Artist: Juliette Forga

Art Work: This picture was an illustration for Jordan Peterson’s book Beyond Order: 12 More
Rules For Life (Rule XII: Be grateful in spite of your suffering).
Vu Ngo
ENG 1975 – Dr. Michael Tomko
September 24th, 2021
Paper No. 01

Prompt: Can beauty soar in the age of mass culture?

When we consider the question of whether beauty can soar in the age of mass culture, it is

important to take into account people’s prior encounter with beauty itself. It can mean orderly for

someone who’s highly structured in his or her daily life and takes pleasure in following a set of

rules. Beauty can also mean chaos and pain for an artist whose life is dedicated to creating

something “out of this world”. Either way, beauty is objective in existence but subjective in

experience. It is individualistic in essence but somehow struggles to soar in the age of mass

culture. It has been replaced by conformity or rather supposed works of art that imitate beauty,

yet there remains hope that the spark of true beauty would ultimately shine through and

illuminate people on the false beauty that’s they have attached themselves to for long.

To start, beauty is often used as an escape route for people out of their ordinary lives. It offers

an alternative world view where one can disappear from his or her reality and be immersed in it

even for a matter of moments. And that’s why it’s supposedly beautiful. It’s not ordinary; it’s not

being repeated on a day-to-day basis. But more importantly, it’s usually not plagued with

suffering, and only God knows how hard people have had it in life. “There is a division of labor

in the world – as I see it – and the people have quite enough reality to bear, simply getting

through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrum of birth, taxes, and

death” (Baldwin 3). Baldwin thinks, and I also tend to agree, that life is hard as it already is. In

fact, I believe that this is universally true. Even the wealthiest among us who seem to have it all

carry the same troubles as the ones who might not be so fortunate with regards to their financial

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well-being. That being said, it would feel natural to have this pursuit of so-called beauty or

fantasies drawn up by the mass media or trending pop culture. They allow us to keep our current

worries at bay and stay out of the dark corners of our lives until we’re pulled back into it by the

reality that’s distressing us from 9 to 5 and more for many people. This beauty is the

manifestation of the unfulfilled desire of one’s mundane life. It is the façade that hides the true

hardship and catastrophes of human existence, yet it is beautiful, nonetheless. But is it true

beauty if it does not accurately reflect the truth? Or is beauty a cure that people voluntarily take

to stay as far away as possible from the truth?

Based on the assumption that beauty itself stems from this idea of individualism which is part

of an individual that is also true, it would only make sense that beauty therefore must come from

truth, regardless of whether it is a magnified version of truth or distorted truth. At the end of the

day, beauty has its roots in reality, and only from reality, arts draw inspiration and can appeal to

a large audience for its relevance. In this regard, mass culture has given us what is only in the

guise of beauty. “What the mass culture really reflects is the American bewilderment in the face

of the world that we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world, that we

are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys, and follies which have baffled and afflicted

mankind for ages” (Baldwin 5). Again, it is important to face the fact that life is hard, but in such

hardships exists sparks of happiness and joyfulness. And together, they give birth to beauty;

beauty that entails both order and chaos, “and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos

contains life – and a great transforming energy” (Baldwin 6).

Having established that beauty derives from individualism, it is disheartening to see that such

beauty has almost entirely been replaced by uniformity. It is what mass culture has turned all

that’s beautiful into. In other words, there is no longer a sense of originality in what’s typically

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considered beautiful nowadays. According to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The

Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, “interested parties like to explain the

culture industry in technological terms. In millions of participants, they argue, demand

reproduction processes which inevitably lead to the use of standard products to meet the same

needs at countless locations”. It is crucial to understand that “culture industry” points to the

commercial aspect of the marketing function of popular culture. It has now become a priority to

focus on mass economic success and thus, everything becomes mostly standardized through

mass production. “The schematic nature of this procedure is evident from the fact that the

mechanically differentiated products are ultimately all the same. That the difference between the

models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known by any child”

