What went wrong with conservatism?
Created | Updated Oct 22, 2002
What went wrong with conservatism?
A review of:
José Ortega y Gasset, 1932, The Revolt of the Masses. New York : W. W. Norton. Reissued as a Norton paperback 1993. (The Spanish original, Le Rebelion de las Masas was published in 1930.)
Conservative philosophizing had a pretty lean time in the twentieth century. After centuries in which philosophers had offered support for the Church (Aquinas), for monarchs (Hobbes), for capitalism (Adam Smith) and the Napoleonic post-revolutionary state (Hegel), the twentieth century was dominated by sceptical liberals (Russell), outright egalitarian theorizing (Rawls) and shamelessly relativistic existentialism (Sartre) and 'constructivism' (Derrida). Though, in America, Camille Paglia put up a quirky lesbian fight against feminism, only the equally quirky foxhunter, England's Roger Scruton, offered a defence of conservative causes across the board. Subdued by the decline in religious faith and by the conversion of much of the Church to welfarism, homosexualism and feminazism, none could articulate a coherent conservatism identifying central elements of Western achievements and culture that must be defended. In Britain, the Conservative Party largely accepted that it was 'the stupid party', and even 'the nasty party', having no ideas to speak of except those laissez-faire principles it stole from nineteenth-century Liberals. Conservatives were electable only when there were conspicuous threats of taxation, inflation and strikes posed by socialists.
Conservatives might thus be wise to be grateful for the thoughtful and historically informed work of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). A fully modern thinker who introduced the writers Proust and Joyce to Catholic Spain, Ortega at the same time bridled against both the tired Spanish aristocracy and the vulgar masses which, after 1918, seemed all too likely to complete the work of pre-1914 European 'diplomats' in polishing off European civilization. Ortega unashamedly urged the masses to accept "the direction of the superior minorities" – while doubting their capacity to do so since "they are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves." Unlike the cowards who pass for conservatives in 2002, he deplored those who "despise intelligence and avoid paying it any tribute." Eschewing today's piety about 'social disadvantage, Ortega held it "false to say that in life 'circumstances decide.'" "On the contrary," he continued, "circumstances are the dilemma constantly renewed, in the presence of which we have to make our decision; what actually decides is our character. ….If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the 'aristocratic' heir {with his charmed life}, his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort."
Surprisingly, perhaps, Ortega was at pains to distance his philosophy from Fascism as well as Syndicalism (i.e. socialism). Both these doctrines manifested "the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so….The average man finds himself with 'ideas' in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation." "Under Fascism," he wrote, "there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason." Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so." With disgust equal to percipience, Ortega noted that "the 'new thing' in Europe is 'to have done with discussion', and detestation is expressed for all forms of intercommunion which imply acceptance of objective standards, ranging from conversation to Parliament, and taking in science." Instead, said Ortega, "the political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. …Both Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns….they are mere primitivism." Ortega was way ahead of his times in his anti-statism, believing: "This is the greatest danger that today threatens civilisation: State intervention – the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State…" The time might soon come, he feared (correctly) when "The mass says to itself, 'L'état, c'est moi' which is a complete mistake." "Can we help feeling," he asked, "that under the rule of the masses the State will endeavour to crush the independence of the individual and the group, and thus definitely spoil the harvest of the future?"
