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.
When H.G. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come in 1933 he
dedicated it to "José Ortega y Gasset, Explorador." Wells had been an
explorer of that other country, the future, since The Time Machine in
1895, and more seriously since Anticipations in 1901, and he
recognized a kindred speculator in Ortega, whose Revolt of the Masses
had appeared in English translation the year before.
The future that was forecast there would not have surprised Wells in
his more somber moments. Europe, said Ortega, was "suffering from the
greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilizations",
namely "the accession of the masses to complete social power." He
explained, with "a shudder of horror" (Ortega's colorful Castilian
can sound embarrassingly overdone in English): "The element of terror
in the destiny of our time is furnished by the overwhelming and
violent moral upheaval of the masses; imposing, invincible and
treacherous, as is destiny in every case." And he prophesied: "If
that human type [mass-man] continues to be master in Europe, thirty
years will suffice to send our continent back to barbarism."
Wells, who could be quite bloodthirsty about what should be done with
populations surplus to his requirements, would have relished another
prophecy in an earlier work of Ortega's: before things could get
better, the masses must fail completely in their audacious attempt to
rule society, "so that they may learn in their own lacerated flesh
that which they do not wish to hear"; only then would their hatred of
their betters be exhausted, and the mass and the select minority
would once again be integrated into a functioning society.
Looking back, many are inclined to give Ortega credit for prescience
that he does not deserve. It is quite true that in his 1930 Spanish
text he pointed to the mass movements of fascism, Bolshevism, and
Nazism to prove his point about a revolt against civilization, and
true that these movements went on to send Europe back to barbarism.
True, too, that his own country, which he scorned as a "pueblo"
nation, a land without elites, would soon sink into atrocious
confusion followed by nearly forty years of dictatorship. But none of
these things happened for the reasons Ortega imagined; and even when
he was right about European mass movements, he was fixed on the least
important things about them, things they shared with social movements
elsewhere that evolved quite differently. Worse than that, several of
the most disastrous of the mass movements he identified (notably
Nazism) were fed by ideologies to which Ortega was sympathetic, ideas
he caressed while calling to have mass-man put back in his place. All
the more curious, then, that his book should have had, after a
sensational success in the 1930s, a long history of sustained
interest on the right as well as on the left, among the intellectuals
as well as, mirabile dictu, among the masses.
That latter paradox is worth considering. By his own super-elitist
standards, a philosophical essay that begins life in a
mass-circulation Madrid daily newspaper and then becomes a
bestselling book must be suspect. And if it denounces the masses, how
is it that so many of them buy it? Do they enjoy being insulted, or
is it rather that each reader approves while making the reservation
that he is not part of the masses? Adding up all these reservations
we get the conclusion that, however many approve, no one believes it.
Horkheimer and Adorno (in their Soziologische Exkurse) tell an
apposite Teutonic joke:
"A huge political demonstration, the terrace packed full to the very
last place, an enormous carpet of men and faces right up to the top,
the orator in full flight. He cries, "The cause of all that's wrong
is massification." Hurricane of applause.
So if no one thinks he is mass-man, do we have to believe
philosophers and sociologists who talk about the masses? As I hope to
show, that was a question Ortega's book helped bring to a head and,
after thirty years' debate, to a conclusion.
First, though, what was the vantage point from which Ortega y Gasset
made his observations? Madrid, where he was born in 1883 into an
influential publishing family, was hardly the best place to study the
modern masses (although its urban hypertrophy had been swift and
devastating). After a first degree in Madrid, Ortega had spent five
years in universities in Berlin, Leipzig, and Marburg, emerging a
disciple of the neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen. He returned
to Spain to found the Revista de Occidente, a magazine and publishing
house that set out to "level the Pyrenees", that is, to bring Spain
into the modern European, especially German, cultural sphere. That
sounds ambitious, and it was even harder than it sounds, but
eventually it was accomplished and Ortega was the pioneer. It meant,
firstly, working from the University of Madrid chair in Metaphysics
(which he held until the Civil War in 1936) to naturalize philosophy
in a land that had for centuries rejected it as either a foreign
affectation or a threat to religion and good order. Secondly, it
meant creating in Castilian a philosophical style and a technical
vocabulary that were quite lacking. In this, Ortega succeeded
magnificently, inventing a bold masculine prose iridescent with
striking metaphor (while sometimes settling for literary brilliance
where argument was needed).
