Folk culture, high culture, and industrial devolution to mass culture

From “America’s future looks vulgar” by Chilton Williamson, The Spectator, February 19, 2026:

The principal enemy of the supremacy of the intellect in a civilized society is not, as anti-democratic critics over the past 200 years have argued, democratic systems of government. It is, rather, industrial economies which destroyed aristocratical governments and cultures by creating the mass societies which emerged from the industrial ones and on which the latter depend, as high culture depended on agricultural societies and the aristocracies that shaped and controlled them.

It is true that agricultural civilizations of the past were comprised of an upper minority stratum, the cultural elite who were both the creators and, as we say today, the consumers of the achievements of a high culture, resting upon a majority lower one consisting of the ignorant and unlettered, just as the industrial ones of the modern era are.

The difference between the two – and it is a critical one – is that ever since the arrival of industrialism the division has been between a high culture and a mass culture, whereas in the countless ages before it the distinction was between high culture and folk culture, whose contribution to civilization throughout recorded history has been in every way as valuable, rich and significant as that of the former. Indeed, in many instances, the two are indistinguishable – Beowulf, for example, or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the fables of Aesop and La Rochefoucauld, or the English madrigals and the French rondelays.

What differentiates the two – the folk culture of the aristocratic-agricultural past and the mass culture of the democratic-industrial present – is that the first was created spontaneously by the “folk,” the people themselves, whereas the second is artificially generated, carefully and cynically according to commercial calculation based on prevalent consumer tastes determined by statistical surveys consulted by “creative” hacks and their employers who expect to satisfy and profit from those tastes, after having created them themselves. 

The result is that while children in the not-so-long-ago invented their own games and entertainments and their elders wrote their own stories and composed their own songs and playlets to perform for their families and neighbors, today they buy them out of a box or imitate the popular “artists” they see and hear on television, radio and the antisocial media.

David Cannadine, the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, correctly noted that many British aristocrats were philistines. Still, the aristocracy constituted a socially and culturally stable class that was the chief preservative element in high British civilization over a full millennium; a role that the unstable financial and industrial plutocracies that succeeded the old aristocracies and whose members rapidly ascend to and as quickly drop out of them as business and social conditions fluctuate – thus virtually ensuring that they pass little if anything of tradition and high value on to their successors – cannot fill.