Many conservative readers of today will admittedly be less impressed by Ortega's insistence on the importance of creating a "United States of Europe" that would take a stand against the vulgarity and mass tyranny which he feared. Though "in a way, the idea and sentiment of nationality have been [Europe's] most characteristic invention", Europe of 1930 was "obliged to exceed herself" or die like other civilisations unable to adopt substitutes for their traditional ideas of the state." Despite wars and rumours of wars, "the souls of French and English and Spanish….possess the same psychological architecture; and, above all, they are gradually becoming similar in content." Ortega even estimated that, for the typical European, "four-fifths of his spiritual wealth is the common property of Europe." Looking out from Spain of 1930, Ortega saw in a wider "union of Europe" only a benign protection from the forces that would soon – after he helped bring down the Spanish monarchy in 1931 – rip his country apart. He wanted conservatives to oppose the "decadence" of the times and "enable Europe to be really, literally Europe" not because of the natural racial unity of White people but because Communism would otherwise fill the void in the European heart. Far from thinking that effective states depended on their citizens having a common race, language, religion or 'natural', defensible territory, Ortega's belief was that a people must be embarked on a collaborative enterprise without end – for a state is "a work of imagination" and "a plan of existence", and "a nation is never formed." "Life is a task," he often stressed, presaging existentialism in playing down any notion that a coherent and viable individual or group will have an essence. Ortega especially feared that if the herculean Soviet Five Year Plan succeeded, Europe would be attracted by this "new and flaming constellation." "If Europe, in the meantime, persists in the ignoble vegetative existence of these last years, its muscles flabby for want of exercise, without any plan of a new life, how will it be able to resist the contaminating influence of such an astounding enterprise? It is simply a misunderstanding of the European to expect that he can hear unmoved that call to new action when he has no standard of a cause as great to unfurl in opposition."
As things turned out, it would be Europe's Fascists who would first unfurl their flags and, eventually with the help of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, subdue continental Europe even if they did not manage to inspire it. Ortega himself fled from the abominations of the Spanish civil war – first to France, then on to a successful teaching career in Argentina (for he refused Franco's offer to be gloriously re-installed in Madrid). In 1930, Ortega could not foresee that the eventual European Union that would arise would be an organization concerned far less with glorious ideals, high culture and great debates than with pork barrel politics and political correctness – even ostracizing the one of its members which, in 2000, voted to stop what was by then the steady invasion of Western Europe organized by a billion-dollar industry bringing 'asylum seekers' from as far away as south-east China. Though more versed in European history than some, Ortega could not see that it is rarely some high purpose that forges a nation but rather the low and messy task of repelling borders – as England, for example, was forged in the sixteenth-century by the heat from mighty Spain which already had continental Europe by the throat.
Yet it is not such mistakes that should be held against a philosopher, let alone a thinker professing liberalism, democracy, elitism and realism. Rather, the problem with Ortega is precisely the one which conservatives went on failing to solve for the rest of the twentieth century. The surprise is that Ortega came so near to saying what Europe needed to do after the horrors of 1914-18 yet did not pursue his own analysis of Europe's "decadence" to its natural conclusion. For by "decadence" Ortega was not referring to any falling away from traditional Christian sexual mores. At one point The Revolt of the Masses touches on the importance of primitive energies, saying "the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine." Indeed, Ortega positively admired the spirit of the Russian Revolution thanks to which (though the details were perhaps unknown to him) the restrictions of the Orthodox Church were overthrown and people were free to make love, abort, divorce and re-marry. By the 1920's, even nudism was a popular sport in Russia as people celebrated the one great gain that the Revolution was to make for them. Reporting from virtually empty shops in the Ukraine of 1930, the young Arthur Koestler noted that the one item still readily available under Communism was the male contraceptive sheath.
No, the problem that faced Europe after Darwin, and after religion, was what to do about sex and the family. Eventually – no thanks to conservatives – a degree of sexual liberation was pushed through in the 1960's. Yet this was not sufficient to allow people to choose the kinds of marriages they wished to have: 'one size fits all' lifelong monogamy remained the only legal option (even though the West's gods in Hollywood could ring the changes on this by prenuptial contracts) and further liberation looked impossible after 1980 because the sexual revolution had proved pretty disastrous for the low-IQ and their increasing numbers of fatherless progeny. By the end of the twentieth century, Ortega would have been even more shocked than he was in 1930 by the lack of forward thrust in Europe, dramatically instantiated in the awesomely small numbers of White children being born to intelligent parents. By the new millennium, conservatives would have achieved their selected mission of the previous fifty years to establish economic competition and low taxes as the key features of modern economies. Yet they would have proved unable to defend and extol the great Renaissance discoveries of romantic love and the female orgasm and to say that a culture which had thus built so practically on the New Testament value of love was one that now deserved a high degree of serious traditionalism in its defence. Specially surprising was the case of Britain, the first country where the idea of love had once spread far outside courtly bounds – as seen in Shakespeare's plays (however ironically sometimes). Though British adolescents were frankly at it like bunnies, society declined to steer their loves into any kind of marriage; and girls' pregnancies were typically matters of shame since no responsible man could ever have been the father. It fell to Japan to become the first country to award prizes (of £3,000) for childbirth (though Hungary provided eugenic tax breaks for mothers producing three or more children, thus wisely encouraging women to start breeding early rather than pursue careers that would risk leaving them childless).
