Attitudes to Mass Culture

Morris Raphael Cohen, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, was best known as a critic of other philosophers. People would sometimes grumble about his “negativism”: Cohen tore down systems of philosophy without offering a clear alternative. On one such occasion he is said to have answered this complaint as follows: “My first name is an Anglicization from the Hebrew for Moses, and like Moses, I can lead you through the wilderness without bringing you to the Promised Land.” Students of “mass culture,” whose subject matter is not the universe but only an increasingly significant part of it, should feel much as Cohen felt when he found himself unable to give sweeping answers to every question. Mass culture is...