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BobW wrote, offlist about my post on Strauss in `book chat':
``...I have dabbled in some of the contemporary conservative writers, and they do seem to have that yearning for a pure identity you describe. Devotion to classical literature, and Christianity, always seems to be the core of it, plus of course fear of the mob. Ortega y Gasset, whom I read in college, is the best expression of this cultural aspect of conservatism...''
This reminded me this morning to look up Ortega y Gasset. I have his Historical Reason sitting over on some bookshelf, but haven't read him in years. Thanks to BobW for reminding me.
Most of my thoughts on Strauss's elitism come from celebrations of tradition coupled with a distain for the `mob' that Thomas Mann wrote about in `Notes of a Non-Political Man', a collection of essays written during WWI. I think Mann's essays were probably a very accurate representation of what the conservative minded and established intellectuals in Germany thought at the time. They were horrified at the rise to power of the industrial masses who were brought into public political life, first by numerous communist and socialist organizing parties, but most effectively because of their forced induction into the military. The process of the war itself brought them to a promenence of power they never had before and it frightened the elites of all orders. A very similar process took place all over Europe and was echoed in the US.
Unfortunately, Notes from a Non-Political Man is almost never read so the ideas and the direct feeling for the tone of the time are not well understood. (It is very reactionary and elitist stuff. Although Mann changed his mind and effectivedly re-constructed himself during Weimar becoming of a political liberal, he never publically disowned these essays.)
On the other hand Ortega y Gassett qis read more often and he is better known as a representative of this kind of reactionary elitism---meaning that Ortega makes for a better known source than early Mann, or the more opaque Heidegger. In other words he was a better political writer than either one. In his early years Ortega moved from Spain to Germany before WWI and studied philosophy under Herman Cohen at Marburg. This gave him a perfect opportunity to see and get a feel for the more conservative wing of the German academic elite and its reactions to the rise of mass-man. Here is a sample:
...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. 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-man 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 recognize 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 traveler knows that in the 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.
Under Fascism 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. In their political conduct the structure of the new mentality is revealed in the rawest, most convincing manner. The average man finds himself with "ideas" in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation. He has no conception even of the rare atmosphere in which ideals live. He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words...'' (Revolt of the Masses, 1930) from:
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/gasset.html
I quoted the above to give the list a taste of what an old European conservative sounded like. It is interesting to compare this sort of elitism with the US neocons, high powered economists and other techocrats, business leaders, and the old ivy league snots like Buckley or whatever slime has taken his place. None of it worships the Throne or the Altar and fits right into US conservativism. Nobody is talking about liberity, since they've all enjoyed plenty of it. What they didn't like about liberity was when most of a well educated mass of a younger generation took the liberity of throwing shit on their parade---yeah like me and a lot of others.
In any event, I remeber dimmly reading Ortega in college for something or other. At first I went along with the elitism because of its apparent celebration of excellence in the arts---something I subscribe to. But then as I got into the heavy handed stuff like the above, I realized this guy was writing about people like me. So I reacted violently to it. Who says we don't have ideas, fuck you old man. I didn't exactly become a communist over it, but at least the old guard left wasn't talking down to me, so I listened. They liked Orozco. I liked Orozco. 1930s working man stuff sounded good enough for me, until they got to Stalin. Had to draw the line about there. Too much authority, too much command and control, so screw it. Had to find a different left, somewhere. Figured out, we had to make it up. New times, new places, new people, new events.
For those interested and not willing to go through several hours of internet reading, which I just blew off my Saturday doing, here is a brief biographical summary on Ortega y Gasset.
Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was from a haute bourgoisie family, had a Jesuit secondary education and went to the top university in Spain, University of Madrid (UCM), before going to Germany to continue graduate studies in Marburg and Berlin before WWI. The link to Herman Cohen at Marburg was the deep rationalism of history and tradition, which Cohen later applied to his studies in Judaism. Ortega applied the same sorts of neo-Kantian, enlightenment ideals to a Spanish traditional elite and its development.
His goal was to bring modern European ideas back to an isolated Spain, as a kind of neo-enlightenment project and put Spain into the 20thC. He was neither a royalist nor a fascist. In 1931 he was elected to the Congress of Deputies of the Second Republic, as member of a conservative party, named Intellectuals in Service of the Republic or something---which he led.
