What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
desirable opinions - the standard of desirability being found in the accepted tastes and
opinions of the society. Such campaigns, in the hands of those who pro- mote them, are
conscious and rational processes designed to shape society, by shaping its individual
members, in a desired direction. Other glaring examples of these dangers are provided by
the commercial advertiser and the political propagandist. The two roles are, indeed,
frequently doubled; openly in the United States, and rather more sheepishly in Great
Britain, patties and candidates employ professional advertisers to put themselves across.
The two procedures, even when formally distinct, are remarkably similar. Professional
advertisers and the heads of the propaganda departments of great political parties are
highly intelligent men who bring all the resources of reason to bear on their cask. Reason,
however, as in the other instances we have examined, is employed not for mere
exploration, but constructively, not statically, but dynamically. Professional advertisers
and campaign managers are not primarily concerned with existing facts. They are
interested in what the consumer or elector now believes or in events only in so far: as this
enters into the end-product, i.e. what the consumer or elector can by skilful handling be
induced to believe or want. Moreover, their study of mass psychology has shown them
that the most rapid way to secure acceptance of their views is through an appeal to the
irrational element in the make-up of the customer and elector, so that the picture which
confronts us is one in which an elite of professional industrialists or party leaders, through
rational processes more highly developed than ever before, attains its ends by
understanding and trading on the irrationalism of the masses. The appeal is not primarily
to reason: it proceeds in the main by the method which Oscar Wilde called 'hitting below
the intellect'. I have somewhat overdrawn the picture lest I should be accused of
underestimating the danger. But it is broadly correct, and could easily be applied to other
spheres. In every society, more or less coercive measures are applied by ruling groups to
organise and control mass opinion. This method seems worse than some, because it
constitutes an abuse of reason.
In reply to this serious and well-founded indictment I have only two arguments. The first
is the familiar one that every invention, every innovation, every new technique discovered
in the course of history has had its negative as well as its positive sides. The cost has
always to be borne by somebody. I do not know how long it was after the invention of
printing before critics began to point oat that it facilitated the spread of erroneous
opinions. Today it is a commonplace to lament the death- roll on the roads caused by the
advent of the motor-car; and even some scientists deplore their own discovery of ways and
means to release atomic energy because of the catastrophic uses to which it can be, and
has been, put. Such objections have not availed in the past, and seem unlikely to avail in
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