John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses

After making many notes, I thought I would add them on here. They are jsut points from the book that I found interesting and that give the overall theme of the book. The theme being that the rich intellectuals are trying to stop the poor masses gain any knowledge and better themselves. Seb rightly pointed out that the intellectuals were probably afraid of the masses bettering themselves and as a result tried and did stop this. They did this by making literature harder to read. This meant that the masses wouldn't be able to read it, get better jobs or earn more money. Here's the run down:

The different themes throughout the book:
The revolt of the masses,
Rewriting the masses,
The suburbs and the clerks,
Natural aristocrats.

-“The purpose of modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or semi-educated) readers and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the mass.”
-“Modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the un-precedently large reading public created by the C19th educational reforms.”
-Spanish philosopher, Jose Orteg Y Gasset – the revolt of the masses. Root of their worries was the population explosion from 1800 to 1914 from 180 to 460 million.
-3 Consequences to the explosion of population. 1. Overcrowding, doctors, cafes, beaches, waiting rooms etc. 2. Intrusion, the crowd takes possession of places that were designed for the best people. 3. The dictatorship of the masses.
-H.G.Wells said that the explosion of the new births was “the essential disaster to the C19th.”
-Nietzsche agrees with Ortega and says that many too many are born and Zarathustra declares, “they hang on to their branches much too long.”
-“The difference between the C19th mob and the C20th mass is literacy”. This was after they bought in the educational legislation which introduced universal elementary education.
-The mass is a metaphor for the unknowable and the invisible. It denies them individuality which we ascribe ourselves and the people we know.
-Tinned Salmon is repeatedly a feature in lower class cuisine.
-George Orwell says that tinned food destroyed the health of the British people.
-In Ortega's view, a mass man is that he is un-ambitious and common. The aim of all of his writings was to segregate the intellectuals from the masses and to acquire control over them with that that language gives. Pg 23
-Nietzsche's idea of mass is a large herd of animals.
-Virginia Wolf, Nietzsche, William Inge, T.S.Eliot all think that they should eliminate the humanity of the masses and degrade them in to weeds, a rabble, a shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that.
-Hitler refers to Jews as a bacterial disease.
-According to Le Bon, crowds are mentally inferior and intent on destruction. As soon as a man joins a crowd he automatically drops a few rungs on the ladder.
-Trotter thinks that there are many different sorts of herds/masses. Some are good like bees and others are bad like wolves. He thinks that the Germans are a bad mass and that they need a good thrashing.
-Kodak, invented by George Eastmen in New York in 1888 bought photography with the reach of every human being.
-Forster travelled from Japan to England to Italy to India and took note of the lower classes and found India the most colourful.
-Writers made the poorer side of the mass, cosmetically ugly. No teeth, begging, bulging etc
-Graham Greene did not feel sorry for the workers/unemployed as when the great Strike happened he sided opposite the workers and got a job beating them. He remarked on it being like rugger at school.
-George Orwell noticed the caste system when he was about 6. His parents did not allow him to play with the ‘common’ children. He does not blame his family for this as it is normal middle class snobbishness but the lower class ceased to be ‘a race of friendly and wonderful human beings’ and became enemies – ‘almost subhuman’ and ‘brutal’. Pg 40
-Indoctrination on young children of the caste system and who should and should not be friends with. Who are humans and who are not.
-Somerset Maugham says that it is not the lower class fault of their smelling sweat, they do not have bathrooms.
-Orwell renamed the masses the Proles and said that they live in dirt, among rats and bed bugs. Pg 43 They are also ignorant, stupid and gullible.
-The Frankfurt theorists, not Benjamin, shared the view that mass culture and the mass media, as developed under capitalism, had degraded civilization in the C20. They blamed radio, cinema, newspapers and cheap books for the ‘disappearance of the inner life’.
-They also believe that if the mass turned in to individuals and fought the bourgeoisie life would be better. However they won’t and O’Briens warns Winston: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
-There was an increase in people moving to suburban areas and commuting to the big cities as it was cheaper. People did however not like the eating up of the countryside around London and such places. Pg 46
-People did not like the rows and rows of housing. Nietzsche commented on it as a child taking them out of his toy box.
-Nice middle class homes surrounded by meadows now occupied terraced houses on every bit of green land.
-The masses caused irreparable damage with their cheap housing taking up the countryside. Another reason for upper classes to not like the poorer ones. Pg 49
-The speed of it too. A couple of decades and everything’s gone.
-This made writers head to other places to write. Pg 50 They did this to escape ugly Britain but tourist destinations were being made just as ugly.
-Greene thought that because of the cremation act the masses had turned even death in to a conveyor belt level. Pg 51
-Writers had different opinions on what suburbia was like. Pg 52
-Northcliffe Daily Mail aiming it at Clerks with the cycle column, tit bits and answers, pg 58
-George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche strive for the overman, the ubermensch .

-Adam and eve mentioned briefly on pg 67
-Nietzsche says that men are not equal. The mistaken belief that they are is to blame for the degeneracy of Europe. The truly noble man is egotistic. He despises pity, which is unhealthy and us valued only by slaves. The warrior is the type of the finest man. Pg 72
-Pg 80 If society wants to be civilized it must establish conditions favourable to the preservation of the gifted few.
-Pg 82 Iany theory of natural aristocracy must attribute the aristocrats superiority either to intrinsic qualities, (secret knowledge, better artistic taste, superior vitality, etc) or to some kind of supernatural selection.
-He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

I hope that proves useful to anyone wanting a simple explanation of John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.