THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY -- ON THE TRIUMPH OF THE 'BLOGOSPHERE'
The
mass-man regards himself as perfect. The select man, in
order to regard himself so, needs to be specially vain,
and the belief in his perfection is not united with him
consubstantially; it is not ingenuous but arises from his
vanity, and even for himself has a fictitious, imaginary,
problematic character, Hence the vain man stands in need
of others, he seeks in them support for the idea that he
wishes to have of himself. So that not even in this
diseased state, not even when blinded by vanity, does the
"noble" man succeed in feeling himself as in
truth complete. Contrariwise, it never occurs to the
mediocre man of our days, to the New Adam, to doubt of his
own plenitude. His self-confidence is, like Adam's,
paradisiacal. The innate hermetism of his soul is an
obstacle to the necessary condition for his discovery of
his insufficiency, namely: a comparison of himself with
other beings. To compare himself would mean to go out of
himself for a moment and to transfer himself to his
neighbour. But the mediocre soul is incapable of
transmigrations -- the supreme form of
sport.
We find
ourselves, then, met with the same difference that
eternally exists between the fool and the man of sense.
The latter is constantly catching himself within an inch
of being a fool; hence he makes an effort to escape from
the imminent folly, and in that effort lies his
intelligence. The fool, on the other hand, does not
suspect himself; he thinks himself the most prudent of
men, hence the enviable tranquillity with which the fool
settles down, installs himself in his own folly. Like
those insects which it is impossible to extract from the
orifice they inhabit, there is no way of dislodging the
fool from his folly, to take him away for a while from his
blind state. and to force him to contrast his own dull
vision with other keener forms of sight. The fool is a
fool for life; he is devoid of pores. This is why Anatole
France said that the fool is much worse than the knave,
for the knave does take a rest sometimes, the fool never.
It is not a
question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary,
today he is more clever, has more capacity of
understanding than his fellow of any previous period. But
that capacity is of no use to him; in reality, the vague
feeling that he possesses it seems only to shut him up
more within himself and keep him from using it. Once for
all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices,
fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has
piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only
explicable by his ingenuousness is prepared to impose them
everywhere. This is what in my first chapter I laid down
as the characteristic of our time; not that the vulgar
believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that
the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity
or vulgarity as a right.
The command over
public life exercised to-day by the intellectually vulgar
is perhaps the factor of the present situation which is
most novel, least assimilable to anything in the past. At
least in European history up to the present, the vulgar
had never believed itself to have "ideas" on
things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs,
mental habits, but it never imagined itself in possession
of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be
-- for example, on politics or literature. What the
politician planned or carried out seemed good or bad to
it, it granted or withheld its support, but its action was
limited to being an echo, positive or negative, of the
creative activity of others. It never occurred to it to
oppose to the "ideas" of the politician others
of its own, nor even to judge the politician's
"ideas" from the tribunal of other
"ideas" which it believed itself to possess.
Similarly in art and in other aspects of public life. An
innate consciousness of its limitation, of its not being
qualified to theorize, effectively prevented it doing so.
The necessary consequence of this was that the vulgar
never thought, even remotely, of making a decision on any
one of the public activities, which in their greater part
are theoretical in character. Today, on the other hand,
the average man has the most mathematical
"ideas" on all that happens or ought to happen
in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his hearing.
Why should he listen if he has within him all that is
necessary? There is no reason now for listening but rather
for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question
concerning public life, in which he does not intervene,
blind and deaf as he is, imposing his
"opinions."
But, is this not
an advantage? Is it not a sign of immense progress that
the masses should have "ideas," that is to say,
should be cultured? By no means. The "ideas" of
the average man are not genuine ideas, nor is their
possession culture. An idea is a putting truth in
checkmate. Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare
himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the
game imposed by it. It is no use speaking of ideas when
there is no acceptance of a higher authority to regulate
them, a series of standards to which it is possible to
appeal in a discussion. These standards are the principles
on which culture rests. I am not concerned with the form
they take. What I affirm is that there is no culture where
there are no standards to which our fellow-men can have
recourse. There is no culture where there are no
principles of legality to which to appeal. There is no
culture where there is no acceptance of certain final
intellectual positions to which a dispute may be
referred. There is no culture where economic
relations are not subject to a regulating principle to
protect interests involved. There is no culture where
aesthetic controversy does not recognise the necessity of
justifying the work of art.
When all these
things are lacking there is no culture, there is in the
strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not
deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in
Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The
traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in
that territory there are no ruling principles to which it
is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no
barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards
to which appeal can be made.
-- José Ortega y Gasset, The
Revolt Of The Masses
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.38 am, 5 September 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
It is
often said that people went to the suburbs in search of
"community," as an alternative to urban
anonymity. I think it was just the other way around. What
they craved was complete privacy -- the freedom to bring
up their children without interference from intrusive
relatives and neighbours, to choose their friends on the
basis of mutual interests instead of physical proximity
and to organize their time without consulting the pleasure
or convenience of anyone else. Suburbs appeared to
institutionalize the principle of free and unlimited
choice. They were designed to exclude everything not
subject to choice -- the job, the extended family, the
enforced sociability of the city streets. Americans hoped
to put all that behind them when they headed for the
seclusion of the suburbs, where they were accountable, it
seemed, to no one.
-- Christopher Lasch, "The Sexual Division Of
Labour," in Women
And The Common Life: Love Marriage And Feminism
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.57 pm, 4 September 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
When
people are forced to remain silent when they are being
told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are
forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and
for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies
is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become
evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus
eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars
is easy to control. I think if you examine political
correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
-- Theodore
Dalrymple
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.03 am, 1 September 2005►
