I loathe crooners and swooners

Reading today's news trivia reminded me of a passage in Arthur Koestler's 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot. References to the "under-privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass-culture" may not sound well seven decades later. But Koestler was a brilliant man with important things to say, and he said them well; most notably in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. This, together with Animal Farm and 1984, was essential reading for a generation of intellectuals falling out of love with the Soviet Union.   

In the following passage from the epilogue of The Lotus and the Robot Koestler reflects on how the Westernization of Eastern cultures is being superseded by another form of cultural osmosis. Despite being written in 1960, Koestler's thesis is, sadly, so very true in today's digital culture. Because as King Charles' 2025 Birthday Honours remind us, there has never been fewer creative talents facing a vaster audience of consumers..  

On a smaller scale, but in a more concentrated form, a similar process is now taking place closer to us. One might call it the coca-colonization of Western Europe, and in this respect I feel the same resentment of the Asian traditionalist. I loathe processed bread in cellophane, processed towns of cement and glass, and the Bible processed as a comic strip.: I loathe crooners and swooners, quizzes and fizzes, neon and subtopia, the Organization Man and the Reader's Digest. 

But who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War against us to force their revolting 'coke' down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because it wanted it. The Americans did not americanize us - they were merely one step ahead on the road towards a global civilization with a standardised style of living which, whether we like it or not, is beginning to emerge all over the world. 

For we live in a state of cultural osmosis where influences percolate across porous frontiers, native traditions wane, and the movement towards a uniform, mechanized, stereotyped culture-pattern has become irresistible. What makes it irresistible are the new media of mass-communication; and what makes the emerging pattern so vulgar is the emergence of the under-privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass-culture. The result is that inevitable levelling-down of standards to the lowest common denominator, which accompanied every revolution in the past........There has never been, relatively speaking, fewer creative talents facing a vaster audience of consumers.