Key ideas: Published in 1937. "Democracy is ever eager for rapid progress, and the only progress which can be rapid is progress downhill. For this reason I suspect that all democracies carry within them the seeds of their own destruction, and I cannot believe that democracy is to be our final form of government. And indeed, there is little enough of it left in Europe today." (Sir James Jeans)
Some years ago I wrote a certain essay called "Why we do not Behave like Human Beings." I still hold that its major premises are sound. The explanation of the more than bestial actions of individuals, groups, and mobs, from time to time, and of the fact that these exhibitions of brutal savagery have shown no lessening in point of frequency and vehemence during the period of human history, is that the basic mass of humanity never changes in character, intelligence and capacity. This is the mass man whose quality Senor Ortega has so completely analyzed.
Out of this matrix of raw material, in every place and age, men in their fullness rise and play their part on the social level, but the basic mass remains always the same. They that thus appear are men in the real sense of the word, not "supermen." It is the fecund but, as a whole, static mass that are, properly speaking, sub-men. The line that separates man and sub-man, as this is drawn by biologists and anthropologists, is drawn at the wrong place.
It is not the knack of walking upright, developing a thumb and fabricating tools that transforms pithecanthropus erectus into homo sapiens, but the achievement (or bestowal) of certain factors of personality: power of reflection, conscience, the recognition and acceptance of moral sanctions, and a full and operative self-consciousness. If you are disposed to think in theological terms, you may say it is the acquisition of an immortal soul. Or you may say that homo becomes such through sapientia.
Now the cave dwellers of the Old Stone Age are not men in this sense, but sub-men, more closely allied to the quadrumana than to the men who built up the great Mediterranean cultures from Menes to Justinian. Between the Blackfellows of Australia, the Pygmies of Africa, the jungle dwellers of the Amazon and the Orinoco, and the builders of the pyramids, the Athenian temples and the Medieval cathedrals j the creators of Classical and Elizabethan letters, the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, the makers of Constantinople, Florence, Toledo, old Paris, Oxford and their like, there is a far greater interval in the case of all that counts in humanity than there is between the first named savages and the simian tribes of equatorial Africa. It is not dentition, the shape of a frontal bone or the cephalic index that separates man from the ape. It is the imponderable, spiritual factors of which your anthropologist takes small account...
We can see very clearly that the level of attainment is about the same in every period. Bernard Shaw is no greater than Shakespeare nor he than Euripides; St. Thomas Aquinas than Plato, Browning than Dante, Bramante and Richardson than the master-builders of the Parthenon, they of Hagia Sophia, or the creators of the Gothic cathedrals. Equals, yes; superiors, no.
In a word, then, there has been no absolute advance in human culture during the historic period, and the myth of progressive evolution, is without validity.
The character and intellectual attainment of its pupils vary from year to year, the personality, the scholarship and the pedagogical ability of its faculty from generation to generation. Sometimes it graduates a larger number, sometimes a minority of good students, but by its very nature it never proceeds to a higher scholastic level and becomes a university. It remains forever a preparatory school, and recognizes no humiliation or inferiority in so remaining.
If some political administration, some "progressive" supervisor or school committee of the "booster" type insisted in imposing on the pupils a curriculum appropriate to a post-graduate college, or trying to force the boys to accept the responsibilities conditioned to their elders, the result for them would be a gross disservice.
This is precisely what has happened to society under the influence of the philosophical myth of progressive evolution and popular democracy.
The human social mass that is our preparatory school remains, therefore, substantially always the same. Year by year it is reinforced by new material, always, shall we say, of the normal fourteen-year old type. It is not the majority of these recruits that can gain their certificates of graduation; indeed it is very few. Nevertheless this same school is indispensable in the economy of life, for it is from its numbers alone that may be drawn the builders, creators, and directors of society. It is the matrix from which men are made
"Mass man" does not show himself in a very favourable light when he is so regarded as the arbiter of culture and social evolution. He is of the type that joins the ranks of specious organizations of the get-rich-quick or get-power-quick variety, from Communism to the latest of the share-the-wealth societies.
He furnishes the personnel of "Know-Nothing," Klu Klux, Black Legion and similar terrorist gangs. He elects a "Big Bill" Thompson as mayor, a "Jim" Curley as Governor, a Zioncheck as member of Congress, a Huey Long as Senator, a Harding as President; he invents or follows after uncouth religions and absurd philosophies, and he makes the newspapers and the pulp-magazines what they are-and steadily debases himself accordingly.
This estimate of the general quality of the great mass of human beings is not to be taken as an indictment. There is nothing vicious in the course followed. Mass man is just as susceptible to good influences as to bad. Indeed it is highly probable he answers more quickly to the former than do his betters.
Like all normal men he is avid for leadership, but the trouble lies in the fact that he is prone to accept leaders on their own valuation, and take what is most obvious and plausible. His estimate of civics and social action is taken from politicians; he bases his standards of value on those of big money and big business. The prophets of new cults talk louder than the exponents of old faiths, and easily get his ear. Hollywood and the pulps mark out the line of high adventure while, as has been indicated, the newspapers being big, ubiquitous and blatant are accepted as models of civilization and culture.