Ortega gave the neo-Kantianism he learned in Germany a curious
hidalgo twist. Principles imposed by the mind, he agreed, must
everywhere overrule empirical intuition. But that required mental
effort, which most people shirked, lazily remaining content with
"sensualism" (as Ortega called reliance on the senses) and "common
sense", that is, vulgar prejudice. Empiricism was the archetypal mob
belief; it was "idiot", "plebeian", "demagogic", "the criteriology of
Sancho Panza." He declared: "Faith in the senses is a traditional
dogma, a public institution established by the irresponsible and
anonymous opinion of the People, the collectivity." In contrast,
philosophy, science, and mathematics are imposed on the given by
energetic, aristocratic intellectual elites. He pushed this so far as
to aver that logic itself and all science were games played under
strict but arbitrary rules by a minority seeking to escape from the
tedium and deadly seriousness of popular beliefs. Therefore Ortega's
anti-egalitarianism was not political (he dismissed politics as "that
second-class occupation") but cultural, philosophic, and even (oh
paradox!) logical.
What Ortega said (with more care for rhetorical effect than for
consistent argument) was that masses of average people had taken
power, not only in politics but in matters intellectual, moral,
religious, and economic, including all collective habits such as
dress and amusements. This phenomenon had political, psychological,
and cultural aspects. In politics, the attempt by the unqualified and
incompetent to rule without the leadership of the select minority
would lead to a political disaster, beginning with "direct action" in
fascist style and ending with the use of an oppressive and violent
state machine to crush the independence of individuals and groups.
Psychologically, the event was marked by the appearance of mass-man,
half spoiled child and half barbarian, content to be like everyone
else, envious of his betters and ignorant of what he owed to them,
ungrateful, complacent, capricious, lazy, obsessed with politics,
vulgar--the epithets pile up, not all of them mutually compatible.
The main point was that the masses were loathsome not just in and
because of their numbers; one specimen was enough to show what was
wrong with them all, and Ortega could recognize him at first glance.
The masses had been around in the plural since St. Augustine's massa
perditionis but individual mass-man, el hombre masa, Ortega claimed
as a discovery. Finally, the cultural revolt meant the end of high
culture, the rejection of all standards of excellence and rationality
in favor of caprice, sentimentality, human interest, and vulgarity.
Quite flatly, culture could not work on a mass basis.
The tone was shrill, and it got worse. In 1937 Ortega added a
"Prólogo para Franceses" in which, curiously, he did not even mention
Nazism while complaining that mass-man had created "a stifling
monotony" all over the continent, converting Europe into an ant-hill,
an overcrowded prison, because of mass-man's vulgarity and
soullessness. Congratulating himself on the anti-Americanism of his
1930 text, he scoffed at the idea that America, that "paradise of the
masses", could ever succor Europe. The only external event that might
stimulate Europeans to something worthwhile, like European union,
would be "a Chinaman's pigtail appearing over the Urals or a tremor
of the great Islamic magma." Or maybe it would all end in a gigantic
famine after which, he added in a sinister Hitlerite note, "Quedarían
muchos menos hombres, que lo serían un poco más" (There would be
many fewer men left, but they would be a bit more like men) (Obras
Completas IV, pp. 113-9).
The Educated Mass-Man
Grim warnings about what came to be called (after Karl Mannheim)
"mass society" go back to J.S. Mill and Tocqueville (dubbed by J.P.
Mayer the "Prophet of the Mass Age"). Denunciations of what came to
be called "mass culture" go back much further, to Juvenal (panem et
circenses) and Horace (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo). So Ortega was
not innovating there. His supposed natural law of oligarchy--that
only elites can rule--had been familiar since Pareto and Mosca, but
the two Italians had been interested only in the elites, not the
masses. For them, the mass was defined negatively; it lacked wealth
or education or military skill or whatever it was the elite had and
used to hold power. Le Bon had studied the psychology of la foule,
but a crowd is an event, whereas the mass is a perduring category,
and to transfer the apocalyptic views of Le Bon from crowds to masses
gave absurd results; which did not prevent Freud following Le Bon
uncritically in Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse (Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego).
