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

There have been some bad moments in the history of the humanities in Canada. I was reminded of this when reading L.B. Kuffert's admirable study of culture critics in English Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Much of the book, especially in the first chapters, is filled with the oh-so-earnest comments of a wide assortment of academics, journalists, and artists on the lamentable state of society and culture in a Canada that was then rapidly modernizing. This was not the finest hour of such luminaries as Arthur Lower, Watson Kirkconnell, B.K. Sandwell, or W.L. Morton, never mind a gaggle of other angry scribblers. Their critique was a tired, repetitive mishmash of moral clichés, a whine against science and technology, anti-materialism and anti-commercialism, a yearning for some mythical spiritual utopia, and pompous but trite declarations about the human condition, or at least the modest Canadian variation of that condition. None of these people produced a work of the calibre and imagination of, say, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills, or The Uses of Literacy (1957) by Richard Hoggart. Instead they unloaded a series of boring tirades about what was wrong with people watching too much American television or avoiding Shakespeare or enjoying the fruits of postwar abundance, few of which seem to have had much effect on the views or habits of the Canadian people they constantly denigrated. Where was that social wisdom the humanities lay claim to? It makes you realize that sometimes it would be better if the country had far fewer public intellectuals.

None of which ought to count against Kuffert's achievement. He has read extensively in the published literature on culture and society in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. He has surveyed an extraordinary range of different, mostly ephemeral works, both literary and broadcast, of the time. He has organized the results into six lengthy chapters, full of quotations and analysis that make sense of the evolution of cultural criticism. His judgments are careful and balanced and always grounded. He is, for example, much more charitable in his interpretation of what the highbrows were up to than I. But, even so, he does make clear that the quality of this criticism improved when social scientists like Harold Innis or John Seeley (of Crestwood Heights fame) added some reasoned insight and researched fact to the debate. He has two particularly interesting discussions, the first on the discourse of reconstruction during and just after the Second World War and the other about the way in which the highbrow assault on mass culture mutated into a brand of middlebrow nationalism after the mid-1950s. One of his chapters manages to link together an informed discussion of the worries about broadcasting to the scare over automation around 1960, a juxtaposition that enhances the understanding of both phenomena. Likewise he has a fine chapter, the last chapter, on that marvellous exercise in state-directed culture, the Centennial celebrations (including Expo) of 1967.

There are some lacunae. I was surprised to see no attempt to grapple with Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'cultural capital' and 'habitas,' especially since that might have led into a deeper exploration of just what so bothered the humanists and highbrows. Along similar lines, I would have liked more attention paid to the material condition of this intelligentsia, who they were, what their situation was, how they ranked against other class fragments. Finally, I think Kuffert neglects two of the most novel and significant Canadian works on culture and society in this period, Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (1951), which did try to revitalize the highbrow critique of mass culture, and John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic (1965), which showed what was right and wrong with mass-society critique, at least in the case of Canada. But...