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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 37
For that interpretation confuses what urges on and constitutes a nation with what merely consolidates and preserves it. Let it be said once and for all- it is not patriotism which has made the nations. A belief in the contrary is a proof of that ingenuousness which I have alluded to, and which Renan himself admits into his famous definition. If in order that a nation may exist it is necessary for a group of men to be able to look back upon a common past, then I ask myself what are we to call that same group of men when they were actually living in a present which from the view-point of to-day is a past. Evidently it was necessary for that common existence to die away, in order that they might be able to say: "We are a nation." Do we not discover here the vice of all the tribe of philologues, of record-searchers, the professional optical defect which prevents them from recognising reality unless it is past? The philologue is one who, to be a philologue, requires the existence of the past. Not so the nation. On the contrary, before it could have a common past, it had to create a common existence, and before creating it, it had to dream it, to desire it, to plan it. And for a nation to exist, it is enough that it have a purpose for the future, even if that purpose remain unfulfilled, end in frustration, as has happened more than once. In such a case we should speak of a nation untimely cut off; Burgundy, for example.
With the peoples of Central and South America, Spain has a past in common, common language, common race; and yet it does not form with them one nation. Why not? There is one thing lacking which, we know, is the essential: a common future. Spain has not known how to invent a collective programme for the future of sufficient interest to attract those biologically related groups. The futurist plebiscite was adverse to Spain, and therefore archives, memories, ancestors, "mother country," were of no avail. Where the former exists, these last serve as forces of consolidation, but nothing more.[12]
[12]We are at present about to assist, as in a laboratory, at a gigantic definitive experiment: we are going to see if England succeeds in maintaining in a sovereign unity of common life the different portions of her Empire, by furnishing them with an attractive programme of existence.