Gabriel Tarde had seen the difference and invented the notion of
"publics", that is the "crowd" that reads a mass-circulation paper
but never meets, a notion that later founded the study of mass
communications. So Ortega could claim originality in trying to
develop a psychology of the members of social masses, to study their
tastes and opinions. Moreover, his colorful and somewhat arbitrary
account of that mentality contained an unexpected element that
changed the direction of the whole discussion. He said that mass-man
at his crassest, most ignorant, and dangerous could nevertheless be
highly educated.
Compare that thought with the description of the mass outbreaks that
terrorized the English gentry given in the essay "The Many-headed
Monster", in Christopher Hill's Change and Continuity in Seventeenth
Century England. The mobs that were a menace to society were held to
consist of ignorant brutes, unruly clowns, enraged beasts. Updated
from age to age, that was the commonly assumed view of the
threatening masses that persisted down to les classes dangereuses of
the nineteenth century. Ortega helped change that. He not only saw
that (in John Carey's words), "The difference between the nineteenth
century mob and the twentieth century mass is literacy." He went
further and specified that teachers, doctors, scientists, financiers,
and all manner of specialists could clump together into a dangerous
asocial mass that could destroy a polity and debase a culture.
François Furet lately recalled the newness of Ortega's thought at the
time, saying in Le passé d'une illusion (1995), "The new thing . . .
is the discovery that this 'man of the masses' is not, or not
necessarily, an illiterate and uneducated person." Ortega had seen
educated northern Italy fall for Mussolini and the most cultivated
nation in Europe was falling for Hitler. "So fascism finds its cradle
not in archaic societies but in modern ones. . . ."
Nietzsche had reported that even philosophers could today have
plebeian souls, so that there exist civilized barbarians and educated
philistines. But Ortega was the first to advance the notion that "the
most immediate cause of European demoralization . . . this rebirth of
primitivism and barbarism" lay not in the restive rabble or delirious
crowds or toiling masses but in the ignorant presumption of educated
specialists, particularly scientists and technicians. If true, it
would be a despairing thought. We would no longer have Matthew
Arnold's dichotomy of culture and anarchy, but a culture that
produced anarchy, a headlong rush into cultural decadence and
political disaster led by learned ignoramuses with the souls of
mass-men.
Despairing or not, it is a notion that has become current coin, as
witness two recent books out of Germany. Peter Schneider, a leader of
the 1968 Berlin student movement who has become très assagi, uses
precisely Ortega's language, in his Vom Ende der Gewissheit (Berlin,
1994), to denounce the rebirth of barbarism in present-day Germany,
and notably the fact that the children of educated middle class
families are "like little beasts, dehumanized, or rather they never
were human." Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his Civil War (London,
1994), uses similar terms to describe the spread of thuggery in a
prosperous educated society and calls for an effort to stop the
rebirth of German barbarism, unless we have "an excessive taste for
continuity", that is, unless we want to go back to the situation
Ortega was describing in 1930. It is another matter whether what he
was seeing was mass-man in action, but at least events since that
date incline us all to accept as readily as Schneider or Enzensberger
Ortega's point that cultured society can produce barbarity.
He offered that thought just when the notion of the threatening
masses, as inherited from the nineteenth century, was in need of
serious revision. By 1930 it was clear that the proletariat had
shrunk to a (sizable) minority in Western societies and there was
less prospect of a working class revolution than of a classless
fascist takeover. So, says Salvador Giner in Mass Society (1976),
Ortega accomplished the necessary revision by transferring prevailing
notions about the lower classes to the newly emergent middle class of
educated specialists and linking them to totalitarian movements. That
is why, Patrick Brantlinger says, "The Revolt of the Masses is a sort
of Communist Manifesto in reverse. . . . The uprising of Ortega's
mass nobodies . . . spells the demise of Marxist hopes for a
proletarian revolution." It would turn out to be as unreliable a
guide to the future as the Manifesto, but at least it was decked out
in up-to-date dress.
