Stuart Walton: …Western Enlightenment did not, after all, represent the unshackling of the human mind from mythical thought-forms. It had only converted the old myths into a new one called rationality. While the power of reasoned judgment was in one sense the agent by which superstitious beliefs were dismantled, it was then set up as a rigidly unquestionable authority in itself – what the authors termed ‘instrumental reason’. When rationalism became an autonomous force in human affairs, in which the coldness of scientific procedures, deductive logic and the reign of factuality overcame natural human impulses, the stage was set for what critical theory calls reification: the transformation of living entities and processes into inert objects or things.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is not an argument for irrationalism. What it seeks to show is that instrumental reason, once it becomes an authority to which human affairs must submit, ends up exercising a tyranny over human beings that turns their societies into soulless machines, and infects relations between individuals as well. Once they become the components of a rationally ordered mechanical system, something of their humanity has been robbed from them. The human race has become divorced from the very natural world on which it depended for survival in primordial times. This traumatic separation has led to a progressive subjugation of nature to human ends, as in the gathering industrialisation of the advanced economies. The alienation of humankind from its natural origins helped prepare the spectacular descent into inhumanity that unfolded around the Frankfurt School, the burning of books paving the way for the bureaucratic destruction of whole classes of society, as millions perished in camps where the killing was as industrialised as everything else.
It isn’t only the obvious crimes of totalitarianism, however, that prompt the authors’ critique, but tendencies within society that might appear on the surface to be innocuous. The book’s most incendiary chapter addresses the ‘culture industry’, in which the spiritual enlightenment supposedly bestowed by the creative arts is reconceived as ‘mass deception’. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, a new industrialised culture began to emerge, controlled by gigantic media corporations like the Hollywood film industry, recording companies and commercial radio. Not only have these institutions replaced genuine works of art with mass-produced garbage, they also manipulate people into acquiescing in the status quo and accepting capitalist values. Consumers are given to understand that although their consumption patterns in the mass are vital, they, as individuals, count for nothing. To that extent, the authors saw no functional difference in the conveyor-belt production of delusion by the American culture industry and the sledgehammer propaganda techniques of European dictatorships. More here.