"Revolt of the Masses" by Ortega y Gasset: a Review

There is a moment in "Revolt of the Masses" (written in 1930) where modern man is described as wandering on to a stage in the middle of a play he does not understand, an image Stoppard later wrote a whole play around in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." In the play two minor players are caught up in another man's tragedy, in the book man is living in an age that does not understand its origins or its foundations. 

In the dynamic interplay between modern human life and circumstance two groups have emerged: the creative minority who exert their will in service to values and goals larger than themselves and Mass-man (so named for his inertia, not his volume) who is content, passive, decides on opinion not reason and is no longer a protagonist but a chorus. Importantly, these are not social classes but rather mindsets, ways of thinking that have become rewarding or unrewarding as they have separated from their philosophical origins. Mass-man fares worse.

This new world is the result of liberal democracy and technicism (scientific experimentation and industrialization.) But "the road is always better than the inn." The culture is "superior to all other times but inferior to itself." This abundant life has "overflowed the banks of its direction." Mass-man is lost in the abundance like the regent of Louis XV, "all the talents but the power to use them." He is of appetite, not aspiration; a combination of desire and ingratitude. The Mass-man is concerned only with his well-being yet alien to the cause of that well-being. "Hungry, the mob goes in search of food and wrecks the bakery." The Mass-man has no interest in civilization, only in its product and is indifferent to the principles they come from. He is the spoiled heir of civilization. Surprisingly, the prototype is the scientific man, narrow and focused, specialized and ignorant. His prototypical opposite from the creative minority, Caesar, integrated the past, the present and future by pushing Rome beyond the city-state to empire.

The creative minority is the man of excellence but, unlike Mass-man, he lives in servitude. Life is a discipline; he lives by obligation, not rights. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man lives by law and order." (Goethe)

This is a book of aphorisms. "...wrecking the bakery", 'spoiled heir of civilization", "the existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite" (Renan), "nationalism is in a direction opposed to the creation of a nation". But he has a greater and valid observation: There is a disconnection between modern man and his cultural heritage. We are children of The Enlightenment but somehow are orphaned and demoralized. In the last chapter he says we are left without a moral code but he never goes beyond the observation, the aphorism. The lynchpin is liberal democracy; the Mass-man is adrift because the theory of liberal democracy is adrift. Founded in Enlightenment on a spiritual theory, the loss of a spiritual view has atrophied the basis of liberal democracy. Astonishingly, this writer from Catholic Spain never mentions religion.

But perhaps he was just anticipating Eliot who said that the Western error was the belief that the solution was still in the Enlightenment. By this he meant, I think, that The Enlightenment was a product, not a source, of Western culture; if we are looking for a foundation, we are looking too late in history.