[This is Chapter Eight of Murphey’s
book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]
Chapter Eight
As
we approach the twenty-first century we seem far removed from the age of
aristocracy. It is hard for us to realize that until quite recently man's story
has not been the story of the many, but of the few. Historically, the great
bulk of humanity existed in a submerged condition in which most people were
committed socially, intellectually, economically and politically to a life outside
the limelight. The chimney sweep and the charwoman were there as givens; they
were the mute and inert matter of mankind, playing their roles quietly --
supportive and unsung.
We
don't need to embrace a dogmatic Marxist interpretation of history to realize
that dominant groups and classes have stood above the main body of the human
race. No modern historian would want to overlook the underlying demographic
factors and other sociologically important aspects of a past society, but for
the most part the active, educated, directive part of each society was found in
its aristocracy.
The
period since the end of the eighteenth century, however, has seen the death of
aristocracy. Men have come fully into an age of general participation. We have
our wealthy, our jet-setters, our prominent personalities and statesmen, our
famous entertainers, but we have nothing comparable to the aristocrats of old
in the sense of their being a cohesive social class elevated well above the
rest of mankind and strongly differentiated from it.
Many
philosophers have remarked that what we have instead is what Ortega described
as "the revolt of the masses.” Europe and America have witnessed two
simultaneous and related phenomena: an enormous increase in the numbers of
average people, and the elevation of their participation in society to the
point at which the tone of almost all activity -- in fact, of the civilization
itself -- is established by their presence.
Ortega
noted fifty years ago that "it is more life than all previous existence."1 He pointed to an amazing statistical fact:
"From the time European history begins in the VIth Century up
to the year 1800 -- that is, through
the course of twelve centuries -- Europe does not succeed in reaching a total
population greater than 180 million inhabitants. Now, from 1800 to 1914 --
little more than a century -- the population of Europe mounts from 180 to 460
millions! "
Despite
this statistic, those of us who are alive fifty years later are inclined to
think of the "population explosion" as just now taking place -- or as
something that will occur mainly in the future. We forget that the explosion
was well underway in the nineteenth century. Ortega points out that this
brought with it a fundamental change in society.
The
increase has not been an increase in aristocrats. The aristocracies had no such
prolific potential. There was instead a magnification of the previously
submerged corpus of mankind. It has been an explosion precisely of the average
man.
This
numerical increase was accompanied by the rise of the "multitudes" to
a culturally predominant role. Ortega wrote from the perspective of an
aristocrat, but we don't have to share that viewpoint with him to agree with
him that "the characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind,
knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of
the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will." As a mere physical
presence, the average man pervades our times: such men fill the highways with
their campers, crowd the ski slopes with their families, stand in line to be
served at restaurants. Average humanity is no longer backstage; it is in the
forefront, "occupying all places." It is to this average humanity
that the mass market makes its appeal; and it is this average humanity that
makes its tastes felt in music, literature, conversation and entertainments -- i.e.,
in every aspect of life.
We may identify ourselves with these multitudes or try to distinguish ourselves from them as men of aristocratic bent have sought to; but this makes no difference; the fact remains as one of the more significant of the modern period.
This
enormous increase in numbers would once have provoked a Malthusian prediction
of famine and misery, but just the same there has been a continuing improvement
in the average man's standard of living. Even though there are different
degrees of well-being, we live in an age of affluence. Compared to anything
before, it is a time of immense affluence.
The problem of human weakness hasn't been abolished; pockets of
enervation exist even within our society, perhaps nourished by the very
policies that seek to help them. But the comparison with the past is notable
if, for example, we read John Bright's diary about conditions in Portugal and
Turkey in the 1830s. His description of Portugal wouldn't be an accurate
picture of Europe or America today: "About the streets are great numbers
of dogs. They are without exception the dirtiest, lousiest, most emaciated,
forlorn-looking creatures I ever beheld... The streets are filthy, owing
chiefly to the habit of emptying everything from the windows at night."2
Our own civilization is so dynamic that we have to be reminded that stagnation
is possible for peoples and cultures; we see such stagnation in Bright's description
of Turkey: "Property and even life being insecure, no inducement is held
out to the people to march on the road to civilization. There exists no spirit of emulation amongst
them, and they drag on their existence as nearly as possible in the same listless
and apathetic manner in which their fathers have done before them."
The
pace of change is so rapid with us that we adapt quickly to even the most striking changes. We
take it for granted that the average person should participate as a full member
of the community. But it is surprising to me, as I read back over the history
of Europe during the nineteenth century, how recently the average man's rise
occurred. It was almost yesterday in the history of Western civilization.
It
was only two hundred years ago that Adam Smith was able to write of "that
drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the
understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people."3
Speaking of the situation in the first half of the nineteenth century in England,
Trevelyan referred to "the illiteracy of a large part of the working
classes," which he says caused such a reformer as Cobden to be anxious to
teach them to read before giving them the vote.4
Even
the predominance of the middle class came quite late. In his Principles of
Political Economy, John Stuart Mill spoke of the landowners, not the middle
class, as "the masters of the legislation of England, to say the least
since 1688."5 It wasn't
the middle class that came into power in 1688; it was aristocracy. Trevelyan
notes that in the 1840s
"Peel has realized
that under the existing franchise the House of Commons did not represent the
lower classes at all, or the middle classes more than a little." He points
out that even "the Reform Act of 1832 had left half the middle class
unenfranchised and the rest insufficiently represented under the arbitrary
system by which the seats were distributed in favor of the landed
interest." Richard Cobden argued the case of the middle class to Peel by
asserting that the Reform and Corn bills had established the foundations for
middle class government.6 This was in the middle of the nineteenth
century! And although some victories were won to move Britain away from
aristocratic government, we sense in Cobden's life a continuing frustration, as
though even after those victories his voice remained a cry in the wilderness.
