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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses

CHAPTER X: PRIMITIVISM AND HISTORY

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Some time in the forties a Mediterranean emigrant, home-sick for his native scenery- Malaga, Sicily?- took with him to Australia a pot with a wretched little prickly-pear. To-day the Australian budgets are weighed down with the burden of charges for the war against the prickly-pear, which has invaded the continent and each year advances over a square kilometre of ground.  The mass-man believes that the civilisation into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man. For him, civilisation is the forest. This I have said before; now I have to treat it in more detail.  The principles on which the civilised world- which has to be maintained- is based, simply do not exist for the average man of to-day. He has no interest in the basic cultural values, no solidarity with them, is not prepared to place himself at their service. How has this come about? For many reasons, but for the moment I am only going to stress one. Civilisation becomes more complex and difficult in proportion as it advances. The problems which it sets before us to-day are of the most intricate. The number of people whose minds are equal to these problems becomes increasingly smaller. The post-war period offers us a striking example of this. The reconstruction of Europe- as we are seeing- is an affair altogether too algebraical, and the ordinary European is showing himself below this high enterprise. It is not that means are lacking for the solution. What are lacking are heads. Or, rather, there are some heads, very few, but the average mass of Central Europe is unwilling to place them on its shoulders.  This disproportion between the complex subtlety of the problems and the minds that should study them will become greater if a remedy be not found, and it constitutes the basic tragedy of our civilisation. By reason of the very fertility and certainty of its formative principles, its production increases in quantity and in subtlety, so as to exceed the receptive powers of normal man. I do not think that this has ever happened in the past. All previous civilisations have died through the insufficiency of their underlying principles. That of Europe is beginning to succumb for the opposite reason. In Greece and Rome it was not man that failed, but principles. The Roman Empire comes to an end for lack of technique. When it reached a high level of population, and this vast community demanded the solution of certain material problems which technique only could furnish, the ancient world started on a process of involution, retrogression, and decay.  But to-day it is man who is the failure, because he is unable to keep pace with the progress of his own civilisation.

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