Indeed, many of its ideas had been in the air. What Heidegger in Sein
und Zeit (1927) had called inauthentic life, the world of das Man,
sounded like Ortega's mass-man, whose thinking (or inability to
think) showed the features of what Lukacs and the Marxists were
calling "reification." Wyndham Lewis, in The Art of Being Ruled
(1926), had included the scientists in the scorned masses. The Revolt
appeared at the same time as F.R. Leavis' Mass Civilization and
Minority Culture, which argued that the mass media had brought about
"an overthrow of standards" and that "the intellectual and artistic
minority was cut off as never before from the powers that rule the
world", precisely Ortega's theme. There was in some parts of the
intelligentsia a panic fear of the masses, which stimulated an
interest in eugenics that the Nazis would have approved. D.H.
Lawrence was hoping that the masses would "fall into death in
millions", and Aldous Huxley decreed in 194, "Universal education has
created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid."
Such a climate guaranteed an enthusiastic reception for The Revolt.
It was eventually translated into more than a dozen languages and was
a minor bestseller in the United States and Germany through the 1990s.
Its argument for meritocracy and condemnation of collectivism help
explain its U.S. success, but its popularity in Germany both before
and under Nazi rule is interesting. Favor with a mass audience should
have dismayed Ortega but, instead, he boasted he was the most widely
read contemporary philosopher. The Atlantic Monthly maintained that,
"What Rousseau's Contrat Social was for the eighteenth century and
Karl Marx's Das Kapital was for the nineteenth, Revolt of the Masses
should be for the twentieth century." This was patently absurd but
that has not stopped Norton and Company reproducing that claim on the
cover of their 1993 re-issue of the English translation, first
published in 1932. Not only do re-issues continue (numbering in the
twenties and thirties in various languages) but a new translation,
with a prologue by Saul Bellow, appeared in the United States in
1985. The communists had no use for Ortega, whom their Lexikon A-Z in
einem Band (Leipzig, 1955) dismissed as "an extreme reactionary and
individualist philosopher." But most other shades of opinion, from
liberal to fascist, found something sympathetic in this ambiguous and
basically confused book.
The tradition in which Ortega's book is inscribed, and within which
we might seek its influence, is twofold: the sociological theory that
there is such a thing as "mass society", on the one hand; and on the
other, the study of "mass culture", the joint consequence of
universal education and the large-scale reproduction and circulation
of cultural materials.
The Homogenized Society
The theory of mass society holds that, whereas earlier societies were
internally diversified, industrial democracies have eradicated the
elements of diversity as incompatible with political equality and
economic efficiency. This homogenization of society has destroyed
much that was old and precious (if not sacred) in social intercourse,
leaving individuals identical but "atomized", lonely, separated, and
self-satisfied in a moral desert, vulnerable to regimentation by
bureaucracies. A corollary, associated with Hannah Arendt, is that
masses of such individuals can seek refuge in ideological fanaticism,
turning from the old political parties to totalitarian movements that
promise something better than moral apathy and secular disbelief.
Thus the theory is offered as an explanation of the major political
events of the twentieth century, as well as an account of its social
life, the world of mass-man, alienated, unfree, resentful, and
manipulated. There are countless variations on this theme, which, as
Giner said, is too "loose and unfalsifiable" to deserve the name of
theory, too much colored by the pathos of cultural pessimism to serve
in analysis and explanation. That did not prevent the theory of mass
society from being, as Daniel Bell said in 1956, the most powerful
idea in the Western world after Marxism; and in 1962 Edward Shils
described it as the specter that was haunting sociology.
Ortega eloquently brought together many threads of this sociological
figment as they existed in 1930 but it cannot be said that he
contributed much to its further development--except his captivating
title, for sundry later authors had a chapter or section called "the
revolt of the masses" or played with variations such as "the revolt
from the masses" (Bachrach), the "rape of the masses" (Chakhotin),
"the revolt against the elite" (Viereck), or the "revolt of the
elites" (Lasch) and so on. (In the muddle ground between ideology and
reason, a striking title and an ambiguous theme can go a long way.)