Instead of being as realistic about eros as they are about thanatos, conservatives in the West have opted to be parties of frumpish women and 'family values' drawn from the wilder shores of religious mania. Instead of being known to delight in Donatello's 'David' and Canova's 'The Three Graces', conservatives have preferred to associate themselves even with dismal churches that were increasingly pursuing socialist and feminist agendas. While the twentieth century saw a magnificent eruption of love songs, oral sex, increasingly beautiful and wasp-waisted women, and fashions to die for, American conservatives positively raced to imprison women who declined to continue with unwanted pregnancies. While twelve-year-olds experimented with sex (usually most responsibly when IQ was adequate), conservatives insisted on trying to control under-age sexuality by such crude methods as withdrawing free contraception, banning sex education and consigning even the most harmless paedophiles to long jail sentences. Ortega was not perhaps the right man to break the dreary association between conservatism and prohibitionistic prudery – for he was small, finely strung and intensely private. Yet it is strange that he could not see the need for a range of entirely new marital and family contracts and sex practices to harness awakened Western sensuality and love of beauty and provide the backbone of a seriously anti-statist Europe. Given his intelligence and idealism, Ortega's defence can only be that later conservatives have done no better.
A review of:
José Ortega y Gasset, 1932, The Revolt of the Masses. New York : W. W. Norton. Reissued as a Norton paperback 1993. (The Spanish original, Le Rebelion de las Masas was published in 1930.)
Conservative philosophizing had a pretty lean time in the twentieth century. After centuries in which philosophers had offered support for the Church (Aquinas), for monarchs (Hobbes), for capitalism (Adam Smith) and the Napoleonic post-revolutionary state (Hegel), the twentieth century was dominated by sceptical liberals (Russell), outright egalitarian theorizing (Rawls) and shamelessly relativistic existentialism (Sartre) and 'constructivism' (Derrida). Though, in America, Camille Paglia put up a quirky lesbian fight against feminism, only the equally quirky foxhunter, England's Roger Scruton, offered a defence of conservative causes across the board. Subdued by the decline in religious faith and by the conversion of much of the Church to welfarism, homosexualism and feminazism, none could articulate a coherent conservatism identifying central elements of Western achievements and culture that must be defended. In Britain, the Conservative Party largely accepted that it was 'the stupid party', and even 'the nasty party', having no ideas to speak of except those laissez-faire principles it stole from nineteenth-century Liberals. Conservatives were electable only when there were conspicuous threats of taxation, inflation and strikes posed by socialists.
Conservatives might thus be wise to be grateful for the thoughtful and historically informed work of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). A fully modern thinker who introduced the writers Proust and Joyce to Catholic Spain, Ortega at the same time bridled against both the tired Spanish aristocracy and the vulgar masses which, after 1918, seemed all too likely to complete the work of pre-1914 European 'diplomats' in polishing off European civilization. Ortega unashamedly urged the masses to accept "the direction of the superior minorities" – while doubting their capacity to do so since "they are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves." Unlike the cowards who pass for conservatives in 2002, he deplored those who "despise intelligence and avoid paying it any tribute." Eschewing today's piety about 'social disadvantage, Ortega held it "false to say that in life 'circumstances decide.'" "On the contrary," he continued, "circumstances are the dilemma constantly renewed, in the presence of which we have to make our decision; what actually decides is our character. ….If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the 'aristocratic' heir {with his charmed life}, his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort."
