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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses

CHAPTER III: THE HEIGHT OF THE TIMES

        THE rule of the masses, then, presents a favourable aspect, inasmuch as it signifies an all-round rise in the historical level, and reveals that average existence to-day moves on a higher altitude than that of yesterday. This brings home to us the fact that life can have different altitudes, and that there is a deep sense in the phrase that is often senselessly repeated when people speak of the height of our times. It will be well to pause and consider here, because this point offers us a means of establishing one of the most surprising characteristics of our age.  It is said, for example, that this or that matter is not worthy of the height of a certain time. And, in fact, not the abstract time of chronology, of the whole temporal plain, but the vital time, what each generation calls "our time," has always a certain elevation; is higher to-day than yesterday, or keeps on the level, or falls below it. The idea of falling contained in the word decadence has its origin in this intuition. Likewise, each individual feels, with more or less clearness, the relation which his own life bears to the height of the time through which he is passing. There are those who feel amid the manifestations of actual existence like a shipwrecked man who cannot keep his head above water. The tempo at which things move at present, the force and energy with which everything is done, cause anguish to the man of archaic mould, and this anguish is the measure of the difference between his pulse-beats and the pulse-beats of the time. On the other hand, the man who lives completely and pleasurably in agreement with actual modes is conscious of the relation between the level of our time and that of various past times. What is this relation?  It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better." But this is not the truth either. Not every age has felt itself inferior to any past age, nor have all believed themselves superior to every preceding age. Every historical period displays a different feeling in respect of this strange phenomenon of the vital altitude, and I am surprised that thinkers and historians have never taken note of such an evident and important fact. Taken very roughly, the impression described by Jorge Manrique has certainly been the most general one. The majority of historical periods did not look upon their own time as superior to preceding ages. On the contrary, the most usual thing has been for men to dream of better times in a vague past, of a fuller existence; of a "golden age," as those taught by Greece and Rome have it; the Alcheringa of the Australian bushmen. This indicates that such men feel the pulse of their own lives lacking in full vigour, incapable of completely flooding their blood channels. For this reason they looked with respect on the past, on "classic" epochs, when existence seemed to them fuller, richer, more perfect and strenuous than the life of their own time. As they looked back and visualised those epochs of greater worth, they had the feeling, not of dominating them, but, on the contrary, of falling below them, just as a degree of temperature, if it possessed consciousness, might feel that it does not contain within itself the higher degree, that there are more calories in this than in itself. From A.D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still"? [1]

[1]Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem.Odes, III. 6.

 

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