In
the 1820s, the Philosophical Radicals felt that the main task was to oppose the
aristocratic domination of England's political life. Joseph Hamburger says that
"in their view the important thing was to achieve total political victory,
i.e., to destroy aristocratic power."7 John Stuart Mill was still able to speak of
"the two principles, which divide the world, the aristocratic principle
and the democratic." Hamburger reports that even "by 1839, far from
having merged into an aristocratic party, the Whigs and Tories were poised
against one another in a fairly even struggle for power. The two aristocratic
factions that James Mill had opposed twenty years before continued to dominate
the political scene." Along the same lines, John Morley wrote in his life
of Cobden of the need for the mercantile and manufacturing classes to
counteract "the feudal governing class of this country" in the first
half of the nineteenth century.8
During those years, indeed, the emphasis was not on a struggle
between capitalism
and socialism, but between capitalism (mainly represented by the Free Trade
movement), the middle class and growing democracy, on the one hand, and the
continuing carry-over of aristocracy, on the other. This was especially true on
the continent, where there was a renewal of monarchical institutions after the
Napoleonic Wars while at the same time there was growing bourgeois
participation.
During
all this, there was constant pressure from below toward an enormous uplift. The
many, including the middle class, were expanding and rising. In England this
culminated in the reform on 1867, extended in 1884-1885. D. C. Johnson says
these reforms "extended the household suffrage to all constituencies, in
counties as well as in towns," with the result that "roughly
speaking, England enjoyed universal male suffrage after these bills."9
And this was just a century ago!
It
was common to think of the multitudes both as rising and as badly in need of
improvement. The rejoicing was tainted by doubt. John Stuart Mill, for example,
felt great sympathy for the "masses," but he regarded them with a re-
serve that was inseparable from his own elitism. He saw the multitudes as having
come culturally into their own; he described this somewhat balefully in On
Liberty: "The general tendency of things throughout the world
is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind... At present
individuals are lost in the crowd... The only power deserving the name is that
of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the
tendencies and instincts of masses." He quickly added that "I am not
complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as
a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind."10 Just
the same, he wasn't pleased; he pointed to the mediocre thinking of the
"masses," to their mutual conformity and to their total absorption in
business.
What we see is that at the time the final political battles were
being fought
with aristocracy, the multitudes were absorbing everything into themselves.
This bears heavily on the unique problems of modern Western
civilization. In
an aristocratic society we are concerned with the special problems of an elite.
The quality of the aristocracy can vary from high nobility to extreme
decadence. But in modern society a great deal turns on the qualities of the
average man. Here there is a direct picking up, without a selective process, of
the ordinary foibles of an immature humanity. In an age of the common man the
infant nature of mankind has a direct bearing that is partially deflected or
transformed in an aristocratic
society.
The passing of
aristocracy and the rise of the multitudes obviously raises the importance of
the multitudes, but an additional point is that the intellectual has also been
rendered more pivotal. Ortega has viewed the "masses" as
overwhelmingly powerful in their own right. For many purposes, this is correct;
but I agree with Ludwig von Mises when he says that even in a mass culture the
role of the intellectual is often central: "The main error of this wide-
spread pessimism is the belief that the destructionist ideas and policies of
our age sprang from the proletarians and are a 'revolt of the masses.' In fact,
the masses, precisely because they are not creative and do not develop
philosophies of their own, follow the leaders. The ideologies which produced
all the mischiefs and catastrophies of our century are not an achievement of
the mob. They are the feat of pseudo-scholars and pseudo-intellectuals ...What
is needed to turn the flood is to change the mentality of the intellectuals.
Then the masses will follow suit.”11
Modern life cannot be understood without appreciating the leading role of the intellectual. Much of my discussion in later chapters will deal with that fact. But the intellectual community does not operate in the modern period on a monarchy or an aristocracy or an established church; it operates, instead, within the milieu created by the explosion of the multitudes. The vacuum left by the demise of traditional institutions is important in giving the intellectuals leadership particular weight. The intellectual has always been significant, but he is especially so today -- although I am no more willing to make the role of the intellectual a "one shot" explanation of history, including modern history, than I am with any other factor. Things are too complicated for that, as I am sure Mises himself would be quick to point out.
But
it isn't that people deteriorated during modern times. In fact, the opposite is
true. The average person in Europe and America today will compare very
favorably with the wretched illiterates of two centuries ago.12 Massness and the problem of
quality simply continue the much larger problem of human immaturity. People
have never been perfect; they aren't perfect today. What we have witnessed is
not a fall, but a continuation of the older problem in a new form. Because of
this, a critical look at contemporary man should not be understood to suggest
praise of some earlier condition. It is worth keeping this in mind as we review
the analysis Ortega made in The Revolt of the Masses.
Ortega
noted the numerical expansion of what he and so many others have called the
"masses," but he went on to distinguish between two types of men:
"There is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to
make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those
who make great demands on themselves...and those who demand nothing special of
themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are,
without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that
float on the waves." He called the first the "noble man,” the second
the "mass man.”
He
continued by saying that "a characteristic of our times is the
predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the
vulgar." He was careful to stipulate that the type of man he defined as
"mass" had little to do with social classes; on the contrary, noble
men could be found in any social class, while mass men were also spread at all
levels. But Ortega saw the immense predominance of the mass man as having a
suffocating effect. Such men "proclaim the rights of the commonplace
and…impose them wherever (they) will."
He
was candid to say that "I uphold a radically aristocratic interpretation
of history" in the sense that "human society is always,
whether it will or not, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that
it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such
when it ceases to be aristocratic." He sensed a "palpitating
danger" under the surface of our times, and an "element of
terror."
Chapters
three and four of The Revolt of the Masses were no doubt intended to
show Ortega's appreciation for the affirmative potential of the rise of the
multitudes, but even here his concern over the dangers came through as the main
emphasis. (The book was written during the years between the world wars.)
