A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939-1967 (review)

The binary of "high" versus "mass" culture is a key dichotomy informing the humanities and social sciences. Kuffert's central argument in A Great Duty is that a number of mid-20^th century Canadians involved in academia, media, government, and community associations were greatly concerned "that mass culture might become the only culture ..." (25), and in some cases made grand efforts to maintain a semblance of civilized taste in the Canadian populous. For Kuffert's critical observers, "[t]he immediate goal was not a highbrow renaissance but undoing what Hollywood and the other capitals of mass culture had wrought" (137). A Great Duty is an immense and detailed description of cultural critics in postwar Canada and their responses to a world struggling with the ethical dilemmas posed by the fallout of Nazi atrocity, mechanized production, and mass consumption. Using cultural criticisms found in popular media of the time, including Saturday Night, Maclean's, and various Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sources, Kuffert plots an important era in the formation of what is subsumed under the often unproblematized axiom "Canadian identity."

Several important epochal issues are touched on over six chapters: the consequences of decreasing civic participation; the religious responses to the "moral chaos" fostered by the colonizing tendencies of modern science; the massification of commodity forms and the subsequent decline in "high culture"; and the proliferation of radio and television communications. The CBC's radio show Citizens' Forum and the federal government's Massey Commission are a few of the "highbrow" cultural projects concocted to "... counteract the perceived effects of commercialized entertainments" (88). B.K Sandwell and F. Cyril James are two of Kuffert's most oft-cited commentators. In the end, an unsettling irony: "Wary of the dangers of modern life and mass culture, and working consistently to show Canadians that there were 'better' ways to spend their leisure time, cultural critics emerged from relative obscurity to find themselves on radio and television — that is, in the marketplace. Duty had led them there." (238). Some of Kuffert's most interesting anecdotes pertain to the "brand of democracy mythologized in wartime slogans" (31), and his critic's paradoxical demonization of a Nazi Germany with which Canada was technologically parallel (40). Conformity and complacency were the cultural ills of Canada, as "[m]any Canadians were no doubt entirely satisfied with the rather practical argument that democracy must be preserved simply because the alternative was hateful totalitarianism" (55). The sheer span and detail of the work alone is likely to attract a large readership of scholars and students interested in Canadian cultural history and the history of communication technologies in Canada.

The book is sharply written, in an impressive lexicon which would also appeal to the kind of critics which Kuffert draws on for data. The work is, however, far from impeccable. The introductory chapter is a drawn-out literature review that smacks of dissertation, which could act to hinder readers from proceeding past the first few paragraphs. Of the 238 pages which constitute the book body, sparsely more than a few are attributed to describing who exactly constitutes a "cultural critic" or the method by which those critic's comments were included or excluded from serving as data sources. Concerned at times with the milieu of mass culture and its connection to "modern life" (4–5, 15–16, 97, 130–131, 218, 237–238) or the "implications of modernity" (172), the author fails to analytically spell out in any depth what these concepts mean or their status in sociological or socio-historical literature. Some technologies are singled out for criticism, while others are glossed over. In one stinging sentence, Kuffert writes "The family sat at home, susceptible to slow dismemberment via the Trojan horse of television" (194), yet the socio-cultural impacts of the automobile are never discussed. Despite encompassing overlapping time periods, Kuffert's work lacks the biting political approach of a book like Whitaker and...