Ortega and the Myth of the Mass

Ortega and the Myth of the Mass

Mini Teaser: Many are inclined to give José Ortega y Gasset credit for prescience that he does not deserve.

by Author(s): Neil McInnes

Karl Mannheim did more than anyone to spread the idea of the "mass
society", starting with Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction
(1935). He acknowledged Ortega's precedence but Mannheim was too
powerful a thinker to owe anything to him. He agreed that there had
been a breakdown of previous communities or "primary groups" and this
had left people vulnerable to bureaucracy, to social disorder, and
ultimately to fascism. By the time Mannheim wrote Diagnosis of our
Time (1943), he sought to distance himself from Ortega as a
representative of an older elite that had been panicked into
deserting modern society just because new groups claimed admission to
civilization.

When Sigmund Neumann wrote his influential Permanent Revolution
(1942) he said that events since Ortega's "timely and challenging
book" had brought home to world statesmen and social scientists "this
onslaught--the reality of the rising masses." By the time Walter
Lippmann wrote The Public Philosophy (1956) he did not need to invoke
Ortega's authority for what had by then become, for some people, a
commonplace thought: "Where mass opinion dominates the government
there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The
derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of
the capacity to govern." By then, though, the concept of
massification or enmassment or Vermassung was being challenged, and
Wilhelm Röpke, who claimed to have invented Vermassung about 1938,
said in his Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage in 1958 (which
appeared as A Humane Economy in 1960): "Some smart-alecks nowadays
pretend that all the fuss about mass and enmassment is a false alarm
and that the disintegration of society described by these words is
only a new, and anything but pathological, stage of cultural
development." But, he protested, Ortega had been right in diagnosing
a cultural crisis, and it was still "the central issue of our epoch."

The trouble was that the notion of mass society was becoming
increasingly vague in the hands of famous but careless writers, while
sociologists were having difficulty giving it a positive meaning.
Albert Camus declared that Ortega was "the greatest of European
writers after Nietzsche" but in L'homme révolte (1951) he said that
mass society was not to be blamed on average men and women but on
Caesarean empire-builders, against whom he hoped the masses would
indeed revolt. So many deplorable but conflicting characteristics
were being ascribed to mass-man that it became difficult to tell him
apart from Horkheimer and Adorno's authoritarian personality and
Marcuse's one-dimensional man.

Managers, specialists, middle-class executives, wage-earning workers,
cadres of totalitarian movements were all being held up as the
quintessential mass-man. Anthony Hartley said in Encounter in 1973
that both the bureaucrat and the hippie were mass-men. Giner observed
that "Bestsellers such as Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, Mills's
White Collar and Toffler's Future Shock (of diverse merit and scope)
which are fully written within the theory of mass society tradition,
may give an idea of the unabated and vast diffusion achieved by this
conception throughout the twentieth century." Clearly, denunciation
of the mass society was becoming the fashionable form of cultural
pessimism, and Judith Shklar was right to be reminded by it of
nineteenth-century Romantics moaning about the plight of
individuality and originality in a vulgar society, with "masses"
standing in for "average" and "Philistine." Indeed, it seemed that
even Albert Einstein was a mass-man à ses heures perdues: When
Einstein ventured an opinion about the Spanish Civil War which Ortega
thought ignorant, he held it up as typical of the "frivolity and
irresponsibility" of European intellectuals that are prominent causes
of "the present disorder" (Obras IV, p. 306).

If mass-man's features were thus becoming hazy, some thought to
recognize him clearly in the rebellious students of the 1960s.
Geoffrey Clive did, writing in Daedalus in 1974 that the universities
by then perfectly illustrated Ortega's thesis "that in the twentieth
century mediocrity encapsulated in mass culture reigns supreme." That
was so because, as Ortega had foretold,

"the cult of material success [and] the idolatry of immediate
gratification transform much of higher education into a perpetual
farce . . . students, often driven into an academic environment by
false expectations of the college experience, comprise collectively a
paradigm case of Ortega's mass-man inadvertently enveloped in
disillusionment."

