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IN THE New American Society," Daniel Seligman has written in a Fortune article entitled "The New Masses," "it is increasingly difficult to tell the players apart without subpoenaing their tax returns." By way of illustration, Seligman challenges us to play detective. Here are four significant facts about a family, he says: They live in a six-room suburban house, have a swimming pool in their back yard, drive a late-model car, and own a television set. From these facts alone, what can we deduce about this family's rank or its breadwinner's occupation?
Nothing! The "significant facts" are not significant at all. The family head might be a truck driver earning $5000, a college professor earning $7500, a life-insurance salesman earning $8500, or an airline pilot earning $15,000. In their ways of life that meet the eye, all these men are essentially every bit as reciprocal as Robert Hutchins's "interchangeable men." They —which is to say we — are a product of the massive blending, blurring, and bunching that has homogenized American society. The cream has been mixed all through it. The class lines that once corrugated the old static social pyramid have become hopelessly blurred. As a result, the profile of the mass market in America today resembles a fat-waisted social diamond with more people clustered around an average before-tax income of almost $7000 than at either top or bottom. Inside this teeming social diamond where, as our Commerce Department says, "Everybody's a little richer," distinctions that make a difference are becoming harder and harder to find. At the supermarket, product differences have blended into an almost universal panorama of Mass Moderation that offends — or excites — no one. Rheingold Beer is "never bitter . . . never sweet." Pepsi-Cola is "never heavy . . . never too sweet." Smirnoff Vodka "pleases all tastes because it has no taste." In politics, the platforms and leading personalities of the two major parties have become virtually interchangeable. A voter who impulsively, or in frustration, splits his ticket today need split none of his preconceptions. Nor will he find much more diversity in his church pew than in his voting booth. Today's religions are highly success-oriented. Even such an "Off-Beat" religion as Norman Vincent Peale's tells us in its advertisements that we will be more successful if we learn how to make God our business partner, as do magazine articles counseling that we take God into our business. The once-fierce partisan crusaders of the Billy Sunday-school have long ago beaten their swords into stock shares and preach to us now not a gospel but a nonsectarian American civil code of social and educational reform, practical psychology for "getting along," and good sportsmanship. Anybody can play. Since 1956, the Reverend Dr. John Sutherland Bonnell, minister of New York's fashionable Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, has been running an advertisement in the New York Times that says: "For a Spiritual Lift in a Busy Day ... DIAL-A-PRAYER . . . One minute of inspiration in prayer." All God's children now have twenty-four-hour-a-day access to Him, given in measured tones as well as measured dose, over a direct line whose digits, CI 6-4200, add up to the sum total of the twelve apostles. With a potential congregation of all 1752 pages of listed subscribers in the 1959-1960 New York City telephone directory alone, no wonder the Protestants, at least, find little left to protest about. Protest has gone out with the bull market. In a society where almost everyone can be a college graduate and where being a college graduate has become so commonplace that, along with being "over 25, bondable," it is now a prerequisite for employment as a taxi driver for the Yellow Cab Company of Montgomery, Alabama; where everyone can attend the same smart church by telephone; where more and more of us are losing even our regional speech distinctions to the same neutral homogeneous tone of what John Lardner called network television's "coaxial accent"; most of us are far too similar and far too pacified to find anyone peculiar enough to make a ruckus about. Too much blood is in our contented stomachs for there to be any in our eyes. Yet aware as we are that today's necessities for the many were only yesterday the luxuries of the favored few, we find no peace. When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. What we have, and we know it, is only access. Access is good. But access is not the bitch goddess herself, success.
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