Surprisingly, perhaps, Ortega was at pains to distance his philosophy from Fascism as well as Syndicalism (i.e. socialism). Both these doctrines manifested "the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so….The average man finds himself with 'ideas' in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation." "Under Fascism," he wrote, "there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason." Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so." With disgust equal to percipience, Ortega noted that "the 'new thing' in Europe is 'to have done with discussion', and detestation is expressed for all forms of intercommunion which imply acceptance of objective standards, ranging from conversation to Parliament, and taking in science." Instead, said Ortega, "the political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. …Both Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns….they are mere primitivism." Ortega was way ahead of his times in his anti-statism, believing: "This is the greatest danger that today threatens civilisation: State intervention – the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State…" The time might soon come, he feared (correctly) when "The mass says to itself, 'L'état, c'est moi' which is a complete mistake." "Can we help feeling," he asked, "that under the rule of the masses the State will endeavour to crush the independence of the individual and the group, and thus definitely spoil the harvest of the future?"
Many conservative readers of today will admittedly be less impressed by Ortega's insistence on the importance of creating a "United States of Europe" that would take a stand against the vulgarity and mass tyranny which he feared. Though "in a way, the idea and sentiment of nationality have been [Europe's] most characteristic invention", Europe of 1930 was "obliged to exceed herself" or die like other civilisations unable to adopt substitutes for their traditional ideas of the state." Despite wars and rumours of wars, "the souls of French and English and Spanish….possess the same psychological architecture; and, above all, they are gradually becoming similar in content." Ortega even estimated that, for the typical European, "four-fifths of his spiritual wealth is the common property of Europe." Looking out from Spain of 1930, Ortega saw in a wider "union of Europe" only a benign protection from the forces that would soon – after he helped bring down the Spanish monarchy in 1931 – rip his country apart. He wanted conservatives to oppose the "decadence" of the times and "enable Europe to be really, literally Europe" not because of the natural racial unity of White people but because Communism would otherwise fill the void in the European heart. Far from thinking that effective states depended on their citizens having a common race, language, religion or 'natural', defensible territory, Ortega's belief was that a people must be embarked on a collaborative enterprise without end – for a state is "a work of imagination" and "a plan of existence", and "a nation is never formed." "Life is a task," he often stressed, presaging existentialism in playing down any notion that a coherent and viable individual or group will have an essence. Ortega especially feared that if the herculean Soviet Five Year Plan succeeded, Europe would be attracted by this "new and flaming constellation." "If Europe, in the meantime, persists in the ignoble vegetative existence of these last years, its muscles flabby for want of exercise, without any plan of a new life, how will it be able to resist the contaminating influence of such an astounding enterprise? It is simply a misunderstanding of the European to expect that he can hear unmoved that call to new action when he has no standard of a cause as great to unfurl in opposition."
As things turned out, it would be Europe's Fascists who would first unfurl their flags and, eventually with the help of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, subdue continental Europe even if they did not manage to inspire it. Ortega himself fled from the abominations of the Spanish civil war – first to France, then on to a successful teaching career in Argentina (for he refused Franco's offer to be gloriously re-installed in Madrid). In 1930, Ortega could not foresee that the eventual European Union that would arise would be an organization concerned far less with glorious ideals, high culture and great debates than with pork barrel politics and political correctness – even ostracizing the one of its members which, in 2000, voted to stop what was by then the steady invasion of Western Europe organized by a billion-dollar industry bringing 'asylum seekers' from as far away as south-east China. Though more versed in European history than some, Ortega could not see that it is rarely some high purpose that forges a nation but rather the low and messy task of repelling borders – as England, for example, was forged in the sixteenth-century by the heat from mighty Spain which already had continental Europe by the throat.
