A not-so-popular culture.

It might be said, taking a cue from a famous definition of pornography, that popular culture is hard to define but we usually know it when we see it. More and more, people don't like what they see, and some argue that much of popular culture has even become a kind of pornography. That argument is put forcibly to Commonweal by John D. Hagen, Jr. (page 19). Hagen, rightly worried about the violence and nihilism evident in contemporary entertainment and art, calls Richard Alleva and Frank McConnell on the carpet for not writing more explicit moral critiques of movies and the media.

In response, Alleva (page 21) and McConnell (page 23) attempt to clarify the difficult problem of where aesthetic judgment ends and moral assessment begins. In the ongoing encounter between Catholicism and American culture, American Catholics have continually found their allegiances and moral judgment tested--not so long ago, after all, the idea of religious freedom was alien to Catholic teaching and the Legion of Decency limited what could be shown in movies. No final resolution of that tension seems possible. In our judgment, Catholicism remains as much in need of the sometimes anarchic virtues of American democracy as American democracy needs the spiritual and moral wisdom of Catholicism.

That dialectic is fully explored in an essay (page 10) by our favorite president emeritus (university president, that is), Dennis O'Brien. O'Brien asks, "What is possibly Christian, properly pagan, and plausibly dangerous in popular culture?" He concludes that the spiritual aspirations expressed in popular culture, and especially in rock 'n' roll music, are genuine and compelling. To further broaden this nettlesome debate, we asked four contributors (pages 16-19) to comment on the perceived antipathy between Catholicism and popular culture.

If a consensus emerges from these pages, it is that the relationship between Catholicism and the surrounding culture is complex and ambiguous. Yes, mass consumer society is manipulative and the commodification of human relations and affections an everpresent danger. Still, the democratization of culture and art has brought great energy, wit, and humanity to our shared entertainments. American popular music, the Broadway musical, the movies, jazz, and even the television situation comedy can be high expressions of the egalitarian spirit.

That does not mean, of course, that the cynical exploitation of sex and violence on TV, in the movies, or advertising should go unchecked. A sense of common morality must find expression even in the media marketplace. Criticizing the stylized pornography of Robert Mapplethorpe is not the same thing as censorship or philistinism. Public campaigns to suppress the violence and misogyny of rap music, the sexual provocation and transgression of advertising, or the vulgarity of radio "shock-jocks" are worthy of support. Averting our own eyes is not enough. Such public controversies about moral standards, most recently involving Time Warner and Calvin Klein, are a sign of social engagement and health, not encroaching puritanism or political repression. Despite what First Amendment absolutists contend, freedom of speech is not the same thing as freedom from moral censure.

That said a healthy skepticism is needed when politicians like Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole exploit outrage about the media for partisan advantage. When it comes to the deteriorating tone of our common life, no one political camp is more guilty than another. Some, usually on the right, think the debasement of popular culture has been engineered by a nihilistic elite. Others, often on the left, fearful that a hostile majority wants to outlaw "deviant lifestyles," have embraced a form of moral agnosticism. Neither of these views comes to terms with the ongoing democratization of culture or the power of technology. Neither moral edict nor a rights-based libertarianism can take us where we need to go.

Mr. Hagen invokes John Paul II's warnings about a "culture of death," depicting a clash between elites contemptuous of "bourgeois culture and determin[ed] to wreck it" and "humbler folk confront[ing] increasingly uninhibited violence on the streets and in the schools." Hannah Arendt's description of how the stage was set for totalitarianism by a similar alliance between the mob and cultural elites in Weimar Germany is used by Hagen to buttress his argument.

Arendt's warning about the dangers of nihilism and the public celebration of vulgarity should be taken seriously. But her analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism goes a step further. It was not the amorality of the mob or the sexual indulgence of the privileged that paved the way for Hitler, but the hypocrisy and political expediency of the bourgeoisie. The artistic nihilism of Weimar Germany was not mere perversity, Arendt wrote, but a mirror and a "justified" response to the "meanness" of a dominant bourgeois culture that "paraded publicly virtues which it did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt."

Sound familiar? Arendt argued that the entrepreneurial classes "always assumed an identity of politics, economics, and society, in which political institutions served only as the facade for private interests." As a consequence, the necessary countervailing authority of political and civil life was denigrated and undermined. "The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest," Arendt warned.

The nation's current drift to the right politically is animated by a philosophy that also seeks to delegitimize our common public life and obligations. In resisting nihilistic art and even the culture of death, it is important not to mistake a pious reiteration of banalities for real morality. An ample space for moral questions in politics and culture is all to the good, but concern for morality must shape our social and economic responsibilities for one another as much as proscribe what we see on billboards and TV.

In truth, most of our popular culture is not decadent or violent, but utterly banal. If Arendt is right, nihilism first feeds off that banality, which is symptomatic of a larger retreat from social and political engagement. The difference between the naked and the nude, Kenneth Clark reminds us, is that the nude is suffused with social significance. Modern life often makes it difficult to embrace social meaning. Catholicism, which has long taught the primacy of the social in protecting human dignity, remains a great resource against such philistinism. Let's rely on that resource, but in doing so let's ask as much of ourselves as we do of those who flaunt their alienation.