I.The text of
The Revolt of the Masses is largely a meditation upon the the famous first paragraph with which it opens:
This initial paragraph, so bluntly and succinctly antidemocratic, seems to violate everything the Western world holds dear to. It also seems to conflict with the basic biographical details I outlined above: why should so essentially liberal a man, a teacher so outraged with the brutalities of a fascist regime that he left his post rather than swear fealty to the State, come out militantly against 'the masses'?
y Gasset clarifies his meaning in the same paragraph. "Public life is not", he says, "solely political, but equally, and even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement." This said, we see that, unlike the narrow republicanism of the post-war age, y Gasset is considering democratic life
in its aggregate: those activities which occur outside of and beyond the sphere of politics proper. In an era when the old New Left expression that "the personal is political" has become the mantra and motto of political organizations on both sides of the great divide, y Gasset writes for an epoch in which politics had yet to become as personalized and commodified as any product in the marketplace of ideas.
The author thus intends to examine what we consider to be 'public life' in total. He continues in this fashion after having posited the initial question:
What y Ortega refers to is well-known among those of us in the Anglosphere: in England it is the sentiment which David Cameron and the Conservatives targeted so long ago in a now-forgotten campaign calling for the 'Big Society'. In America the idea is less politicized, but still lies at the essential core of identity politics in this nation. It is called the 'American dream'.
But what could objection could a Spanish philosopher have towards that particular feeling of community which lay outside political life? ya Gasset begins by contextualizing his statements
The immediate context of that 'democratization' of society which y Gasset here mentions is that process which David Brooks called a movement "from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one" in
a recent piece, waxing lugubriously on the differences between American and British political life (and which pretends that a similar transition is being made by the Cameron government today). A
profound change overtook Europe in the years between the World Wars, and that change was not limited by any means to the rise of socialism and nationalism in the political sphere. The industrial revolution of an earlier age had found its counterpart in the
social revolution of the Normalcy.
It is this context that shapes and focuses y Gasset's critique of contemporary society. He continues:
The sentiment y Gasset makes public here seems, at first glance, to be even more highly reactionary than those expressed in the opening paragraph. The 'publicization' of the mass correlates, to him, with the first great rush of multiculturalism in the modern world. This deeply 'conservative' feeling seems bolstered by his Wagnerian metaphor of the chorus: suddenly, the liberal mind is sent reeling, calling up images of moonlit marches by torchlight and the operatic nature of anti-multicultural politics. But y Gasset's mind is too nimble for such base conservatism.
The
point of y Gasset's complaint about the modern world is, thus, not about the conglomeration of mere national or ethnic or religious minorities into 'the mass', into a conglomerate. y Gasset is not a conservative. His overriding concern is with the
man in the main: the man who, while he may not be qualitatively superior to any other of his peers, is nevertheless lessened further when he is combined with them.
The point is made. Now the author must define the terms which he is using, and he does so:
We today are well aware of those to whom y Gasset refers; they have multiplied in their number since his time. These are they of whom Nietzsche wrote: "He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon." Or, rather, those who
try to "think (their) way through" to the other side and fail. The only point of contact they share with their fellows is the conformity of a narrow non-conformity.
y Gasset does not find the "mass man" much superior. They are, in his consideration, worse:
We know this kind, too, especially in America, where they have been thoroughly politicized. "The mass" is the man who
knows he is "mass"; what's more, he wants
you to be "mass", too, and will go to great lengths to ensure that you
will be "mass".
But y Gasset is aware that he may sound like a 'Babbit', a man who wants to think himself better than his neighbor because he wants to belong to the "mass" which actually
is better. He denies this:
y Ortega will make this point time and again in
The Revolt of the Masses: that many who feel themselves as being validated by the holding of an opinion not held by the rest of men, or of being of unique characteristics and thus 'better than' their fellow men, fall into a trap more subtle but no less damning than those in which the more common form of the "mass man" sets for himself.
y Ortega has made his diagnosis of society. What in it does he find objectionable?