To
Ortega, the mass man is the typical man of our age; and this man "leaves
the impression of a primitive suddenly risen in the midst of a very old
civilization." He said such men had proved uneducable in any true sense;
they can only be instructed in the techniques of modern gadgetry. At the same
time, they are rootless, having no real respect for the highly civilized culture
they have inherited. They take that civilization for granted in the same way
they take everything for granted. "This leads us to note down in our
psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free
expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his
radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his
existence." He arrived at the important analogy that "these traits
together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child."
Ortega
observed that the mass man jumps to opinions without effort. Not only is this
mental inertia destructive of intellectual values, but it has untold
significance in political life: "Under the species of Syndicalism and
Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not
want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to
impose his opinions." This mentality reverses the usual posture of true
civilization: instead of force's being made the final resort, it is elevated to
the first or even the only resort. "Direct action" -- the leaping to
results without regard for the civilities of an ordered society -- became the
by-word, as it did with Sorel. "Direct action" finds the state an
easily available tool, since the state most possesses the means for immediate
gratifications. The relationship of this to modern totalitarianism is easily
evident. The mass does not limit itself individually or collectively; nor does
a state representing the masses feel the need to do so.
In
another area, the extreme specialization that has developed in modern thought
has a similar effect on intellectuals and scientists. "A mass of
technicians" exist who are essentially rootless outside their own
specialties, and who have no "intimate solidarity with the future of
science." These technicians may be quite intelligent, but they share the
lack of attachment to civilization in its fuller meaning. "Specialism
begins to dislodge integral culture from the individual scientist"; and,
going on, Ortega said that "the specialist 'knows' very well his own tiny
corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest."
The
greatest danger, according to Ortega, is the state. He referred to the Romans
from the time of the Antonines, and anticipated that "the state (will)
overbear society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved,
to be unable to live except in the service of the State."
I
have given so much time to Ortega’s analysis because I see it as inescapably
true in light of our own contemporary experience, at least as to its main
observations. His description of the spiritual and mental qualities of the
typical person of our times is borne out both in everyday life and in public
events. We can hardly understand contemporary life without taking into account
the rootlessness, the spoiledness, the shallowness,
the spiritual inertia, the uncivil grabbing, and the continuing infantilism
that are normal to it. "The postulate that men are rational beings,"
Herbert Spencer said, "continually leads one to draw inferences which
prove to be extremely wide of the mark."
Despite
everything, Ortega was still able to say that "the rule of the
masses...presents a favorable aspect, inasmuch as it signifies an all-round
rise in the historic level, and reveals that average existence today moves on a
higher altitude than that of yesterday." Even though he said that man
today "does not know what to create," he preceded this with the
observation that "we live at a time when man believes himself fabulously
capable of creation." As a result, "our life as a programme of
possibilities is magnificent, exuberant, and superior to all others known to
history."
There
is an intrinsically valuable and at the same time infinitely promising aspect
in the increased well-being of mankind's overall membership -- and in its
advancement into full participativeness. There are problems, even immense
problems, but mankind stands at a new scale and even at something of a
culmination of its wildest dreams. For men in general, our present condition,
especially in Europe and America, is clearly preferable to any earlier
condition.
If
modern man's faults bring a total destruction of his civilization, hindsight
will tell us that the promising aspects should have been disregarded. But this
is a hindsight we can't anticipate. We have no reason to overlook the immense
potential that is present.
An
aspect of this hopefulness appears in the continuing tendency of people to
lower the threshold of compassion, thereby including more and more people
within the scope of sensibility. Coining a phrase, I have some- times called
this the "decline of the fish principle." Sportsmen do not hold trout
above the threshold of their sensibility; the trout are sufficiently
differentiated from them psychologically that sportsmen have no felt awareness
of their suffering. Men can make the same psychological differentiation from
other men, placing them below the threshold. In ancient civilization, the
people of other cities were excluded from sensibility. If they were defeated
they were usually either killed or pressed into slavery. The crucifixion of
Spartacus and seven thousand of his followers illustrates an aspect of ancient
man that we view with horror today. We can say this despite the horrors of the
twentieth century; despite their immensity they have not obliterated the
general truth that our compassion knows much wider limits today than it did
among the ancients.13 There has been a "decline of the fish
principle," a decline of the psychological truncation of feeling. Such a
truncation has continued to exist in National Socialism's treatment of the
Jews, in the Stalinist herding of millions into slave labor camps, in the
terrors of Communist China and elsewhere; and the impersonality of war has permitted
us Dresden and Nagasaki; so we see that the growth of compassion should not be
thought of as a uniform cultural phenomenon. But even with these horrors,
countless billions of man-years of beneficent life have been lived in the
twentieth century in which the amenities of modern society have been enjoyed by
average humanity.
Earlier,
I indicated my disagreement with Julien Benda's view that this sensibility is entirely an
inheritance we enjoy from the eighteenth century -- an inheritance that, he
said, we are rapidly losing. In his The Betrayal of the Intellectuals,
he argued -- after a long review of the savagery of a great deal of modern
thought as reflected by, among others, Nietzsche, Barres
and Sorel -- that although "the historian...is
amazed at the transformation of a species which only four centuries ago roasted
prisoners of war in bakers' ovens, and, only two centuries ago forbade the
workers to establish a pension fund for their aged members," he must nevertheless "point
out that these improvements cannot be credited to the present age. They are the
results of the teachings of the eighteenth century, against which the 'masters
of modern thought' are in complete revolt."14
Of
course, there is much truth in Benda's view. Modern
thought has enjoyed no real consensus about the preconditions of an advanced
and satisfactory civilization, and in this conflict there have been many
positions taken that involve an intensely anti-civilization aspect. Karl Popper
has counted Karl Marx as standing on the side of genuine humanitarianism, 15 but from a different perspective I would
place Marx clearly among the more destructive thinkers. This illustrates the
inevitable difference of assessment that would be present in any attempt to
classify the many voices that have been heard since the eighteenth century. But
whatever our classification in a given case, we may agree that in many ways the
ideals of the Enlightenment have been eroded (though in others they have been
fulfilled).
