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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER IX: THE PRIMITIVE AND THE TECHNICAL
Page 7
What arguments can bring about something which has not been brought about by the motor-car in which those men come and go, and pantopon injection which destroys, miraculously, their pains? The disproportion between the constant, evident benefit which science procures them and the interest they show in it is such that it is impossible to-day to deceive oneself with illusory hopes and to expect anything but barbarism from those who so behave. Especially if, as we shall see, this disregard of science as such a pears, with possibly more evidence than elsewhere, in the mass of technicians themselves- doctors, engineers, etc., who are in the habit of exercising their profession in a state of mind identical in all essentials to that of the man who is content to use his motor-car or buy his tube of aspirin- without the slightest intimate solidarity with the future of science, of civilisation. There may be those who feel more disturbed by other symptoms of emergent barbarism which, being positive in quality, results of action and not of omission, strike the attention more, materialise into a spectacle. For myself, this matter of the disproportion between the profit which the average man draws from science and the gratitude which he returns- or, rather, does not return- to it; this is much more terrifying.[6] I can only succeed in explaining to myself this absence of adequate recognition by recalling that in Central Africa the negroes also ride in motor-cars and dose themselves with aspirin. The European who is beginning to predominate- so runs my hypothesis- must then be, in relation to the complex civilisation into which he has been born, a primitive man, a barbarian appearing on the stage through the trap-door, a "vertical invader."
[6]The monstrosity is increased a hundredfold by the fact that, as I have indicated, all the other vital principles, politics, law, art, morals, religion, are actually passing through a crisis, are at least temporarily bankrupt. Science alone is not bankrupt; rather does it every day pay out, with fabulous interest, all and more than it promises. It is, then, without a competitor; it is- impossible to excuse the average man's disregard of it by considering him distracted from it by some other cultural enthusiasm.