Karl Jaspers was writing his Man in the Modern Age (1931) at the time
of Ortega's success, and since he argued there that the issue of the
day was the struggle of selfhood against the mass order, he hailed
The Revolt, and continued to cite it in later works. Gabriel Marcel,
the Catholic existentialist, acknowledged a debt to Ortega in his
book variously translated as Men Against Humanity and Man Against
Mass Society, and he showed that a French Christian could be as
tough-minded as a Spanish atheist by declaring that the mass was "a
degraded state of the human", beyond true education, capable only of
being trained, like animals.
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.
These intemperate lamentations are the first and the latest links in a tradition that includes, prominently, Ortega's Revolt. He chimed in soon after Heidegger had declared in Sein und Zeit (section 27):
In utilizing public means of transport or in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein [existence] completely into the kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a way indeed that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded.
In case that was not perfectly clear, Heidegger was saying that every time you get on a bus or open a newspaper, you wipe out your selfhood and fall victim to the dictatorship of the masses - apparently even if the newspaper does not have pictures.
Ortega put this more accessibly, forcefully, and colorfully in "the classical intellectual account of the advent of mass culture in the early twentieth century" (Carey). He went beyond J.S. Mill who in 1859 had said 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." He did so by insisting on the baleful influence of mass taste on the creativity proper to the select minority. Because the mass was vulgar and insolent, it dominated the age and instituted the rule of barbarism over taste. This would have been difficult to prove (even supposing Ortega could ever be bothered with proofs of his utterances) because, although the mass production of kitsch and cheap entertainment is obvious, so is the unprecedented volume of output of high-culture materials, and it is often cross-subsidized, via record companies and publishing houses, by mass culture. Ortega could not foresee Marcuse's bizarre argument that when a classical work - say, Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal - is mass-produced in paperback, it ceases to be high art and becomes another instrument of repressive tolerance, because genuine art must be inaccessible to the masses. But Ortega came near, as when in The Dehumanization of Art, he approved contemporary abstract painting because the mass failed to understand it and left the elites to appreciate it undisturbed. Actually, Ortega did not particularly like it himself, but he rejoiced to see the sheep separated from the goats. Snobbery has rarely been more insolent.
His broadside against popular taste was welcomed by those artists and intellectuals who were engaged in Modernism's effort to bamboozle the common people. Johan Huizinga in In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935) commended Ortega's diagnosis of the "puerilism" of the day, "that blend of adolescence and barbarity", the "worldwide bastardization of culture", "the entry of half-educated masses into the international traffic of the mind", and the links it all had with totalitarianism: "the spectacle of a society rapidly goose-stepping into helotry." Huizinga's contempt for his age persisted in Homo Ludens (1938). T.S. Eliot also was enthusiastic about Ortega; in the arbitrary game of ascribing sins to mass-man, Eliot threw in "the new paganism" (which would not have bothered Ortega), while deploring liberalism, which Ortega claimed to represent, for paving the way for fascism. Under their differences of temper and opinion, they were united only in the Odi profanum vulgus.
This whole story, in which Ortega's part was accessory, is best told in John Carey's magisterial The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London, 1992). The first chapter is called "The Revolt of the Masses." He notes that when Geoffrey Grigson founded the periodical New Verse in 1933, the first number began with a salute to Ortega for describing the vulgarization of the arts produced by the revolt of the masses, and announced that the aim of the periodical was to let writers talk to each other free from the limitations of mass intelligence. Carey sees this as emblematic:
[T]he principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity. What this intellectual effort failed to acknowledge was that the masses do not exist.... The metaphor of the mass serves the purposes of individual self-assertion because it turns other people into a conglomerate. It denies them the individuality which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know.
Ortega and the Nazis
If the "mass" concept served only the self-assertion of intellectuals, it would be pretty harmless. But it obviously can serve another purpose, as when Hitler said, "Russians exist only en masse and that explains their brutality" - the purpose, namely, of dehumanizing candidates for destruction. There is, in fact, a faint but disturbing aroma of authoritarianism, thinly disguised as cultural snobbery, about Ortega's whole theory of mass society. We do not have to go as far as George Lukacs when he judged Ortega (like Heidegger) guilty of preparing the Hitlerite ideology, of making a suitable atmosphere for fascism, with his anti-democratic, aristocratic philosophy of society. But his sympathies and his silences do attract attention to the seamier implications of mass-man theory. Now, this is odd, because it is precisely the exponents of mass society theory who claim (as Hannah Arendt did in The Origins of Totalitarianism) to have discovered one of the very causes of fascism. There is a chiasma of ideas here that would be interesting to dissect.