This
is not the entire picture, though. When we speak of increased compassion we do
not mean merely an ideological expression of compassion; we may speak of
compassion in fact. Several
non-ideational factors have been at work since the eighteenth century to lower
the threshold of compassion, despite all that the Nietzsches
have said. One of these has been the self-interest of the multitudes
themselves; much of our pity or empathy comes from our identification with the
victim: "there, but for the grace of God, go I." The vulnerable
(sometimes) appreciate vulnerability.16 Another factor has been
our affluence. It is easier to be concerned for others when we ourselves have
enough; someone starving in Europe will hardly be concerned about the
starvation in India.
We
can accept Marshall McLuhan's suggestion (without necessarily agreeing with his
entire emphasis) that a third factor comes from the extension of our modern
awareness through the media.17 Our nervous systems are
almost literally extended by television, photography, films and the press to
feel pain wherever it occurs (just as the same media permit us to share the
beauty of the Canadian ballet). We often comment, as Thoreau did, on the extent
to which this outreach is prostituted; we have become the playthings of every
sentiment. This extension of our senses is played upon by politicians,
ideologues and interest groups. But this does not invalidate the fact that we
are not as insulated as we once were: the threshold has actually been lowered.
These
factors lead me to agree with the observation made by Edward Alexander in his
book on Arnold and Mill. "Even in the seventeenth century, Tocqueville
argued, sympathy extended so little beyond class boundaries that a humane and
civilized person like Mme de Sevigne could descend to
jocularity about the fate of galley slaves. But in democratic society
imaginative sympathy had been immeasurably extended by a social revolution. The
democratic man, feeling himself equal to all his fellow men, and in some sense
actually being so, could with his imagination, enter into sympathy with the
most wretched of his fellow men."18
There
are other massive and yet subtle developments that should be noticed, but this
lowering of the threshold is itself one of major importance and one that
relates intimately to the "rise of the multitudes." I take a
favorable view of it -- even though its ultimate consequences can't be
foretold. Herbert Spencer might have deprecated this compassion as running
counter to the continuing selectivity that he considered important to the ultimate
well-being of the human race. And he may have been right. But I value the
broadened humaneness for its own sake; it is one of the ends toward which I
would hope evolution
would be taking us. It is an end in itself -- although if it is premature it may
ultimately prove harmful.
In
the following sections I will discuss several of the character or spiritual
problems present in modern life. Since we will be focusing on problems, it is
worth keeping in mind that they cannot themselves tell the whole story;
otherwise, we would not be able to maintain the advanced civilization that we
have.
Spoiledness. Several factors -- the continuing immaturity
of mankind, the affluence of the modern age with its comforts and the expansion
of possibilities, the mental structure of rationalism, and the inertia that so
many people have that negates any real will to culture or understanding or
appreciation -- contribute to one of the main facts about the contemporary
spirit: the aspect of spoiledness.
Ortega's
view of the spoiledness of contemporary man was central to his analysis.
Richard Weaver expressed a similar perception in Ideas have
Consequences. Weaver referred to
"the spoiled-child psychology of the urban masses." He explained that
"the spoiled child has not been made to see the relationship between
effort and reward. He wants things, but he regards payment as an imposition or
as an expression of malice by those who withhold for it. His solution, as we
shall see, is to abuse those who do not gratify him.”19
Weaver
saw this quality as having broad implications in the modern man's worldview:
"He has been given the notion that progress is automatic, and hence he is
not prepared to understand impediments; and the right to pursue happiness he
has not unnaturally translated into a right to have happiness, like a right to
the franchise. If all this had been couched in terms of spiritual insight, the
case would be different, but when he is taught that happiness is obtainable in
a world limited to surfaces, he is being prepared for that disillusionment and
resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism."
But
what is the psychology of the spoiled child? It is illustrated by a child who
hears the music of an approaching ice cream truck on a summer's day. If the child's
mother knows the child has already eaten enough sweets for that day and denies
the child's request, a spoiled child will be resentful and maybe throw a
tantrum.
This
includes several psychological elements:
·
There
is knowledge of the possibilities. The far-away music communicates a
possibility -- in this case of eating ice cream.
·
At
the same time, there is a wide expansion of desire. Ice cream may not have been
in the mind of the child earlier, but the desire for gratification is now
overwhelming.
·
The
desire is for immediate gratification -- with no "ifs, ands or buts."
·
The
child is not concerned about either the effort that has been needed to acquire
the means that make the gratification possible, or about the long-term
consequences of receiving the gratification. The spoiled child doesn't
understand the meaning of the money; he takes its value and presence for
granted. Nor is he thinking of longer-term consequences, such as obesity or
rotting teeth -- which are the mother's concerns.
·
The
child has an unquestioned feeling of having a right to the
gratification. The child will feel the denial of the cone as an act of bad
faith.
·
There
is a willingness to use a "direct action technique" to get the
gratification. A tantrum-throwing child has no regard for civility or for
round-about methods.
·
Finally,
there is little appreciation for the cone even if the mother gives in. This
characteristic follows easily from the others -- from the sense of entitlement,
from the lack of appreciation of the effort required to gain the means, from
the general lack of regard for the feelings of others and from the
preoccupation with self that inheres in the entire complex.
Our
immaturity is certainly a factor in the presence of this psychology among
adults in modern society. The immaturity can easily dull any of the elements of
a broader, more civilized comprehension, taking away the appreciation of
values, the regard for consequences and the willingness to abjure socially
unsatisfactory methods. Each of these things requires a person to stand back,
to be willing out of mental discipline to back off momentarily from the
immediacy of his felt needs. But immaturity makes this less possible. In fact,
we could define immaturity as its absence.
At
the same time, we can easily see the role of modern affluence. The ancients
often felt an austere awareness of the uses of self-denial and rigorous
discipline; we saw this among the Spartans and in the Athenian stress on
disciplined competitiveness, the philosophies of the Stoics, the Epicureans and
the early Christian ascetics. The ancients accordingly commented frequently
about the unfavorable moral consequences of a comfortable life. Polybius, for
example, saw a "deterioration" when Rome, "after warding off
many great dangers...arrived at a high pitch of prosperity and undisputed
power."20 Affluence brought effeminacy, weakness and
loss of discipline.
