José Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses

Remedial Media

Dear Friends,

As part of an occasional series, I’m sharing lecture notes from a class I’m teaching on media studies. This class is on the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.

Best,

Sam

JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET’S THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES (1929)

A revelation. Ortega y Gasset has the most coruscating critique of modernity and democracy that I’m aware of this side of Nietzsche.

His basic point is vanishingly simple but also difficult to argue with — that there are too many people, and more people than the architecture of civilization can handle. He writes:

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely to find room.

The problem of overpopulation — Ortega y Gasset is really thinking of something more like ‘oversaturation’ — is compounded by a shift in mentality, the emergence of ‘mass man.’ Ortega y Gasset writes:

The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man….The leveling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions.

To understand Ortega y Gasset, it’s necessary to understand the distinction he makes between ‘minorities’ and ‘masses’ — and, here, he’s a little less than clear, or at least counter-intuitive. When he refers to an aristocracy or nobility, he is not referring to the old class-based system, for which he has (as for so many things) nothing but contempt. What he has in mind is simpler — it’s just the fact that since it’s impossible for the entirety of a population to rule, someone has to rule, and they have to be ipso facto a small number of people i.e. ‘minorities.’ But those who rule also in some way set themselves apart, and this ties in with Ortega y Gasset’s definition of minorities — “the minorities are individuals or groups of people who are specially qualified.”

For Ortega y Gasset, this is almost entirely a natural condition — to obtain anything, whether it’s political power or just growing food from the earth, requires work, requires making something out of nothing, and the mentality of all civilizations across the world has been to accept this state of affairs, with its inherent inequalities.

But with the 19th century, a new sensibility comes to the fore. This is scientific progress — Ortega y Gasset calls it ‘technicism’ — which drives population forward and provides a host of new conveniences that require no particular work from the population-at-large; and then the doctrine of ‘human rights,’ which makes the ‘mass’ entitled to all possible conveniences whether or not they had anything to do with their creation or manufacture.

This is the underlying tension that Ortega y Gasset is dealing with. The rise of science creates an insuperable break with the past — we cannot use the past as any particularly useful guide to the present. “We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, be they problems of art, science, or politics,” Ortega y Gasset writes. The mass emerges, utterly convinced of its own entitlements and seizing whatever it wants through sheer force of numbers, but the mass is incapable of rule, and whenever it seizes power by crashing past the authorities it only ever succeeds in installing some new minority who, through cunning, has emerged at the head of the mass. The modern world, then, divides into two poles — both of which are abhorrent to Ortega y Gasset. There is the active mass, the mass in ‘revolt,’ which is capable only of violence and of unrest; and then there is the passive mass, which is pacified through consumerism and through the regular handout of various ‘rights’ and entitlements. Nowhere in this is there room for the kind of ‘nobility of spirit’ that Ortega y Gasset is interested in.

It’s probably obvious by this point that Ortega y Gasset is a handful, and his bevy of dislikes makes him a less-than-reliable narrator. But he is also a fabulous writer, and it’s fun to take a brief survey of his assortment of prejudices. Russians are, for him, “a child-people.” Americans come in for special disdain. Americans are “a primitive people camouflaged behind the latest invention,” and, in an even better put-down, he writes, “Blissful the man who believes that, were Europe to disappear, the North Americans could continue science!” But I’m pleased to see also that he has a disdain for emergent Fascism, writing that Mussolini “represents a typical movement of mass-men” — and, after Franco came to power in Spain, he would reject all overtures from the regime, saying that his beliefs were “incompatible” with Franco. He seems to have some affection for classical China, and that’s pretty much it.

José Ortega y Gasset. A handful.

What is notable in Ortega y Gasset is how consistently counter-intuitive he is in his definitions. ‘Minority’ is the really key term — and, in a word, separates out human beings from those who are trying and those who are not. But his notions of how the world has changed — and how the ‘mass’ mindset has predominated — take in just about everything in our grounding of reality. In a beautiful passage, Ortega y Gasset describes what he means by ‘world’ — “the world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities; it is not then something apart from and foreign to our existence, it is its actual periphery.” The ‘world’ becomes an imaginative construct, and the characteristic of modernity is for the world to push in with the superfluous. “Something more than a year ago the people of Seville could follow, hour by hour, in the newspapers what was happening to a few men near the North Pole; that is to say that icebergs passed drifting against the burning background of Andalusia,” he writes. Ortega y Gasset, here, is very close to Walter Lippmann’s description of ‘the pictures in our heads’ as the constituent element of ‘reality’ — and he, very obviously, is anticipating our current era, with its Balkanized imaginations, with everybody inhaling some image of the wide world through their smart phones, which tends only to confirm their prior conceptions of it.

Time also gets a unique treatment in Ortega y Gasset. The past has been jettisoned from relevance, but the future in some sense also has no real existence — the future is understood to be a continuation of the technological trends of the present. “Convinced that it holds nothing essentially new, the progressive puts away from him all anxiety about the future and takes his stand in the definite present,” Ortega y Gasset writes. “Can we be surprised that the world today seems empty of purposes, anticipations, ideals?”

Taken together, Ortega y Gasset is a searing critique of modernity — the modernity of soccer fans and cheap cars, and there is of course a direct line from the pattern of entitled consumerism he witnessed in the ‘20s to our mindless scrolling. As is usually the case for prophets and critics, it’s harder to know what to do about it — and it’s greatly to Ortega y Gasset’s credit, given his reactionary sensibilities, that he resisted the lure of fascism. (He does so through another counter-intuitive definition, rejecting the fascistic view of the state as rooted in blood-and-soil and instead proposing a view of statecraft based in heterogeneity and pluralism, somewhat along the lines of city-states.) As far as solutions go, he contents himself by writing that his book represents “a preliminary skirmish against the mass-man” and adding the dark addendum that “the frontal attack [against mass-man] will come later, perhaps very soon, and in a form very different from that of this essay.” His path out of the maze would seem to be a renewal of continuity with the past — “the destiny of Europe must be placed in the hands of men who feel palpitating beneath them the whole subsoil of history,” he writes — but, as Ortega y Gasset would surely have been willing to acknowledge, the past can offer only a limited guide to the era shaped by technicism and we really are forced to develop our social ideas as if from scratch.

In the end, then, Ortega y Gasset offers only a challenge and something of a spur. He is fairly ruthless in dismantling attempts at a solution. ‘Science,’ which is supposed to be the guiding thread of modernity, comes in for a particularly coruscating rebuke — the mass of scientists are deemed “astoundingly mediocre and even less than mediocre.” And geopolitics offers a particularly difficult state of affairs — with Europe no longer able to rule, and losing its moral code as a result, but with no other region capable of filling in the vacuum and offering rule on a global scale (and, as noted, Ortega y Gasset has nothing but contempt for both the American and Russian solutions). What’s left is ‘mass man,’ “the spoiled child of history,” and these oscillations between consumerist stupefaction and tantrums of not-getting. It’s as hard to argue that this is not a terrible state of affairs as it is to propose anything better given the constraints of modernity. For anybody who believes in liberal democracy, then, Ortega y Gasset is a perfect foil — it would be interesting to set him side by side with Tocqueville for instance. He’s set up a series of apparently insuperable problems — proving that effective statecraft, social stability, and even genuine individual achievement are all but impossible within the era of the ‘mass mentality.’ The question is how to prove him wrong.