Ortega was capable of spurning the Nazis as vulgar and then embracing their pet theories. For example, in The Revolt he says that "the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with but related to the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine." Against that biological undertow, politics and culture are "the mere surface of history." Later he dismisses culture and nationality as secondary historical elements compared with "vitality." Moreover, this peculiar substance "vitality" seems to be what distinguishes the elites from the masses, and gives them their right to rule and to determine taste. He can give no better account of them than that they try harder, they do not spare themselves, whereas mass-man is lazy and unambitious.
But we are not told what they try harder at, what their policies are; remembering that Pareto said there was an elite in every calling, including among bank-robbers, we can see that this is not a theory to disturb Nazi "elites" any more than Heidegger's mysterious distinction between "authentic" and "inauthentic" life. Ortega was later to criticize Jean-Paul Sartre's engagement as "nihilistic" and an incitation to mindless activism, but it is only his enormous self-confidence that prevents him seeing that he does no better when he cheers on his faceless elites. This fatal vagueness is, of course, the nemesis of all elitist theory in politics, once it claims to say anything more than the banality that fewer people give orders than take them.
Patrick Brantlinger points out that after Ortega jettisons mass culture and then the scientific and technical elements of high culture, "there remains only a set of reactionary political attitudes" that are frequently difficult to distinguish from fascism. His politics "fails to transcend ideas and attitudes - nostalgia for lost authority, a loathing for the vulgar and common man, distrust of science and democratic procedures - compatible with the fascism he sees as one of the most tragic consequences of the revolt of the masses." That is, no doubt, why he was invited by José Antonio Prima de Rivera, founder of the Falange and son of the former dictator of Spain, to become the movement's intellectual leader. He refused, but then he despised all politics. (His son fought the civil war in the Nationalist army.)
Ortega got his higher education in Germany, and scholars have shown that German sources can be identified for most of his ideas (notably the American scholar Nelson Orringer in his Ortega y sus fuentes germanicas, Madrid, 1979). Certainly in writing The Revolt he was squarely in that tradition of conservative imperial Germany which held that the Teutonic soul was threatened by "Americanization", meaning Mammon, materialism, colossal machines, and mass society. Now this is one of those home-grown leather-breeches and rye-bread ideologies that fed directly into Nazism, as Fritz Stern showed in his classic study, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961). Nazism, he says, did not come from Versailles or Weimar - nor, we must now add, from mass-man either - but from supposed elites, educated people often in established positions, who were heirs to a century-old national frustration and galling cultural discontent, which inspired in them nationalist fantasies and the idealism of anti-modernity.Ortega got his higher education in Germany, and scholars have shown that German sources can be identified for most of his ideas (notably the American scholar Nelson Orringer in his Ortega y sus fuentes germanicas, Madrid, 1979). Certainly in writing The Revolt he was squarely in that tradition of conservative imperial Germany which held that the Teutonic soul was threatened by "Americanization", meaning Mammon, materialism, colossal machines, and mass society. Now this is one of those home-grown leather-breeches and rye-bread ideologies that fed directly into Nazism, as Fritz Stern showed in his classic study, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961). Nazism, he says, did not come from Versailles or Weimar - nor, we must now add, from mass-man either - but from supposed elites, educated people often in established positions, who were heirs to a century-old national frustration and galling cultural discontent, which inspired in them nationalist fantasies and the idealism of anti-modernity.
Forces of that sort were infinitely more important in Germany in 1930 than the developments that obsessed Ortega, such as the common people's challenge to the political and cultural dominance of their betters. That was going on everywhere, but the very societies where political equality and universal education were carried furthest, such as the United States, were the least tempted by totalitarianism (as Arendt admitted). The elaborate argument about how the modern world had atomized and leveled and isolated individuals into insolent mass-men who were about to seize power was just another variation of the anti-modernism it was called in to explain.
Essay Types: Book Review