John Carroll on the Cultural Elite and Popular Culturebr Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Gleebooksbr In this substantially revised edition of Ego and Soul, John Carroll examines the battlegrounds across which a struggle for meaning is being fought -- including work, sport, intimacy, the university, shopping, tourism, computers, democracy, and a retreat into nature.On the one side, depressive pessimism, rancour, and disenchantment have arisen, accompanied by rampant consumerism. The upper-middle-class elites, with their high culture, have lost their way.On the other side, much of what people still do disguises a search for meaning.Groping unconsciously for direction, inhabitants of the modern West are even, in their ordinary and everyday lives, casting lines into the transcendent in the hope of a catch.And there is success.