Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
"As a Teen-Age Boy of the Twentieth Century…"
By Harold Rosenberg
Culture Against Man
by Jules Henry
Random, 485 pp., $7.95
Almost everything in Culture Against Man is familiar through other studies and through articles in newspapers and magazines. It is not news today that this is a society (or culture) in which objects are produced not for use but for profit; in which most people work not at what they want to do but at what they have to do; in which the steady rain of falsehood, exaggeration, and nonsense emanating from 'Madison Avenue' conditions adults and children to a perpetual hunger for commodities upon which depends the growth of the Gross National Product; in which achieving a high standard of living goes hand in hand with 'loss of Self'; in which compulsive economics fused with the national fear of Communism has harnessed our universities and our intellectuals to a production and military machine largely out of control; in which anxiety about success and dread of personal extinction ruin the relations of man to man, of husband to wife, of parents and children, and haunt the individual from the kindergarten to the wheelchair. This account of conditions is, we say, thoroughly well known; so that one who wishes to repeat it confronts a problem of rhetoric: How deliver the grim description of our collective life in a new way, so that we may apprehend it more clearly, feel it more deeply, and react to it as people who know where we are? There is also, of course, the problem of how to make things better.
Review, 2396 words
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