A
knowledge of possibilities and an expansion of desires are inherent in
affluence. People are also less willing to tolerate delay in gratification,
since delay is less imperative. The connection of affluence with a failure to
take a larger view is less readily apparent, but is present just the same: the
press of other contingencies is less urgent; values mean less, since it costs less
to acquire them; consequences are more easily remedied; and there is a habit of
gratification that by itself will diminish the force of more remote
considerations.
Taking
the causes a step further, I am struck by the parallel, at least to a certain
point, between the psychology of spoiledness and the rationalist mentality (to
which I myself subscribe and that is so characteristic of science and secular
modes of thought).
Secular
knowledge deals with the visible matters of this world, especially as those
matters relate to the so-called "practical" aspects of life. It
inherently involves a concern about "possibilities" in the sense in
which I have used the word in the illustration of the spoiled child. The growth
of technique provides the basis for a continuing expansion of desires: what
previously was not even thought of becomes possible, and most people will reach
out for it. It is not satiation that seems to occur most, but a constant
outreach -- though this is a human reaction that is vigorously criticized by
social commentators who see it as a blind process that involves very real costs
for the human beings who are kept psychologically pressed by their own
ever-expanding "needs."
Where
technique is highly refined and is developing, there are few inhibitions to
slow a desire for immediate gratification. An example is that if we have the
"know-how" to go to the moon, we are not prepared to put it off for
long. This is why I have felt that the slowing-down of the exploration of space
after the initial Apollo flights was atypical; we will hardly deny ourselves
for very long a full exploration to the outer limits of our capabilities. (Nor
should we, in my opinion.) Those who
have means and an awareness of possibilities in any area will in the absence of
serious counterweights be drawn to use those means.
So
far, the analogy between spoiledness and rationalism has held up well. It
becomes doubtful, though, when we get into the psychological elements that
pertain to appreciation and depth of understanding. These are pivotal elements
as to whether a person is "spoiled" or not. There is no inherent
reason why rationalism should involve this lack of breadth and appreciation.
Accordingly, it is not rationalism per se that we must condemn. But this
lack can come from other sources and merge with rationalism, at which time
spoiledness and rationalism can become mutually supportive. At the same time,
though, rationalism can help overcome spoiledness to the extent it creates an
awareness of consequences and values.
This
interplay of factors is important today in the relationship between the sexes.
It would be well for marriage counselors to understand it. The mental habits of
both a general spoiledness and rationalism accustom a male, perhaps not without
justification, to think about sexual possibilities: both from the bombardment
of sexual enticements he receives from the culture and from his own mental
make-up he is aware of the potential. Whatever he may do in his behavior, there
is at least psychically an expansion of desire; except to the extent other
considerations make him repress this desire, he will have a psychic impulse to
live sexually as much as any man can. He will see no reason to exclude himself
from the democracy, so to speak, of sexual fulfillment; not accustomed to
denying himself anything unless a valid reason compels him to, he will feel
entitled to fulfill these possibilities as a matter of right.
As
with rationalism, the process may stop there. He may put the expanded desires
aside out of an appreciation for a balance of other values. But this requires
some discipline, some ability to stand back and take a look at things. Such
psychic restraint will not occur if spoiledness and shallowness prevail, or if
cultural restraints are weak.
But
even where these are strong, his rationalism will cause him to demand
reasonable justifications for any denial of desire. An unreasonable denial will
seem intolerable (and we need to realize that he is not entirely an objective
observer as he judges its reasonableness). It is for this reason that the male
today has a particularly strong psychic need for sexual variety within
marriage. A wife who does not satisfy this need will find her husband
psychically unsatisfied.
I
have been told recently by a lawyer who specializes in divorce that with the
current emphasis on "women's liberation" he has had several women
clients who have experienced this same psychic need -- so it may not be the
special province of the male.
Hedonistic
orientation. Secularism, affluence and spoiledness,
together with still other qualities of people today, lead to a preoccupation
with hedonistic values -- comfort and enjoyable diversions. Weaver commented
unfavorably that "certainly there is no more innocent-seeming form of
debauchery than the worship of comfort; and, when it is accompanied by a high
degree of technical resourcefulness, the difficulty of getting people not to
renounce it but merely to see its consequences is staggering. The task is bound
up, of course, with that of getting principles accepted again, for, where
everything ministers to desire, there can be no rebuke to comfort." He
added that "absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of
present or impending decay.”
The
preoccupation with pleasure is connected with cultural mediocrity. This is
important to realize for its own sake, but it also touches some related issues:
it is one of the reasons for the deep cultural alienation of the intellectual;
it contributes to the apathy and modulation that so often typify the "middle
class" in politics and public issues; and the hedonism was itself a major
ingredient in the "hippie lifestyle" of the
"counter-culture" of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.
Intellectual
shallowness; the arrogance of uninformed opinion. When I read one of Richard Cobden's diary
entries written in 1847 in which he told of his trip to Russia, I was struck by
his frustration over an absence of intellectuality that we in America would
take for granted today: "They rise from table as soon as they have
swallowed their dinner, and proceed to the card-table, billiards, or skittles.
There is no intellectual society, no topic of general interest to be discussed
-- an un-idea'd party."21
Such
non-intellectual social relations struck Cobden as unusual in his day, but they
are virtually universal in contemporary American culture. In middle class
society today it is rare to enter into serious intellectual conversation with
guests. We wouldn't think to complain about rising from dinner and going, say,
to a bridge table. The "un-idea'd" quality of almost all social
contacts is considered natural. But we should see in this the actual
unnaturalness of our situation: intellectual relations should be integral to
the lives of intelligent people. We have suffered a decline from Cobden's
standard.