This was much in the spirit of Martin Heidegger during the 20s, and not unlike Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Bertrand Russell, and Thomas Mann---all well established intellectuals with a deep conservative bend, all faced with the rise of mass-man who could go either fascist or communist---in any case bound to knock down the elite. The differences came with the crunch of nationalist inspired fascism and nazisism that arrived. Time to choose boys and girls. They went all different directions. Valery, Gide, Russell, and Mann all buckled down to the new reality of mass society. There are masses of people to serve as an intellectual so do your best. Valery was appointed French ambassador to the League of Nations under Leon Blum, Mann immigrated to the US and wrote Joseph and his Brothers, a kind of FDR New Deal parable about western civilization's roots in Judaism and the Old Testament. Russell turned to political activism and socialism and away from his math and science background. Gide went to the new USSR and wrote a devastating report on Stalin and the struggle of the industrial masses under a central command economy, called Retour de l'U.R.S.S, Return from the USSR. Gide had admired Russian literature from afar from Gogol to Dostoevsky and provided French translations as a one of the founders and editor of N.R.F, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, later to become the Gallimard Publishing house. He came back appalled mostly at what he perceived as the crush of the Russian spirit. This book had a tremendous impact on a younger generation of French socialist intellectuals from Malraux to Campus and Sartre, including ex-patriot Samuel Beckette and gave them all pause to consider just exactly where Russia was headed. The studied ambivalence of the French socialist government and certainly the Hitler-Stalin pact spun a new reality for them, including the now exiled Germans like Hannah Arendt. The world was being turned inside out, then outside in.
Back to Spain. When a larger and more reactionary conservative coalition in Spain took over the Congress in 1933, they suspended most of the socialist reforms enacted in the previous socialist led government. The reactionary's (they were still not quite fascists) dismantling of socialist and argarian reforms provoked general strikes in Valencia, Zaragoza and street fighting in Madrid and Barcelona, and armed revolt by the miners unions in Astruias who were joined by the semi-autonomous Catalonia. (See Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Malraux's L'Espoire). All these revolts in 1934 were heavily suppressed by the now conservative Congress under two liberal presidents, with its armed forces led by general Franciso Franco. The 1936 elections re-installed a progressive majority, Popular Front. Franco fled to North Africa with much of the army and was re-supplied and kept alive by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists---aiding Franco to invade Spain. Communist Russia and Socialist France did and didn't support the flagging Popular Front in Spain. That is something the Russians and French will regret for the rest of their history. Now in turn, and out of power, rightwing parties began to collect under Franco and open civil war began. Many of the elected conservatives still in the Congress dropped out of parlimentary politics altogether. Ortega y Gasset was civil governor of Madrid at that point and fled to Argentina. As an intellectual conservative he was trapped between the fascists and the communists and socialists---worst of all nightmares for guys like him. Mass-man did not have one head, but many, like Medusa who adorned Athena's shield of war.
After WWII, he returned to Spain all quiet now, under the generalissmo, and went back to academia, set up an institute for the study of the humanities in the late 40s where he wrote and taught until his death in 1955.
I guess my point is that the occasional essays and short works by Strauss, Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger and others have introduced a European conservatism to the US, that the naive US world of ideas never knew or felt before. We are watching these Euorpean sources ebb and flow across the US political spectrum, like an alien metamorph seeking a host. Will they link up with a reactionary populism and some intellectual elite conservatism, or will they die out in a chorus of multicultural contentions for power and expression, as a teeming multitude wills itself to have its say? I don't know. I used to believe that the mass out there was ultimately wise and would not go beyond certain common sense limits. But the re-election of George Bush threw that ideal out of water completely and forever. I could always excuse the people for Nixon, but never for George Bush. They knew what they were voting for and they went ahead and did it anyway. That is as close to historically unforgivable as it gets. That's the kind of American pig-headedness in the early 19thC that led us into the Civil War over slavery.
In all my studies of 20thC history with its ideas and arts, which I love, I have figured out only one message. When history starts to speed up, watch out. Dig deep and figure out where you stand, now. Hold on. The ride will be wild, crazy, scary, and hard. Reversals are everywhere. I tell myself, try to keep your humanity, your compassion, your generousity, they are always the first casualities. I seemed to lose them everyday at work and reading the news---and try to regain them every night by reading history, philosophy, political rants, occasional novels, moments of art, movies, whatever. It's a dialectic of darkness every damned day.
I just rented Berlin Alexanderplatz. Jesus fucking christ on crutch and bitch on a blossom (see Botticelli). Some twisted shit. I am certain this will end badly. This guy is a Nazis in waiting. The new mass man tries to make good, and turns sour. I can see it coming. Maybe I am wrong...
Good night. I am flipping in disc two.
CG