José Ortega y Gasset on Self-Satisfaction and Specialization

Joaquin Sorolla (1863 – 1923): Portrait of Jose Ortega y Gasset (1918)

The Revolt of the Masses (1930) by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955), like many books openly critical of modern trends, was once celebrated and judged to be something of a contemporary classic, but it has gradually, over the last four or five decades, vanished from awareness even among the supposedly educated.  I read it for the first time in the early 1970s when I pursued (rather fitfully, I confess) my undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles.  The College Library possessed two copies, an indication of how widely the book circulated in the middle of the Twentieth Century.  Were one to canvass today’s English or History faculties, familiarity with Ortega’s book would likely be non-existent; it would be a rare incident even if so much as the name Ortega registered with humanities professors in their thirties and early forties.  The Revolt nevertheless speaks to the present moment with increasing pertinence, as do many similar books of its day, such as Oswald Spengler’s Hour of Decision (1934) and Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), which likewise have lost all currency.  The Revolt also describes those who know not of it and who think that knowledge is circumscribed by the syllabus of their graduate studies.  The Revolt illuminates a remark made by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012): “Modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known.”  Two chapters of The Revolt offer themselves as especially relevant to the situation of the West in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century – “The Self-Satisfied Age” and “The Barbarism of Specialization.”  First, however, a brief summary of Ortega’s general argument is in order.

The late-Nineteenth Century, according to Ortega, saw the sudden rise in Europe of economies of abundance.  This mounting wealth resulted, in the first part of the Twentieth Century, in mass man, a social and cultural phenomenon that adapted itself, but in no positive way, to the advent of material ease and comfort.  Mass man reaped the benefits of a civilization to which he had in no way contributed, which he failed to understand, and which he took entirely for granted, identifying it as the natural background to his existence.  By the power of number alone, mass man, in Ortega’s phrase, intervenes everywhere, breaking down the hierarchical aspects of society and culture, while assimilating to himself – that is, to his limitation and incapacity – every institution.  Mass man undertakes no projects, but contents himself with diversion.  If he labored, it would be reluctantly, without commitment, and for the sake of diversion.  Ortega defines mass man as “he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting along.”  This Homo novus has proliferated with such celerity that he overwhelmed any possibility of education.  Thus, in Ortega’s words, “heap after heap of human beings have been dumped onto the historical scene at such an accelerated state, that it has been difficult to saturate them with traditional culture.”  Mass man experiences a privative consciousness bereft of history, ignorant of the ancestors, and by tendency self-centered.  He is egocentric in the extreme, in fact, but with the codicil that his ego remains at an infantile level of development.

A key to grasping mass man, Ortega argues, lies in the discovery of his most fundamental assumption concerning himself, namely that he is “exempt from restrictions.”  Mass man also takes a stance of “radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible his existence,” a disposition related to his lack of any historical perspective or knowledge.  Whereas “the ordinary man of past times was daily taught… elemental wisdom by the world about him,” because instability continually unbalanced that world; yet, “the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part.”  This almost automatic proffering of goods and services in response to mere whim provokes in mass man “the psychology of the spoilt child.”  The child of indulgence confidently presumes his priority over everyone else, and his superiority to anyone who thwarts, or attempts to thwart, him in his desires.  He “makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself.”  Ortega’s phrase – “full of possibilities” – requires qualification.  The range of “possibilities” that interests mass man remains quite narrow.  What one specimen of mass man wants, every other specimen of mass man also wants.  Mass man brings an unprecedented conformity and homogeneity to his milieu.

These trends, including the abrupt dominance of this new, vague variety of human being, have expressed themselves, as Ortega puts it in one of his chapter titles, in “A Self-Satisfied Age.”  Let it be said that the label that applied justly to the civilizational scene of Europe in 1930 applies no less justly, but with greater justice than ever, to the civilizational scene of North America ninety years later.  Ortega could be sketching a portrait, for example, of the typical college freshman of 2020 in one of the state systems of (so-called) higher education, or of a self-declared “expert” prattling about this, that, or another thing on one of the cable news channels.  The current chapter of modernity – or of “post-modernity,” as it preeningly calls itself – is undoubtedly ten times as self-satisfied, as entitled and narcissistic, as its precursor-chapter.  What then are the basic characteristics of a “Self-Satisfied Age” or, rather, of the constituent personality of that Age?  Ortega draws from his previous analysis three chief traits: “An inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, [and] without any grave limitations”; “contentment with himself [as he is that] leads [mass man] to shut himself off from any external court of appeal”; and a tendency “[to] intervene in all matters, imposing [his] vulgar views without respect or regard for others.”  Ortega unites these traits, while emphasizing the third trait or vulgarity, under the damning etiquette of “spiritual barbarism.”  Because “all life is the struggle, the effort to be itself,” and because mass man never struggles, but only revels in diversion, spirit or self has no inward grounds on which it might consolidate or exercise itself.  It never appears.

Age of Illumination

The mass man of either the 1930s or the 2020s would not acknowledge the reality of what the word spirit invokes.  He has learned in his schooling or rather in his indoctrination that physical reality is the sole reality.  He participates exclusively in what Ortega calls “the cult of the body” – and thus, “his propensity to make out of games and sports the central occupation of his life,” and his “lack of romance in his dealings with women,” and “his preference for living under an absolute authority rather than under a regime of free-discussion.”  Ortega uses the word “romance” in its full, chivalric meaning.  Courtship on the traditional model follows a ritual structure informed by spirit.  The principle of restraint supplies the form of courtship and originates nowhere else but in spirit.  Mass man and his female counterpart, being “exempt from restrictions,” as Ortega remarks, and immersed in corporeality, abolish the phase of spiritual communion and avail themselves directly of the physical opportunity.  Society urges them to do so.  Mass man’s opportunism, no matter whether it is 1930 or 2020, collaborates with his disdain for the “external court of appeal” and his preference for the suppression of debate.  “When [the self-satisfied man] becomes the predominant type,” Ortega writes, “it is time to raise the alarm and to announce that humanity is threatened with degeneration, that is, with relative death.”  Mass man, in his moral and spiritual deficiency, courts his own inward death (his death-in-life) or rather he never actually grows into the fullness of life, but sacrifices his potential.  Ironically, he seeks to stave off his biological death by resorting to the gymnasium and the medicine cabinet.

