is a holdover from the period, which ended roughly with the 1929 stock-market crash, when our capitalism was still in the stage of production. Here I am concerned with a kind of fact-fetishism that is characteristic of the age of consumption the economy has moved into. Compared to the straightforward old utilitarian attitude toward Facts, this new approach is decadent, even a bit perverse. Instead of being interested only in useful information, we now tend to the opposite extreme, valuing Facts in themselves, collecting them as boys collect postage stamps, treating them, in short, as objects of consumption rather than as productive tools. This attitude, of course, is not wholly new, as Dr. Watson’s horror at his friend’s ignorance about the solar system shows; but we have carried it much further. A newspaper review, for example, of Cassell’s Encyclopædia of World Literature has this passage:
How useful it may be to have “Who’s Who” information on Arabic, Cuban, Dalmatian, Flemish, Persian, Raeto-Romanisch, Sanskrit and Slovak writers is problematical. But that the information should be available somewhere seems like a good idea and here it is.
We just like to have the little things around, like pets. Because the gathering of Facts is an important part of the scientific method, which with us has more prestige than the artistic, ethical, or philosophical modes of apprehending reality, a confused but powerful notion has arisen that the mere accumulation of Facts is a sensible activity. The Well-informed Man is our Poet, our Sage, our Prophet.[2]
Journalists like Walter Winchell and John Gunther have made careers out of exploiting the enormous American appetite for Facts. Every year a great range of books appear to soothe our itch for information: digests of everything from anthropology to palm reading; popular encyclopedias and introductory guides to painting, music, philosophy, world history; manuals on birds, politics, economic theory, American history, baseball, polar exploration, what not. Such curiosity is not in itself bad, though often rather pointless, and the level of this kind of popularization is probably higher today than it has ever been before. What is bad is the devaluation of other modes of understanding if only because one hasn’t time for everything. (The nonexpandable attic isn’t the brain, but rather time.) Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market for the latest “Inside Russia” reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how, what, who, when, where, everything but why.
Henry Luce has built a journalistic empire on this national weakness for being “well informed.” Time attributes its present two-million circulation to a steady increase, since it first appeared in 1925, in what it calls “functional curiosity.” Unlike the old-fashioned idle variety, this is “a kind of searching, hungry interest in what is happening everywhere—born not of an idle desire to be entertained or amused, but of a solid conviction that the news intimately and vitally affects the lives of everyone now. Functional curiosity grows as the number of educated people grows.” The curiosity exists, but it is not functional since it doesn’t help the individual function. A very small part of the mass of miscellaneous Facts offered in each week’s issue of Time (or, for that matter, in the depressing quantity of newspapers and magazines visible on any large newsstand) is useful to the reader; they don’t help him make more money, take some political or other action