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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER X: PRIMITIVISM AND HISTORY
Page 3
It is painful to hear relatively cultured people speak concerning the most elementary problems of the day. They seem like rough farmhands trying with thick, clumsy fingers to pick up a needle lying on a table. Political and social subjects, for example, are handled with the same rude instruments of thought which served two hundred years since to tackle situations in effect two hundred times less complex. Advanced civilisation is one and the same thing as arduous problems. Hence, the greater the progress, the greater danger it is in. Life gets gradually better, but evidently also gradually more complicated. Of course, as problems become more complex, the means of solving them also become more perfect. But each new generation must master these perfected means. Amongst them- to come to the concrete- there is one most plainly attached to the advance of a civilisation, namely, that it have a great deal of the past at its back, a great deal of experience; in a word: history. Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced. Not that it affords positive solutions to the new aspect of vital conditions- life is always different from what it was- but that it prevents us committing the ingenuous mistakes of other times. But if, in addition to being old and, therefore, beginning to find life difficult, you have lost the memory of the past, and do not profit by experience, then everything turns to disadvantage. Well, it is my belief that this is the situation of Europe. The most "cultured" people to-day are suffering from incredible ignorance of history. I maintain that at the present day, European leaders know much less history than their fellows of the XVIIIth, even of the XVIIth Century. That historical knowledge of the governing minorities- governing sensu lato- made possible the prodigious advance of the XIXth Century. Their policy was thought out- by the XVIIIth Century- precisely in order to avoid the errors of previous politics, thought out in view of those errors and embraced in its substance the whole extent of experience. But the XIXth Century already began to lose "historic culture," although during the century the specialists gave it notable advance as a science.[1] To this neglect is due in great part its peculiar errors, which to-day press upon us. In the last third of the century there began- though hidden from sight- that involution, that retrogression towards barbarism, that is, towards the ingenuousness and primitivism of the man who has no past, or who has forgotten it.
[1]Here we catch a glimpse of the difference we shall shortly have to treat of between the state of the sciences during a given period and the state of its culture.