(Horkheimer & Adorno 97). Every movie now follows the same trajectory or carries the same

formulaic narrative. Hence, it has become almost too easy to predict the endings based on prior

movies having the same motifs. That is what the “culture industry” has led us into – the singular

beauty that arises out of the demolition of differentiating characteristics. This is an interesting

idea as it bears many similarities to Nazi Germany. The reason being is that one could make a

strong argument that it may be better to understand Nazism as an aesthetic movement rather than

a political movement. It aims at the pursuit of beauty, or an idealized image of the German state

based on the destruction of others. Anyhow, the culture industry seems to take over the quest for

the imagination of the people. “For the consumer, there is nothing left to classify, since the

classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production” (Horkheimer &

Adorno 98). There is no thinking left to be done, and the only task remaining is to consume

what’s been fed to us and consider it as the so-called modern beauty.

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 What’s especially fascinating is Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the content of the

above-mentioned beauty, which appears to align with my definition of true beauty. “The whole

world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the

moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because

the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception” (Horkheimer & Adorno

99). Here, the culture industry produces forms of arts, replicating the base reality or truth of our

lives. But isn’t that what was previously defined as true beauty – one that stems from truth or

some version of the truth? The keyword here is “stem from”. It is not a direct replication of life,

given how tough and grim it is, as mentioned above. But if it is, beauty would simply be

conveyed by those who are in a constant state of apathetic torpor.

However, this is not to say that life itself is not beautiful. There is indeed beauty in every

nook and cranny of life; one just has to accept it for what it is and be grateful despite his or her

suffering. Again, one must not deem everything that the mass culture is producing unworthy of

achieving beauty. Granted that beauty originates from truth itself, what if such truth is genuinely

too horrible to bear for the average person? “And this has everything to do, of course, with what

was expected of America: which expectation, so generally disappointed, reveals something we

do not want to know about the intricacies and inequities of any social structure, reveals, in sum,

something we do not want to know about ourselves” (Baldwin 5). On this note, it is important to

acknowledge the ability to fearlessly confront one’s suffering and transcend it psychologically.

This is something that’s uniquely human. Instead of making matters worse, we can constrain our

suffering and face it head-on, which makes us courageous, and then ameliorate it. In other words,

it is necessary that we encounter the darkness of our lives or dive deep into the abyss before we

begin to find a light, which is beauty. Looking at the illustration on the first page, we can see the

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depiction of St. Sebastian being tied to a tree and shot with arrows. What’s interesting is that we

don’t actually see the roots of the tree, but rather St. Sebastian being one with the tree itself. It

seems like what’s rooted powerfully in the earth is the strength of his feet and his legs. He

represents the tree, which in turn represents life, longevity, and power particularly in the face of

suffering. Above all, St. Sebastian does not seem to be tormented but at peace. He’s not leaning

back but pushing his body forward, which I interpret as an indication of gratitude. And you

cannot be properly grateful for what you have unless you understand how terrible things could be

and are likely to be. Coming back to the culture industry, although it is true that most of the

things it presents us with aren’t directly pointing us to true beauty, it might be beneficial to look

past that. The culture industry does the best that it can to meet its economic and financial goals.

As a result, this acts as a divergence for those seeking true beauty. Yet, it might be essential to

have that divergence since there’s a promise or hope that through the experience of false beauty,

similar to St. Augustine, one can develop an appropriate understanding and appreciation for true

beauty, which is rooted in truth.

In a nutshell, Horkheimer and Adorno along with Baldwin critique the supply-driven nature

of the mass culture, and yet it is the consequence of our own doing. The mass culture has turned

media consumption or art into the pursuit of wealth and the minimization of cost. That being

said, mass culture or mass media is not necessarily evil. If used properly, it can give rise to true

beauty, which can in turn be added to our mundane lives that are filled with hardships but at the

same time, love and joy. According to Baldwin, we are in fact “in the middle of an immense

metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoted to be hoped, rob us of our myths

and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities”

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(Baldwin 6). In other words, we are slowly but surely developing a sense of autonomy while

getting closer to truth, or true beauty.