This
is something about which Wilhelm Roepke commented in A
Humane Economy. “Thought is becoming shallow, uniform,
derivative, herdlike, and tritely mediocre." He wrote of "the growing
predominance of the semi-educated...and the presumption with which this homo
insipiens gregarious sets himself up as the norm
and chokes everything that is finer or deeper."22 This
process has taken place so comfortably that most of us hardly realize it.
Roepke also spoke of the literary limitations
imposed by such a culture when he referred to "the tight corner into which
books really worth reading are driven, together with serious periodicals not
catering to mass tastes." This reminds me of Nietzsche's lament:
"Would it be permissible for me to confess what books are read today?
Accursed instinct of mediocrity!" It is reminiscent, too, of Henry David
Thoreau's anguish in Walden almost a century and a half ago in the
United States about the lack of good reading and conversation.23
This
seems to be a general characteristic of the rise of the multitudes. John Stuart
Mill complained of a "general indifference to those kinds of knowledge and
mental culture which cannot be immediately converted into pounds, shillings,
and pence." He thought that English society in general as he knew it was
"thoroughly insipid," involving a "low moral tone" and an
"absence of high feelings." In Germany at the time, Jacob Burckhardt saw the same thing. In an introduction to an
edition of Burckhardt's Force and Freedom,
James Hastings Nichols has summarized Burckhardt's
feelings: "Men of education, tradition, and character were suspected and
hated by the traditionless, rootless masses, even if not actually ostracized in
Athenian fashion."24
An
aspect of this commonplace mentality that has often attracted the unfavorable
comment of intellectuals has been the self-assurance of the commonplace mind in
insisting dogmatically on the validity of opinions formed without effort.
Ortega complained of this in readers who would reject his thesis out of hand:
"Many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought
to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing
that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to
work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that
absurd type of human being which I have called the 'rebel mass.' It is
precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically
closed." In a book about Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, Edward
Alexander has commented in the same vein that "in such an age, the layman
was convinced that his opinion, blind and uninformed as it might be, on any
particular subject, was as good as that of anyone else." This phenomenon
can be seen at the typical American university today under the regime of open
admissions: many "students" are impatient with any learning beyond
the catchwords of the conventional intellectual fashion.
Uneducability;
effect on education.
These considerations shade imperceptibly into still another: that education,
the hope of Jefferson, Mill and others, has not ennobled the average man to
anything near the level of culture for which they hoped. Mediocrity has in the
main conquered education, not education mediocrity. The anxious hopefulness of
sincere democrats of the nineteenth century has largely been disappointed.
"The typical college graduate," according to Russell Kirk,
"reads little or nothing except ephemera and the selections of one of the
gigantic book clubs. Popular fiction reeks of the brothel."25 Weaver has commented that "they read
mostly that which debauches them." He has pointed to the prevailing desire
to use education only to "enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on
the plane of the bourgeoisie," and he has added that this falls far short
of instilling higher values. Burckhardt complained
that as his most talented students were drained off into business, they found
it necessary to count on others to supply them with intellectual culture, just
as I have noticed in university teaching that my better students have avoided
academic careers to go into practical professions -- a process that is
justified by practical considerations in a given case, but that drains the
society of intellect. This in turn leaves the academy to those with a
temperament less adapted to the active world. This is all a part of cultural
emphasis, and the emphasis among the multitudes is not on intellectual culture.
The
effect on academic life is extreme. Students are graduated in large numbers
from colleges of business, say, in our state universities who cannot even spell
"business" and who in general possess the literacy of a third grader.
A college junior -- after sixteen years in American public education -- told me
that the New Deal was Herbert Hoover's program. The ignorance and militant
know-nothingism of so many in our universities, including even some among the
faculty, merits more than quiet acceptance. It means, in effect, that the most
extensive educational effort in history, an effort backed by resources
surpassing even the imagination of earlier generations, is often unable to
instill even the slightest intellectual culture. This partly reflects the low
level of inherent educability of the so-called "mass man"; it also
reflects a cultural emphasis that at some future time, under other
circumstances, will almost certainly be different.
Ortega
observed that the average man of his time "leaves the impression of a
primitive man suddenly risen in the midst of a very old civilization. In the
schools, which were such a source of pride to the last century, it has been
impossible to do more than instruct the masses in the technique of modern life;
it has been found impossible to educate them."
Rootlessness. Modern man is cut off from the roots of
past society. The social cements that these intellectual, moral, spiritual,
cultural underpinnings could provide are greatly weakened. This shallowness in
turn strengthens the tendencies toward relativism, the relaxation of morals and
manners, the ebbing and flowing of fads, the decline of loyalties -- and toward
a loss of identity in an existentially indeterminate present. It involves, as
well, a loss that we can afford only on the assumption that the experience of
past generations really has nothing important to tell us -- an assumption that
the great majority of "practical men" at all levels implicitly
accept.
The
same thinkers who have commented on the other aspects of modern character have
also addressed this subject. Burckhardt observed that
Americans "have to a great extent foregone history, i.e., spiritual
continuity, and wish to share in the enjoyment of art and poetry merely as
forms of luxury." Roepke spoke of "rootlessness" and said that "the sense of
continuity and of our links with history as a living part of knowledge is
declining more and more widely." Those who observed the
"counter-culture" of the 1960s will appreciate his perception that
"there is not as much conformism in tradition as there is willful eccentricity;
it goes with disorientation and discontinuity, with disdain of anything
conventional, time tested, or normal." Weaver adds that "today over
the entire world there are dangerous signs that culture, as such, is marked for
attack because its formal requirements stand in the way of expression of the
natural man." I particularly value his comment that "it has been well
said that the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not
read the minutes of the last meeting." Kirk speaks of "what Burke
called the flies of summer, unable to link with dead generations or those yet
unborn, lacking memories or high hope." And again Ortega states the
problem eloquently: "The meaning is that the type of man dominant today is
a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising
up in the midst of a civilized world. The world is a civilized one, its
inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilization of the world around him,
but he uses it as if it were a natural force."
