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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 15
5. It will be well now to get back again to the starting-point of these articles; to the curious fact that there has been so much talk in these years about the decadence of Europe. It is a surprising detail that this decadence has not been first noticed by outsiders, but that the discovery of it is due to the Europeans themselves. When nobody outside the Old Continent thought of it, there occurred to some men of Germany, England, France, this suggestive idea: "Are we not starting to decay?" The idea has had a good press, and to-day everyone is talking of European decadence as if it were an incontrovertible fact. But just beckon to the man who is engaged in proclaiming it, and ask him on what concrete, evident data he is basing his diagnosis. At once you will see him make vague gestures, and indulge in that waving of the arms towards the round universe which is characteristic of the shipwrecked. And in truth he does not know what to cling to. The only thing that appears, and that not in great detail, when an attempt is made to define the actual decadence of Europe, is the complex of economic difficulties, which every one of the European nations has to face to-day. But when one proceeds to penetrate a little into the nature of these difficulties, one realises that none of them seriously affect the power to create wealth, and that the Old Continent has passed through much graver crises of this order. Is it, perhaps, the case that the Germans or the English do not feel themselves to-day capable of producing more things and better things, than ever? Nothing of the kind; and it is most important that we investigate the cause of the real state of mind of Germany or England in the sphere of economics. And it is curious to discover that their undoubted depressed state arises not from the fact that they feel themselves without the capacity; but, on the contrary, that feeling themselves more capable than ever, they run up against certain fatal barriers which prevent them carrying into effect what is quite within their power. Those fatal frontiers of the actual economics of Germany, England, France, are the political frontiers of the respective states. The real difficulty, then, has its roots, not in this or that economic problem which may present itself, but in the fact that the form of public life in which the economic capabilities should develop themselves is altogether inadequate to the magnitude of these latter. To my mind, the feeling of shrinkage, of impotency, which undoubtedly lies heavy on the vitality of Europe in these times is nourished on that disproportion between the great potentialities of Europe and the form of political organisation within which they have to act.