Yet it is not such mistakes that should be held against a philosopher, let alone a thinker professing liberalism, democracy, elitism and realism. Rather, the problem with Ortega is precisely the one which conservatives went on failing to solve for the rest of the twentieth century. The surprise is that Ortega came so near to saying what Europe needed to do after the horrors of 1914-18 yet did not pursue his own analysis of Europe's "decadence" to its natural conclusion. For by "decadence" Ortega was not referring to any falling away from traditional Christian sexual mores. At one point The Revolt of the Masses touches on the importance of primitive energies, saying "the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine." Indeed, Ortega positively admired the spirit of the Russian Revolution thanks to which (though the details were perhaps unknown to him) the restrictions of the Orthodox Church were overthrown and people were free to make love, abort, divorce and re-marry. By the 1920's, even nudism was a popular sport in Russia as people celebrated the one great gain that the Revolution was to make for them. Reporting from virtually empty shops in the Ukraine of 1930, the young Arthur Koestler noted that the one item still readily available under Communism was the male contraceptive sheath.
No, the problem that faced Europe after Darwin, and after religion, was what to do about sex and the family. Eventually – no thanks to conservatives – a degree of sexual liberation was pushed through in the 1960's. Yet this was not sufficient to allow people to choose the kinds of marriages they wished to have: 'one size fits all' lifelong monogamy remained the only legal option (even though the West's gods in Hollywood could ring the changes on this by prenuptial contracts) and further liberation looked impossible after 1980 because the sexual revolution had proved pretty disastrous for the low-IQ and their increasing numbers of fatherless progeny. By the end of the twentieth century, Ortega would have been even more shocked than he was in 1930 by the lack of forward thrust in Europe, dramatically instantiated in the awesomely small numbers of White children being born to intelligent parents. By the new millennium, conservatives would have achieved their selected mission of the previous fifty years to establish economic competition and low taxes as the key features of modern economies. Yet they would have proved unable to defend and extol the great Renaissance discoveries of romantic love and the female orgasm and to say that a culture which had thus built so practically on the New Testament value of love was one that now deserved a high degree of serious traditionalism in its defence. Specially surprising was the case of Britain, the first country where the idea of love had once spread far outside courtly bounds – as seen in Shakespeare's plays (however ironically sometimes). Though British adolescents were frankly at it like bunnies, society declined to steer their loves into any kind of marriage; and girls' pregnancies were typically matters of shame since no responsible man could ever have been the father. It fell to Japan to become the first country to award prizes (of £3,000) for childbirth (though Hungary provided eugenic tax breaks for mothers producing three or more children, thus wisely encouraging women to start breeding early rather than pursue careers that would risk leaving them childless).
Instead of being as realistic about eros as they are about thanatos, conservatives in the West have opted to be parties of frumpish women and 'family values' drawn from the wilder shores of religious mania. Instead of being known to delight in Donatello's 'David' and Canova's 'The Three Graces', conservatives have preferred to associate themselves even with dismal churches that were increasingly pursuing socialist and feminist agendas. While the twentieth century saw a magnificent eruption of love songs, oral sex, increasingly beautiful and wasp-waisted women, and fashions to die for, American conservatives positively raced to imprison women who declined to continue with unwanted pregnancies. While twelve-year-olds experimented with sex (usually most responsibly when IQ was adequate), conservatives insisted on trying to control under-age sexuality by such crude methods as withdrawing free contraception, banning sex education and consigning even the most harmless paedophiles to long jail sentences. Ortega was not perhaps the right man to break the dreary association between conservatism and prohibitionistic prudery – for he was small, finely strung and intensely private. Yet it is strange that he could not see the need for a range of entirely new marital and family contracts and sex practices to harness awakened Western sensuality and love of beauty and provide the backbone of a seriously anti-statist Europe. Given his intelligence and idealism, Ortega's defence can only be that later conservatives have done no better.