Lack
of shared belief.
Weaver has commented that modern men "no longer have the same ideas about
the most fundamental things," and contrasts this with an "age of
shared belief." Although I do not accept his suggestions about ; what the
shared belief of mankind should be, he is accurately describing the contemporary
predicament. Modern Western civilization would involve a Babble of conflicting
beliefs even if the qualities we have just discussed were not present to
exacerbate the lack of consensus. This is so because secular, rationalistic
society, as distinguished from an age of faith and accepted ideas, has never
settled the main questions in philosophy or lifestyles or economics or politics
or religion. These are up in the air as an aspect of our cosmic immaturity. The
ancients bequeathed us no consensus on them, and as we have picked up the
threads of disputation as we have emerged from the Middle Ages we have
unavoidably renewed countless avenues of contradictory thought. A succession of
modern thinkers -- Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche, Bentham,
the Mills, Coleridge, Carlyle, Comte, Proudhon, and
countless others -- show the variety of views modern humanity has been implored
to adopt. This will be pertinent when in later volumes I review the major
ideologies: while in important ways each ideology involves a peculiar
adaptation to modern social cleavages, each also carries on ideas that have
found supporters for thousands of years.
Secularism. Our civilization is now
overwhelmingly secular. This has serious implications with regard to the loss
of prior belief. But I am one who on epistemological grounds sees no acceptable
substitute for secularism, which I welcome as an advance. This is not to say
that contemporary man does not face severe spiritual needs for which he
desperately needs secular solutions. The decline of theistic religion leaves
man existentially adrift, and genuine answers to the meaning of life are fully
as essential as they were before.
The
spiritual void within the modern psyche is apparent even in the everyday life
of a prospering society, where it is an element in the hedonism and
spoiledness. But it becomes most apparent when things are not so comfortable,
as in Germany after World War I. The yearning for something larger, something
ultimately more significant, than the ordinary is an important factor in the
totalitarian social religions of this century.
Several
thinkers have expressed this yearning.
It has often taken the form of a condemnation of peaceable, productive
life, and has glorified war. Some men feel boredom and ennui within an ordered
system. This appears in Hitler's anguish in Mein
Kampf about not having been born in time for the
Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, "when a man, even without a business,
was really worth something."26 It is in Burckhardt's praise of "an atmosphere of danger"
and of the uses of war, and in Nietzsche's statement that "it is the good
war that hallows any cause," a comment that he followed with the
reflection that "one has renounced the great life when one
renounces war."
Anyone
familiar with the literature of the last two centuries knows how common such
feelings have been, but anyone who is not may be surprised by them, since these
feelings so greatly contradict the increased compassion and love of comfort
today. This surprise, though, shouldn't obscure the fact that such yearnings
are important ingredients in modern life. Viktor Frankl wrote that "the
existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This
existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom."27 Existentialist authors have commented about
this at considerable length.
The
declining sense of nobility. Our age is secular, rationalistic and
democratic. Superficially, then, we should be able to match the spirit of the
Greeks. But manifestly we do not. What is missing? Probably more than anything
else an agreement on a standard of heroic emulation. We have nothing that
compares with the Greek arête in any of its forms, and we have no shared
religion similar to the Greeks' that gives us an Olympian standard. The
feelings of ennui and emptiness exist, but our behavior in overcoming those
feelings is scattered: sometimes into totalitarian movements, sometimes into
the distractions of entertainment and libido, sometimes into personal
commitment. We lack a common striving after a vision of what is considered the
most ideal in human life.
For
a time the "middle class" carried on some of the cultural values of
the old aristocracy, but this patrician code has been dying within my lifetime:
it was palpably held by my grandparents, existed in shallow form among my
parents, and is hardly perceptible today. We may, of course, applaud this as an
increase in democracy; but the patrician values contained much more than what
superficially seemed snobbishness. They embodied a view of man, an aspiration,
that was by no means totally divorced from that of the Greeks. Without the
elevated sensibility either of the Greeks or of our earlier European
aristocracy, our democracy lacks an essential breath of spirit and style. It is
qualitatively below an appropriate standard for mankind.
The
omnipotence of power. I was about to write
"the omnipotence of majorities," but it is a broader phenomenon than
that. Those who exercise power without being a majority seem willing even without
the majority to exercise power as omnipotently as
they can. I have a few times been placed in extraordinary situations in which
naked power speaks on its own terms, admitting the irrelevance of argument or
reasons, and simply asserting its will. At such times, the Machiavellian
underpinnings of many human relationships show through. This is something
Machiavelli himself would have taken as natural, but Ortega would say it must
be reversed and culturally, morally inhibited if true civilization is to exist.
During
the past century, majorities have most often possessed this unchecked power.
The question has been whether these majorities would acknowledge restraints
upon themselves. This has been thoroughly problematical. The loss of roots has
entailed the loss of appreciation for restraints imposed at an earlier time. A
case in point would be the United States Constitution; such attitudes and the
dominant ideology have made it a freely floating document.
Herbert
Spencer and Alexis de Tocqueville each predicted this lack of majority
restraint with foreboding. In The Man Versus the State, Spencer wrote
that "the great political superstition of the past was the divine right of
kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of
parliaments." He added that "the divine right of parliaments means
the divine right of majorities." He noted that "the function of
Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The
function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to
the powers of Parliaments.”28
This
is no mean task. The problem is only partly political and legal. Far more, it
is cultural and spiritual and intellectual. This makes it much less amenable to
quick reform. Ortega would have felt the problem so inherent in the quality of
modern man that it is wishful thinking to expect any really satisfactory
solution. Tocqueville's observations were also directed to culture and to the
ubiquitous power of the majority. "In America the majority raises
formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an
author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them...The
ruling power in the United States is not to be made game of. The smallest
reproach irritates its sensibility." He warned that "absolute
monarchies had dishonored despotism; let us beware lest democratic republics
should reinstate it and render it less odious..." He made the interesting
comment that "the Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number
of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority
succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes any wish
to publish them."29 I would have us
complicate this picture by taking into account the role of the intellectual
subculture, but Tocqueville's observations are
certainly correct with regard to the culture at large.
