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Mass man does not have to be poor or stupid. He can be both highly paid and highly intelligent, in a narrow way, and he can also be very highly educated, or at least trained; indeed, as knowledge accumulates, and as it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to master more than the very smallest portion of human knowledge, so connected thought (of the kind of which mass man is incapable) becomes rarer and rarer. Mankind collectively knows more than ever before, says Ortega, but cultivated men grow fewer.

I was just discussing this with a coworker the other day.

As civilizations advance or, at least grow old and long in the tooth, people specialize more and more. As the saying goes, they come to know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing at all.

Civilizations finally decay and fall when everyone becomes too specialized in their own area of expertise to see or care about what is going on around them.

On the other hand, I can see that dude's point about Chopin. That tinkly piano music can get on my nerves too.

I once heard of an elementary music teacher who played a scale on her piano, then asked individual students to sing the scale. One student sang “La-La-La-La-La-La-La-La”, but all his tones were the same, in a bland and unpleasant, non-musical rasp.

She had discovered a person who was perfectly tone deaf. So she played a song on the piano and asked him if it liked it. To him, it sounded like rapping on the bottom of a kitchen pot with a wooden spoon. Not terribly pleasant.

The only music he enjoyed was percussion. He could appreciate a rhythmical beat. And this was why he liked most rock ‘n’ roll, because he could hear its back beat.

Now granted, he was an oddity. But remember that half of the public have hearing that is closer to his than to the finely tuned ears of a violinist.

So don’t think them just Philistines when they don’t want to listen to tonal music. They might just not enjoy it very well.

In other words, man is endowed by nature with instinctual desires that have to be controlled in civilized conditions, if those conditions are to continue to obtain, but the control gives rise to frustration, guilt, and anxiety, that is to say to discontent.

Well, any Christian could have told you that (and offered a solution, in fact!).

Very interesting article. Ortega was an odd person, certainly worth reading, and he had an accurate vision of what was happening with the "massification" of society. However, as Daniels points out, his solutions were bizarre. Ortega had a philosophical disciple, Julian Marias, who was a Christian and resolved the question much better. Unfortunately, little of his work has been translated.

As for beauty, it's very odd, but it seems to be the first thing that revolutionaries seek to destroy.

Great article, and thanks for posting. I knew it was Dalrymple by the third paragraph. This is very interesting:

In Civilization and Its Discontents, for example, [Freud] says more than once that civilization, precisely because it imposes such restraints on man’s instinctual appetites, leaves him less happy than he was in a state of nature.

The Enlightenment hangs on and on here. There is no "state of nature." It is mythical, a mental construct that has no historical manifestation at all. Many of the same pressures ascribed to civilization are precisely the same in less sophisticated circumstances: the necessity of providing for oneself and one's family in terms of security, food, and a future. The curbing of crude appetite is seen in even the most primitive cultures; indeed, the curbing of crude appetite is in a sense culture itself.

So much for Rousseau and his intellectual heirs. One of Ortega y Gasset's notions was that the phenomenon of Mass Man depended to a degree on the advent of mass communication; that mass culture was only possible if these media were able to overcome regional differences imposed by the difficulties of travel. In this one suspects that some amelioration of the phenomenon is inherent in the system; that Mass Man will in the end attack the very means used to establish mass culture. Ayn Rand had a similar notion. That doesn't bode very well for the rest of us, however, who have to share the planet with the Wreckers.

High culture has always been candles lit in a very dark forest. We'll be doing well to keep them lit at all. IMHO.

The author is an educated man; hence, it is with some surprise he does not discuss Nietzche as a precursor to both Freud and Gasset.

Freud read Nietzche and remarked Nietzche was one of the few who did not need an analysis and, further, indicated he stopped reading Nietzche because he would not have made any more original discoveries. That is Freud thought much of what he had to say about the unconscious and so forth had previously been discussed and illustrated by Nietzche.

In any case, while everyone remembers "God is dead" as Nietzche's claim to fame, the real story is somewhat different. There have always been atheists. Surely, Nietzche mounted severe criticisms of the Christian church but he spoke highly of Christ.

What Nietzche had to say, was that modern man (late 19th century) either no longer believed in God or the belief really didn't influence his actions and morals. Nietzche predicted the 20th century would have monsters leading mass movements that would be more destructive than any previous monsters. And, we got Hitler, Stalin and Mao right on time.

Unlike Freud who believed in the pleasure principal (he later added thanatos or death instinct) as the primary human motivator, Nietzche saw the primary motive of man to be the excercise of power and life. Not simply political power but personal power over our environment and surrounding persons. That is why with no internalized God as a check any and every outrage would be possible since most are followers and desirous of achieving a personal meaning or power to their lives even if it means giving up their individual identity.

In respect to Gasset, what he misses and Nietzche discusses is "resentiment" which is an emotion and common in the lower classes (slave mentality)and that can be suddenly actualized into revenge which seeks to destroy the masters.

Resentiment (French)is hidden from the rulers or masters but simmers just below the surface. In some societies--Christian and Hebrew--it manifests itself by turning the morality of masters upside down--"..the meek shall inherit the earth...a rich man has less chance of getting into heaven than a camel has to pass through the eye of a needle..." In summary, resentiment is a bitter emotional reaction to the superiority of others; resentiment is a feeling which can be converted to resentment which can then be actualized into revenge. Seeking justice is a favorite means of the relatively powerless to up end and destroy the powerful.

I would not write all of this except that both of the authors quoted by Daniels must have read Nietzche and understood his positions on these matters, yet they still came up with a reductionist solution to a psychological problem. No need for hydraulics. No need for thanatos--a death instinct.

Nietzche is the most quoted modern Western philosopher. He is generally hated by believers for his sharp criticism of "slave morality" and Christian morals spelled with a capital M. Nietzche, for example, claimed to be an "immoralist" but by that he did not mean all morals but rather those morals given to us by authorities or God.