Ortega asserts that “the tonic that keeps mass man in form is insincerity, ‘the joke.’”  Mass man takes nothing seriously except what is essentially banal and in cosmic terms completely unserious.  A “Self-Satisfied Age” entails a pervasive mood of disbelief.  It also entails a penchant for “farcicality.”  Ortega could be describing the existing politics of the Western nations in 2020 when he writes that “almost all the positions taken up and proclaimed are false ones”; and “the only efforts that are being made are to escape from our real destiny, to blind ourselves to its evidence, to be deaf to its deep appeal, to avoid facing up to what has to be.”  One might point to the disappearance of genuine curricula in the school and universities.  Shakespeare and Cervantes, the one in his plays and the other in his novels, work up a candid anthropology – a study of man that reveals the persistence of human flaws and therefore also the inevitability of the tragic.  Shakespeare and Cervantes function in this way as anti-utopians.  The university, however, has committed itself to a utopian reorganization of society and civilization, even of human nature itself, never minding that the intellectual consensus on campus denies that such a thing as human nature exists.  The professoriate cannot tolerate the anti-utopian science of the Dead-White-Male authors and it acts to scrub them ruthlessly from the reading list.  The prevailing mentality – if that were the word – of the university is one of radical corporeality.  The definition of the human has shrunk down to mere physical traits such as skin color and the genitalia.  No one is more representative of mass man than a college professor or administrator, and no one is more self-satisfied.  To quote a friend – such people are a collective blight on human existence.

The topic of the professoriate forms a bridge, logically, to Ortega’s discussion of “The Barbarism of Specialization.”  In this chapter of The Revolt, Ortega makes the somewhat counter-intuitive claim that mass man finds his prototype in the scientist, as that role modified and institutionalized itself during the period from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century.  “The development of anything,” Ortega points out, “is not the same as its constitution.”  The sciences in the plural – that is, the specializations – have branched off from their trunk, but they remain connected to it, although the practitioners have climbed so far out on their limbs as to lose sight of the axis.  In its founding unity, as opposed to its development, science consists in the interconnection, indeed the fusion, of bodies of knowledge into a single body of knowledge.  To be true, any scientific claim must, as it were, communicate with the trunk – and with the roots.  “Not even empirical science,” Ortega writes, “taken in its integrity, can be true if separated from mathematics, from logic, from philosophy.”  With the succession of cohorts, each new practitioner of science, “through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, European civilization.”  By the end of what to Ortega was the last century, “we meet with a type of scientist unparalleled in history… who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator.”

Ortega uses the metaphor of the encyclopedia, that collation of knowledge, to pinpoint the specialist in the array of types.  The specialist contributes to the encyclopedia, but only to a single entry – or to a single sub-entry of that entry.  Of the encyclopedia as a whole, the specialist knows nothing.  He advances a science that “he hardly knows,” while remaining “conscientiously ignorant” of any facts beyond the narrow horizons of his diminished awareness.  For those few souls who remain conversant with the encyclopedia as a whole, the specialist reserves the contemptuous epithet of “dilettantism.”  The specialist’s epistemological isolation, his moral assuredness, and his conviction in himself as “a man who knows,” make him, formally speaking, the pattern of mass man, whose employment, in whatever it consists, also takes place in bureaucratic compartmentalization.  When the specialist extends the knowledge-related confidence of his own domain to other domains, which he is wont to do, he behaves like “a learned ignoramus” and “with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special lines.”  The specialist submits, not only to the conformism of his institutional niche, but to a general conformism.  He has fallen under a renewed pattern of tribal-like totems and taboos, such as the civilized order had previously, after much labor, cast aside.  The specialist deserves Ortega’s ascription to him of barbarism because in his mental and moral dispositions he corresponds to the tribesmen of prehistory, living in geographical seclusion, the equivalent of his bureaucratic seclusion, burdened with superstition, and seeing in natural events not the order of law but the arbitrariness of magic.

The social and political epiphenomena associated with the pandemic of 2020 underline the acuity of Ortega’s insights of ninety years past.  One thinks only too readily of the endless parade of so-called experts who have, in their half-knowledge and self-satisfied petulance, inexpertly cobbled together the puritanical and totalitarian responses to the disease, shutting down the nation and damaging it economically in ways that might prove irresolvable.  One suspects that Ortega, through some weird timeslip, must have been watching Fauci and Birx, Newsome and Cuomo, and all the talking heads of MSLSD, when he wrote: “And such… is the behavior of the specialist,” who “in politics, in art, in social usages… will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man”; and when he added: “By specializing him, civilization has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations… induc[ing] him to wish to predominate outside his speciality.”  Science already in 1930 had devolved into scientism.  In 2020 that devolution has descended into hadal depths.  That what passes itself off as rigorous knowledge is, in fact, only rigid dogma reveals itself in the stern farcicality of the Global Warming hypothesis, which, to defend itself against the cumulus of counter-evidence, has renamed itself the Climate Change hypothesis, a moniker that its users must regard as non-ironic.  Even the perverse fantasies of the professoriate – the bizarre claims of “transgenderism,” “structural racism,” “intersectionality,” and all the rest – couch themselves in scientific jargon, as if they were the equivalent of Newton’s laws.