Man
diminished; the state raised. "Only where the state ends,"
Nietzsche wrote, "there begins the human being who is not superfluous."
Ortega added that "This is the greatest danger that today threatens
civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social
effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in
the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies. When the mass
suffers any ill-fortune or simply feels some strong appetite, its great
temptation is that permanent, sure possibility of obtaining everything -- without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk
-- merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion."
Richard Weaver reflected that "an ancient axiom of politics teaches that a
spoiled people invite despotic control." Roepke
spoke of modern man as an "aborted form of Homo sapiens created by
a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending
itself willingly -- indeed gladly, because that way lays redemption -- to use
as raw materials for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state."
Socialism
and the Welfare State are often thought to corrupt men, and I have no doubt
that this is true, but it may be more important to appreciate that a diminished
type of man -- who is undermining in countless ways the moral, intellectual,
spiritual, cultural, and hence political and legal, prerequisites of a free
society -- leads to the enhanced state. Here the causation is the other way
around. The Welfare State in America may reduce the vitality of millions, but
it is also noteworthy that reduced vitality has (along with many other factors)
produced the Welfare State. The collectivisms of the twentieth century have
not, for the most part, been imposed on a reluctant people; the collectivism
reflects their inner condition. When combined with the constant thrust of the
intellectual subculture to use the state as a church to remold mankind in its
own image, this mediocrity negates the ideas and values that support
self-reliance, individuality and a minimum of coercive impingement on the
individual.
Spencer
saw the effects of a decline in self-discipline when he noted that "the
diminution of external restraint can take place only at the same rate as the
increase of internal restraint. Conduct has to be ruled either from without or
from within...The degree of freedom in their institutions which any given
people can bear, will be proportionate to the diffusion of this moral sense
among them." Elsewhere, he pointed out that "it is the national
character that decides…Similarly with the institution maker. If the people with
whom he has to deal are not of the requisite quality, no cleverness in his
contrivance will avail anything. Let us not forget that institutions are made
of men, and that frame them together as we may, it is their nature which must
finally determine whether the institutions can stand." He commented
perceptively about law that "judicial protection is vitiated by the
depravity of the age."
It
was because of such things that Lord Acton felt compelled to write that
"liberty has lost its spell; and democracy maintains itself by the promise
of substantial gifts to the masses of the people."30
And
yet an explosion of technique. It would be a mistake to end the discussion
without observing again that despite all of these things we live in a
civilization that is unbelievably dynamic and that possesses a number of
virtues that correspond to its vices.
Consider, for example, the men who live in a typical middle class American neighborhood. All of the factors I have mentioned have a bearing on their lives. But those things are not a complete portrait. The men work hard and often their wives are employed to help provide the standard of living they both desire. Their homes are well built and clean, the lawns nicely maintained. The men keep busy with the uses of their mechanical expertise. There is a vast multiplication of hobbies, sports, club activities and night classes, so that personal enervation is almost unheard of. The picture is one of bustle, pleasantness, good neighborliness -- of a common humanity with all its foibles living comfortably, gregariously and, by its own standards, well. Only an observer applying other standards, even though they are standards of major importance to human culture, comments upon the emptiness.
This
dynamic has carried us on and on, with a multiplier. Quite
non-rationalistically, it is moving to its own as yet unforeseen consequences.
That it is doing so is one of the frustrations for the type of social critic
who would like to remold
this culture in some other image. The culture has ignored his criticisms and
simply continued on. This is one of the conservative dimensions in modern
society, since it resists the importunities of the intellectual subculture. At
the same time, it embodies its own radical dimension by containing processes of
rapid change that are clearly carrying us into new vistas.
Innumerable
thinkers have reflected pessimistically about modern life. It would be hard not
to see the bases for that pessimism. The voids within modern civilization loom
so large that the whole undertaking is problematical. But there is no plausible
substitute for the predominance of the multitude. We couldn't return to
aristocracy if we tried, and that wouldn't be desirable in any case. We have no
choice but to ride the roller coaster out. The destiny of these masses is in
their own hands, and we should not allow ourselves to become so engrossed that
we fail to appreciate how exciting the experiment really is. Those who see the
problems can strive to elevate, to build and to lead; but forces far beyond our
control will determine whether that is successful. The major problem within
modern society, given these constraints, is to "civi1ize the
intellectual" so that the multitudes can have the benefit of a mild
"clerisy" to play a crucial directive role. But that puts us ahead of
our story.
1. Jose Ortega y Gasset,
The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1960), pp. 47, 50, 18, 70, 15, 16, 108, 20, 21, 51, 58, 73, 75, 120, 87, 111,
121, 28, 44, 47, 68, 51, 82, 120.
2. R. A. J. Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright (New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1931), pp. 21, 41.
3. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New
York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 735.
4. George Macaulay Trevelyan,
The Life of John Bright (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), pp.
60, 145, 365.
5. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political
Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), Vol. II, p. 885.
6. John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London:
Chapmen and Hall, Ltd.,
1881), Vol. I, pp. 395, 458; Vol. II, p. 396.
7. Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in
Politics -- John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965), pp. 32, 61, 242, 261, 292.
8. Morley, Cobden, Vol. II, p. 396.
9. D. C. Johnson, Pioneers of Reform (New
York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p. 159.
10.
Edwin
A. Burtt (ed.), The English Philosophers from
Bacon to Mill (New York: Modern Library, 1939), pp. 1000-1001.
11. Ludwig von Mises, Planning of Freedom (South Holland, Ill: Libertarian Press, 1952), p. 171.
12.
Ortega himself does not paint a uniformly
unfavorable picture of the "mass man.” He observed that "it is not a
question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, today he is cleverer,
has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period."
He recognized that this man is on a higher plane than before.