Many of their teachers were no better, Clive added:

"Often basically uncultivated and devoid of historical perspective,
they sincerely confuse their folly with innovative programs and
original ideas. Thus they reinforce Ortega's paradoxical critique of
mass-man as being at once deficient in comprehensive culture and
without competence in any special branch of culture."

So Ortega, Clive concludes, "hits the nail on the head when he
diagnoses our ills as above all the products of towering and
misappropriated self-love divorced from reverence for what over the
centuries has been proven best for life and thought." One might only
object that he had hit the wrong nail, since overcrowded campuses
were hardly the same as mass society.

Meanwhile, sociologists failed to find mass society. The term
betrayed an underestimation of the complexity and pluralism of modern
societies. To be sure, some old primary groups waned but new ones
arose, even in crowded urban areas, and in any case there were strong
interpersonal relationships and daily commitments to provide a sense
of belonging, social fellowship, personal expression, and
satisfaction. In an essay "America as a Mass Society: A Critique"
(collected in The End of Ideology, 1960) Daniel Bell said:

"At this point it becomes quite apparent that such large-scale
abstractions as 'the mass society', with the implicit diagnoses of
social disorganization and decay that derive from them, are rather
meaningless without standards of comparison. Social and cultural
change is probably greater and more rapid today in the United States
than in any other country, but the assumption that social disorder
and anomie inevitably attend such change is not borne out in this
case. . . . For these reasons the theory of mass society no longer
serves as a description of Western society but as an ideology of
romantic protest against contemporary life."

Robert Nisbet, in Sociology as an Art Form (Oxford University Press,
1976), agreed that the notion of atomized individuals loosened from
the ties of kinship, religion, class, and neighborhood was a
subjective one: "I think it would be difficult indeed to substantiate
on any strictly quantitative and objective measurement the idea of
the masses. . . ." Talcott Parsons was less charitable, dismissing
the idea as "a figment of social romanticism, as elitist bias . . .
or, more invidiously, as an ideological position congenial to certain
groups of intellectuals." In reporting that 1960 observation, E.V.
Walter added, in an article called "'Mass Society': the Late Stages
of an Idea" in Social Research (1964), "At present the idea is more
poetic than theoretical", but he thought it might nevertheless be
useful as a myth, as a proto-scientific notion. Maybe, but his was
the last article with "mass society" in its title to appear in Social
Research for the past thirty-one years.

The Threat to High Culture

The other tradition in which The Revolt of the Masses belongs, and to
which it made a more substantial contribution, is the denunciation of
"mass culture", not only as inferior to high culture but as a real
threat to it, if not to society itself. This thought can be traced
back a long way, but for our television age the best place to start
the story is May 14, 1842. That was the date of the first publication
of The Illustrated London News, the pioneer of illustrated
newspapers, in which pictures lightened those solid black columns of
type that made up newspapers before then, which had much discouraged
the illiterate majority. The news-in-pictures idea has flourished
ever since, down to Life magazine and the television. The innovation
appalled that one-time enthusiast of liberty and now aging Tory,
William Wordsworth, and he wrote a bad sonnet to deplore it, entitled
"Illustrated Books and Newspapers" (no. XIV of Poems of Sentiment and
Reflection):

Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought--dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand. Now prose and verse sunk
into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here.
From manhood--back to childhood; for the age--
Back toward the caverned life's first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!

So there you have it: if lots of people are going to get their news in pictures, then we all become children again, society goes back to the caves, and civilization regresses to a lower stage. If that sounds like a quaint piece of Victoriana, then listen to the contemporary Parisian pundit Jean Baudrillard standing in front of a television set tuned to CNN news and crying "Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!": TV news, he explains, blunts our sense and understanding; we thought East Europe was persecuted because it was denied the natural democratic right to news and information, "as if we were not ourselves hostage to a system every bit as terroristic as theirs: our unscrupulous news system." Now we are subjecting entire peoples, as they emerge from darkness that was violent and tyrannical, to "this modern tribunal of news and information-gathering which is assuming all the features of an Inquisition. For only information [the news] has sovereign rights, since it controls the right to existence." The news in pictures exemplifies "the triumphant illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality...."So Wordsworth was right: Putting the news in pictures for the benefit of the masses is as terroristic as Soviet domination.

Essay Types: Book Review