ABSTRACT
There is a danger in this discussion of mass culture: the danger of excessive Platonization; that is, taking mass culture as one distinct entity and elite culture as another, each with essences of its own and the product of each having no relation to the product of the other. People who criticize the passivity produced by mass culture are often passive in accepting what they regard as a predestined consequence. There are opportunities for leadership and influence in the future of the mass media. What most humanist critics mean when they contend that mass culture and excellence are incompatible is that the aesthetic forms that flourished in, say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe do not flourish in twentieth century America.
